Kratom & Ibogaine as Psychiatric Medication

It's been said that mental illness is manufactured by the State to control the people.

Now I do not know how true this is, because it gives the State too much credit. A more moderate stance is this: stress is known to cause insomnia, which may arise due to anxiety. Anxiety may arise out of fear, and most of that anxiety may due to anger about loss of control over our lives. While it's not all that simple, the remedy for insomnia before one becomes so tired that self control is sleep.

In the worst case scenario, the lack of sleep leads to mania and sometimes brief psychotic episodes. It's at this point that most people may get the first intervention for it in the form of anti-psychotics..

However, those drugs work via the placebo process since most of the anti-psychotics are hypnotics, and sleep aids the process by providing rest.

Ibogaine, that entheogenic African root, and kratom, that wonderful South-East Asian herb, are better than or equal to all psychiatric medications because of its profile: in low doses, it's a stimulant and in high doses, a sedative.

With chronic use, kratom is addictive but ibogaine will cure it. So, in a perfect world I would urge the medical community to provide an alternative to psychiatric medications with regulated use of kratom and ibogaine with therapy.

Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world. Therefore I would urge moderation in the use of kratom.

In fact, moderation preserves mental health. A little bit of caffeine is ok, but 6 cups of coffee is not moderation.

Getting back to kratom, it's unlikely the way it's presented to us in the West - it was an extract but was mixed with other herbs, all of them safe at the dose. If anything, I felt stimulated, because of its action in low doses. I am very doubtful it had much effect on me. It tasted more like an energy drink.

And that was the first time I drank it. Several weeks went by and I drank the second little bottle of this kratom drink. Nothing. Just endless energy for a little bit and then peace.

I drank those drinks back in June. It wasn't the cheapest energy drink, though.

That is the only reason why I didn't get any more. If kratom is the ideal drug to calm the mind, then my experience with it only seemed to fizzle because I'd expected something astounding. Instead, if I even had a placebo effect, then the energy I showed was a combination of wishful thinking and being jaded by energy drinks.

While kratom is helpful to some people, I believe my brain likes a sedative because being mellow is the most excellent state of mind. Under such conditions, it's hard to get upset and spiral into an anxiety-induced insomnia.

So like I said, moderation is the key and meditation is the finger pointing to the moon.

Using the Mad to Save the Mad

Sociologically, magico-religious healing plays a central and positive role. The magic and faith in the healing powers of the shaman aids in strengthening the group, tribe or caste by defining a common foe, and in identifying the evil, invisible spirit that has been causing illness.

In this way, it is possible to control one’s own environment and the immediate neighbourhood and to influence it.

Moreover, the healing ritual of the shaman late into the night helps to sublimate difficult somatic instincts and to channel them in a socially acceptable and legal way, without being stigmatized in the society as being abnormal or an ill-person.

In our society we have abnormal and ill people who are stigmatized daily as "mentally ill." While being educated about their illness and treated, the medication may affect them so that they are unable to work when exposed to the stresses of the modern workplace.

At the same time, conventional medicine has a stranglehold on the people. If one is a shaman, then most doctors will jealously guard their territory and look down upon alternative forms of healing, even to the point of subjecting shamans to public ridicule and even stigmatizing them as mentally ill and hospitalizing them. All this does is make modern medicine look bad.

While traditional folk medicine has a long tradition in Nepal, it must not be forgotten that what is folk medicine now used to be common practice. It wasn't until the 19th century that doctors began to believe in the disease model of health. Since then, health-care may have made leaps and bounds technologically but overall it's also created problems especially within psychiatry.

If we think of each potential schizophrenic as a would-be shaman, ignorant of hir role in society, then we have here a pool of new medical workers who can augment the hospitals and doctors in their work. While it will be tough to weed out people who are too sick to decide the best health-care for others, the results will be worth it because we will have trained health-care workers supporting doctors and hospitals.

Rather than medicating a potential schizophrenic, it would be more humane to have hir employed. Since the only purpose of medication is social control, this is malpractice. For mentally ill people who are employed suffer less from their illness than their unemployed brothers and sisters.

Note that the shaman is not schizophrenic because rather than being impaired by anxiety and fear, he is channeling his anxiety and fear in socially acceptable way, rather than being plagued by insomnia's nightmares and the descent into mania and madness.