LYME DISEASE AND PSYCHIATRIC SYMPTOMS

More and more people are being locked away in psychiatric wards due to UNDIAGNOSED or IGNORED Lyme disease and coinfections.  I know personally of two patients who had a known past history of Lyme disease yet in the institutions they were taken to ...when experiencing psychotic episodes... they were refused antibiotics and or treatment for coinfections. Even though the young men were dangerous at this point the parents had to remove them from from these institutions (one of which was a psychiatric ward at Yale Hospital) in order to have access to antibiotics and or specific medicine for babesia or bartonella, which are very common tickborne infections.Instead of treating the causes of these psychiatric symptoms, people are only being offered symptomatic psychoactive drugs. This allows the main cause to go untreated and to more deeply embed itself into the human system.

Many many people with severe chronic illness are being told they are depressed and simply handed a prescription for antianxiety drugs or Prozac. This is a very scary scenerio. We must make this information widely distributed.

For a most excellent article on when to suspect Lyme disease please see the following link. It is an older article but is the best one I have ever read. Dr. Bleiweiss is no longer with us. Suposedly he committed suicide by shooting himself in his driveway....but some people question this version of his death. From what I understand Dr. Bleiweiss had been distributing information that perhaps some people did not want him distributing. Lyme disease is hugely political and a growing number of people feel it it is actually PHASE 2 of the CDC Tuskeegee Experiment where black men were told they had bad blood instead of the syphilis they really had. During the study they were refused antibiotic treatment, while passing  on the pathogen to others and then  died horrible deaths.The Lyme spirochete is a very close cousin to syphilis and appears to act in similar ways in the body. If you know of anyone with chronic illness you need to read this article by Dr. Bleiweiss.

http://lymesentinel.blogspot.com/2009/02/when-to-suspect-lyme-disease.html

The following is a recent article from Rodale Press

Off-the-Charts Anxiety: Is a Tick Bite Making You Nuts?

Tick-borne infections aren't just causing sore joints and swollen knees. Some cause psychiatric symptoms that often go untreated, some experts say.

By Leah Zerbe

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Finding an engorged, blood-sucking tick attached to your skin can cause anxiety in and of itself. After all, Lyme disease, an infection that causes multi-systemic, waxing-and-waning symptoms, and a disease that isn't always detected or effectively treated early on, is on the rise. But researchers are starting to realize that, although getting bitten may be stressful, tick-borne infections could actually trigger panic attacks and other psychiatric disorders in some people.

THE DETAILS: "After treating thousands of patients with tick-borne disease in the past 20 years, it appears psychiatric symptoms are more commonly seen when there is a co-infection," explains psychiatrist Robert Bransfield, MD, president of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS) and vice president of the New Jersey Psychiatric Association. Co-infections (when a tick passes along more than one disease) most often involve Lyme, babesiosis, a malaria-like infection that can cause fever, night sweats, and anemia; and bartonella (cat scratch fever), a bacterial infection that causes fever, headache, and raised skin rashes. Co-infections are most often culprits in tick-related panic attacks and anxiety, and these multiple infections from tick bites are quite common, occurring in an estimated 30 percent of cases.

Dr. Bransfield, who is also associate director of psychiatry at Riverview Medical Center in New Jersey (a state with a high prevalence of Lyme disease), points out that 240 peer-reviewed scientific articles demonstrate an association between Lyme and other tick-borne diseases and mental illness. For instance, a small study published in The Clinical Journal of Pain in 2005 found that patients experiencing panic attacks also suffered other symptoms not typical of standard panic attacks—extreme sensitivity to light, touch, and sounds, joint pain, mental fogginess, and migrating pain, all of which can be symptoms of Lyme disease—and those people tested positive for Lyme and babesiosis, which, like Lyme, is on the rise in the U.S. Once treated with antibiotics for both diseases, the patients no longer experienced panic attacks. READ MORE...... http://www.rodale.com/lyme-disease-panic-attacks?page=0%2C0