Gadolinium and other heavy metal toxicity and Psychiatry. The Shutter Island Effect.

One of the scariest events that most of us can conjure up is the concept of being committed against our wishes in a mental institution- involuntary confinement it is termed. Movies such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Shutter Island come to mind. The terror of being locked up when you have the strong feeling that the psychiatrists have it all wrong. Gross psychiatrist misconduct is what we fear, and is all too real, and even too current. There was the famous account from 2 decades back about the chain of private psychiatric centers in the Southwest admitting patients against their wishes till the insurance money ran out, then discharging them. Most recently the Arkansas psychiatrist... look that account up yourself on-line. Essentially imprisoning patients in psychiatry lock-up to charge maximum amounts for their 'care'., while basically never seeing them.

This is essentially how psychiatry was managed, especially for women, in the 19th through early 20th century. Physical beatings were part of the care for men, and we can assume physical beating and rape for women.

Frontal lobotomies..... psychiatric drugs with the adverse effect of suicide.. all terrifying.

This unfortunately I have come to learn, is an all too common occurrence that is happening to this day, of the health care inflicted upon many patients who suffer from GDD (and other heavy metal toxicities). I have heard many accounts that when patients have gone to the ED and have complained that they have sustained significant injury following a (recent) GBCA injection, that psychiatry is called in to see them, and a number get admitted, against their wishes.

In this present time, with the amount that I and others have written in major journals in the peer-reviewed literature on this subject of GDD, I consider it inexcusable and suboptimal health care management, not meeting Standard of Care (SOC). This is especially ironic considering one of the other major authors on the subject of GDD is a Psychiatrist Emeritus from Stanford University, one of the top universities in the world, and not a small hospital in Arkansas or North Carolina. Individuals could reach out to him for clarification and knowledge, from psychiatrist to psychiatrist.

If not Gd, but other heavy metals likely are a major, and unrecognized, factors in mental health conditions (lead, which everyone has in them; and certainly mercury is already well recognized for this effect).. Checking for Gd or lead (and in many cases other heavy metal toxicity) is readily performed: 24 hr urine prior to chelation. Ca-DTPA chelation. 24 hr urine starting right after chelation. Observation of a Flare phenomenon. Essentially not that much more challenging then taking a Blood pressure to look for hypertension, and fasting blood glucose to look for diabetes. Even just a native 24 hour urine for heavy metals can provide good insight into whether toxic levels of a panel of 20 heavy metals (many of which can have at least depression as a toxic effect) is present. Maybe even the present reality is that levels of PFAs, glysophate, microplastics, and more recently attention to other nasty chemicals (*many of them pesticides) like Chlormequat, need to be looked at.... This latter large category of non-metal toxins, and their effect on metal health, is presently beyond what I know, or apparently any other physician or scientist.

So for the present, I stick with Gd toxicity (and other metals) and all the unfortunate individuals, many are women, who have been/are locked up in mental facilities due to them having GDD, but being misdiagnosed as having a conversion reaction or some other reaction (eg: Munchhausen's, maybe also the misdiagnosis of Guillaume Barre) . In my present role as the Protector Publicus, there now are simply too many articles, and readily accessible, that describe GDD, not to be aware of that. Finally now, I am ready to say it is below the standard of care, by radiologists, psychiatrists, and other physicians not to know that people with normal kidney function can have a debilitately multisystem adverse reaction to GBCAs., There is no excuse for not understanding that a GBCA injection can result in significant debility (including cognitive) in an individual.

Richard Semelka, MD