One of the best books I have ever read on the subject is: The Mind Game by Phillip Day (ISBN: 9781904015086) - it totally blows the psychiatrists and their treatments out of the water.
HOTB
Where and What. . . IS THE EVIDENCE for "Mental ILLNESS"? ? ?
by Terry 33 Replies latest jw friends
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GrreatTeacher
In the last minute, he promises to give his "amateur's opinion" of what is really going on in another video.
He says there are other effective solutions. Like cognitive behavioral therapy. For severe mental illness? Maybe as an adjunct...
He hates the medication. OK. The medicine has side effects. Not every medicine will work for every person. It might take several trials to find the right medication. But, there's a risk/benefit analysis that must be done for every person.
He's not a fan of electroconvulsive therapy. It is an invasive procedure and has really bad side effects. It's also a treatment of last resort and is highly effective at remitting depression.
He seems to have an issue with semantics. I personally don't care what you call it. Actually, it's a physiological illness like any other, so the modifier "mental" seems unnecessary and stigmatizing for serious illnesses like bipolar disorder that are visible on brain scans.
Personality disorders might deserve that title a little moreso, but, ultimately an argument over semantics is wasted time in my opinion. As is arguing over illnesses and categories for the DSM.
Yes, the suffering is real. He admits this, yet has no answer for it, likely because he is no expert, as he admits.
So, why is he talking?
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GrreatTeacher
And, in my personal experience as a mostly successfully treated bipolar patient, he can take his cognitive behavioral therapy as ultimate solution and shove it up his ass.
This infuriates me. CBT can often be helpful for those with "garden variety" depression (not to underestimate the suffering). Sometimes the depression remits and sometimes medication is also necessary. Patients are often able to go off the medication after some time.
I'm not even going into the discussion about so many people being diagnosed with depression. It may or may not be true. Personally, but unprofessionally,I think the American way of life is extraordinarily stressful and we might need a culture change.
What I am going to talk about is severe mental illness like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, and the good news is that we've come a long way, baby. These illnesses were an institutionalization sentence 50 or so years ago. Shock therapy was brutal, but one of the only treatments available.
Because of pharmaceutical advancements, these patients, for the first time in history are allowed to lead quasi-normal lives. Hardly anyone requires permanent hospitalization anymore.
Lest someone misunderstand how great a miracle is, let me give you my personal account of a psychiatric hospitalization. I, like most patients, was only hospitalized for a short stay (about a week) to find a combination of medications that would work for me.
The ward is locked. You may have personal clothes, but things like shoelaces and razorblades are only given to you after proving that you are not a danger to yourself. That means no shaving of your legs and armpits, ladies, or your face, gentlemen. (Oh, and if you arrived via the emergency room, they took your clothes, including your underwear, and gave you a heavy apron to wear.) If you earn it, you can go outside in an enclosed courtyard for fresh air twice a day. Someone physically checks on you every 15 minutes night and day. Any quiet time in your room is punctuated by a staff member popping in every 15 minutes saying, "checks!" You line up for your medication, take it with water in a little paper cup and show your mouth after you are done to make sure the pills went down. You do see a doctor daily. Lights are out when they say they are out. You get up when they say to get up. You can't lock the bathroom door. you just have to hope that other patients respect a closed door when you are showering. Maybe you have earned a razor and can shave your legs!
Everything is done for your safety, but it's all rather humiliating.I shudder to think that people with my diagnosis used to live out their lives in institutions. I was there a week, but I saw a doctor daily and we found a good combination of medication that started to work. They keep you safe and force you to get out of bed, to eat, to wash, to take your meds.
Then, you move to day hospital. You sleep at home, but drive back to the day hospital program for about 6 hours a day. You are educated about your illnesses, the types of medication you take, you do group therapy.
it's like a seminar that keeps you busy and educates you during the day. I was there for 5 weeks! All day, every weekday, over an hours' drive each way. You see the doctor less frequently to fine tune medication dosages, and you work with a social worker to plan community mental health care. You also learn to monitor your mental health and grade it daily on a 1 - 10 scale. Once your illness severity rates a 4 or less, you go home.Once I went home, I saw an outpatient psychiatrist and a therapist. I started seeing the therapist 3 times a week, then twice a week for several weeks, then once a week, then once every two weeks, etc. until I was able to function in the community, again.
This is a best case scenario. It's very expensive and I was fortunate to have healthcare insurance so i could go to an excellent private hospital. The public hospital has a horrid reputation and some of the other patients had been there and had terrible tales to tell.
But, it's only through the miracle of modern psychiatric pharmaceuticals that leaving the hospital and living at home is even possible. A half century ago, and that hospital may have been my home.
So, I am livid at videos like this that misunderstand the types of treatment protocols that are considered best practices, and devalue the very drugs that are literally lifesavers and also allow those with serious mental illnesses to live relatively normal lives in the community.
Cancer treatments make your hair fall out and nearly kill you, but they can also allow you to beat the disease and live. Psychiatric medications can have awful side-effects and they can surely stress your liver, but they allow you to live with the disease in your community and function. How is that a bad thing?
Ill-informed opinions like this are infuriating. Psych meds are crude in many ways, like chemo, so we have to allow science to find better drugs. This type of video aids in reducing support for scientific research, whether public or private. He seemed to dislike both. I won't belabor the best source of funding here, but it has to go on. People's lives depend on it.
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bohm
Lets look at the argument. First he states that the spending on drugs has increased rapidly in the last 10 years as have the number of people diagnosed.
Then the arguments:
In the past 50 years, the number of people diagnosed with mental illness has gone up. If we could cure mental illness, we would expect it to go the other way.
The problem with this argument is that it can be applied to many forms of cancer or other illnesses which have also gone up in prevalence in the past 50 years and does not account for better tools being available for diagnosis and treatment today.
Second argument
psychiatry has yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a physical cause or a genetic origin
and no two species have been conclusively observed to evolve into each other. There is plenty of contrary evidence for instance: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/common-genetic-factors-found-5-mental-disorders
Then there is some quote-mining. Quotes that indicate that no single cause or condition can be identified as having a 1:1 correlate with a single mental illness is used to support the wider claim that mental illnesses do not have clear physical and chemical correlates. This is right out of the scientology playbook, wonder if we will hear about how cruel certain treatments are in a moment?
The case of schizophrenia is discussed. It is brought up we don't know the precise cause of schizophrenia (true) or how it is best treated (true). It is begrudgingly brought up twin studies demonstrate there are changes in the brain in patients with schizophrenia compared to their normal twin (which is damn good evidence those changes are related to schizophrenia), however he pulls out the explanation that these changes are CAUSED by giving the schizophrenia twin drugs. No citation is provided for this claim. The theory is, then, that the brains are initially equal but one have schizophrenia. Then that person is administered "brain-altering drugs" which changes his brain so it looks like the changes in the brain correlates with schizophrenia. This claim does not take into account the observation schizophrenia has an obvious inheritable component to it.
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konceptual99
The number of people diagnosed with mental illness has gone up because we've stopped calling people witches or demon possessed and pushed on from simply locking people up in institutions en-mass.
True, some of the treatments are crude. I've seen first hand the impact of electric shock treatment. Drugs often manage rather than cure but that is true of other treatments such as radio and chemotherapy for cancer.
Challenging the status quo is always needed but throwing pseudo-science around as if it's some magic cure is at best a waste of time, at worst positively dangerous.
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zeb
As one with bi-polar and greatfully on medication I often wonder what was someone eating when they went or about the numbers of chemicals in our daily 'diet'.
For example I am convinced there is something in the water at Bethel NY.
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Caedes
Terry,
I am surprised you fell for this.
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Doubtfully Yours
Pedophiles are mentally ill.
Anyone that attempts suicide is mentally ill.
Any of us humans at this time mentally stable really?
God have mercy on us.
DY
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Vidiot
Well, the video convinced me...
...Stephen Molyneux is out of his f**king mind. :smirk:
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Xanthippe
Very interesting Terry. It is worrying, if it's correct, that if you block dopamine receptors with antipsychotics the brain produces 50% more to compensate. Which means if a person tries to come off the medication they now have 50% more receptors than they need, which would explain why the episode can reoccur. Is this a relapse of a mental illness or a brain reacting to being chemically altered?
For my local authority job I was sent on a Mental Health First Aid course. Started by a nurse in Australia the idea is to identify possible problems in colleagues caused by stress or family circumstances and look out for the person until they can get professional help. The social worker who was one of the two people running the course said that groups like The Hearing Voices Network was set up to help people, many of whom are professionals, to cope and live with unusual symptoms rather than being medicated and hospitalised. In fact the subtitle of their website, hearing-voices.org, is 'for people who hear voices, see visions or have other unusual perceptions'. She stunned me by saying there is a whole network of professional people who live with things like occasionally hearing voices but who cannot reveal their real names because it would end their careers. It's all very interesting and perhaps we should seriously look at what he described in the vid, showing respect and compassion for mentally suffering people rather than throwing drugs at everything.
This doesn't mean we should never use medication. When my parents both died in the same year over ten years ago I used SSRIs for about five months for acute depression. However now, when I feel depressed, I cut back on everything, work, commitments and avoid stress like the plague. I increase fruit and veg in my diet and after about three weeks I start to feel better. I'd rather let the serotonin build naturally if possible. That's my personal view. In fact you have to wait two to three weeks for SSRIs to start working anyway. Just my halfpenny worth.
I just want to add I don't think we should try to medicate away unhappiness. If life is getting us down we need to change it. Everyone on this forum has had to drastically change their lives so they could be happy. Sometimes we have to go through the pain barrier to create a better future. There seems to be a huge need to stop everyone feeling sad or miserable, ever. Surely pain and misery is your brain's way of getting you to change your life?