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?