Well, I’ve been through the mental health system, and I feel a bit like a pariah, because I disagree with the view of doctors that meds are the best solution to mental health problems. I think non-drug approaches are better. Allowing a person to figure out what has disturbed them in life, and what they need to do to resolve any worries.
If people want to take these drugs then okay, but I also think people should have the right to take other approaches.
The article was written by a person who says “I have spent several years of my life in various psychiatric institutions”. So it is a person with experience of this system, and what helped them. I don’t see at all how they can be seen as fear mongering. They seem to be giving their honest account of their experiences as a patient in the mental health system.
As for reality and data, there is a lot of reality and data showing that psych drugs are not perfect. There is evidence that antipsychotics cause movement disorders (restlessness, involuntary movements), metabolic effects (changing blood sugar levels), effects on heart function, weight gain, etc. And there is evidence of negative effects from antidepressants too, like sexual dysfunction, and a small increase in the risk of birth defects, just as an example:
I support patient choice. If a person wants to take psych meds, okay. But I think they should be informed by reputable authorities (CDC in the US, national health organisations in other countries, including regulatory bodies of psychiatry) about the positives and negatives of these drugs. That is the only way to make an informed choice.
Ultimately I hope for non-drug approaches to mental issues. Approaches that recognise the real issues in people’s lives that cause them distress, rather than approaches that label the patient as “ill” and dismiss them with a powerful and sometimes unpleasant drug.
Maybe people with mental difficulties (and I’ve been through this system myself, for a long time) aren’t injured or ill. Instead they had genuine reasons to feel angry or distressed at the time of their “illness”.
I’m reminded of what I heard in an interview with a training psychiatrist who took antidepressants himself (within recent years, he contributed to the advice that Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists gives to patients trying to come off antidepressants):
Some people call these things [mental illnesses] a chronic illness, but… another way of looking at them is a response to stressful circumstances… if you know the number of stressful life events in someone’s life over the last year, you can predict their risk of depression with great accuracy
If some people want to take these drugs then okay. But the evidence shows real negative effects of these drugs. I support patient choice. If we support the right of people to take these drugs, then we should also support the right of people to find other ways to manage their problems.
I have seen stats about genetic dispositions, yes. Wikipedia says 40% of a person’s risk of having major depression comes from genes.
Still. One thing is that you don’t know what your genes are. Your genes might have less of a risk than you think. But also, maybe an increased risk can be dealt with through lifestyle choices. I’m not saying people shouldn’t take meds if they want to take them, and I think personal choice is extremely important. But the meds do have annoying and somewhat harmful side effects… so I suppose that has to be weighed up in a decision to take the meds or not.
I strongly dislike SCAM stuff, like homeopathy etc. And Scientology (who are anti-psychiatry) is obviously a scam too.
Some people find psychiatric drugs helpful, yes. But I have met psych patients, drugged against their will for months, who were still miserable after months of drugging. I think a psychological approach, such as counselling, is probably better.
I think a lot of psych patients are trying to understand what’s going on in their head. If they can reach this understanding, then they no longer need drugs, with all the negative health effects that the drugs cause (such as movement disorders, restlessness, muscle spasms, weight gain, sexual dysfunction, etc).
Politicians want to improve our worsening mental health with big psychiatric initiatives. The problem with this model, says historian of neuroscience Danielle Carr, is that it ignores the social and structural forces causing widespread mental suffering.
I actually think this is true for everybody diagnosed with a “mental illness”. Society wants to push you to a psychiatrist as an easy fix. But in reality, there are social and emotional pressures that have caused the patient to become distressed. It could be bullying, or financial worries, or the loss of a relative, or other big worries. Psychiatry invents “diagnoses” so that the true social and environmental pressures get swept under the rug. Because they don’t care about you, they just believe that you might turn dangerous (even if you have no history of doing anything wrong), so they’ll drug you to reduce what they think is a risk.
Edit: Thinking about it more, maybe we should get rid of the biopsychosocial model that doctors love to talk about. Just have a psychosocial model instead (getting rid of the bio bit, where they drug the patient). Because nearly all of the time, they never prove any biological fault with the patient’s brain. And yet they’re still happy to drug the patient.
It’s great until the cow gets bored and walks off.
I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
But he is a bad person. He’s being a fucking idiot and being insulting to the person who made the software for him in the first place.
People like that don’t deserve patience and understanding. Perhaps a good response would be “this software is free for you to use, if you don’t like it then fuck off and make your own”.
Iran probably wants this, because they can say “look, the West cares more about money from shipping, than it does about the lives of human beings in Gaza”.
Maybe if the medical industrial complex surrounding mental health wasn’t so profit-hungry and dehumanising, then she might not think that death is an option that she needs to take.