Chronos wrote:
Ariela wrote:
Med free is the way to be.
Check you Harold Mandel's new book, The Deviant Psychiatric Mind Syndrome.
Actually that's not entirely true. There is this horrible three part chasm with psychology on one side, psychiatry in the middle, and neurology on the other side and psychiatry often gets caught in a tug of war between psychology and neurology, with many psychologist declaring psychiatric disorders to be illnesses that originate from the subconscious mind...or learned, and can thus be controlled through behavioral therapy,and many on the neurology side who believe all psychiatric illnesses can be medicated.
Well let me set things straight.
Some psychiatric disorders, though require some biological pre-disposition, are behavioral in origin and the most appropriate means of treatment is cognitive behavior type therapies, talk therapy, etc. These disorders include, but are not limited to, borderline personality disorder, many eating disorders, and so on.
Some psychiatric disorders have a predominant neurological basis and the best treatment method is frequently medication. This includes schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, Tourette Syndrome, OCD and so on.
Some disorders fall into the first category, and the sufferers can potentially benefit from medication (people with environmentally based, yet severe depression) and some disorders fall into the later category, and sufferers might benefit from behavioral therapy approaches (medication resistant OCD).
I was forced to take medication much of my life until I was a teenager and realized they couldn't make me take it, and my parents agree that I do much better without it, because my OCD is generally non-responsive to medication, however I did experience often severe side effects.
I would not recommend some individuals with bi-polar disorder or schizophrenia go off their medication, however.
That's rather a mischaracterization. Perhaps if we were to change your use of "neurological" to "neurochemical", this could be more useful, although still oversimplified.
Neurochemical disorders, such as depression, OCD, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, are often amenable to medication, although any responsible psychologist is going to recommend talk therapy to go along with them - merely correcting a neurochemical imbalance does nothing to correct the patterns of thought laid down by years of dealing with the issue(s) before medication.
Neurological disorders, like autism, AS, Down's syndrome, or Williams syndrome, are not amenable to neurochemical modification, because the neurochemistry of the patient is not imbalanced. Rather, the actual neural structure of the patient differs from the norm, something which cannot be "corrected" at our current state of the art. (It will, almost inevitably, become possible one day; there is currently a debate, preparing for that day, over the question of whether such neurosurgery would be ethical, being as it would change the nature of the patient in fundamental ways.)
Simple psychiatric disorders, such as situational anxiety, situational depression, or neurosis, can be treated with talk therapy and its variants, without the need for medication. Sadly, some patients, overly influenced by advertising in magazines or on TV, will demand medications they think they need, and some doctors lack the will to deny them, so you wind up with people on SSRIs and Ritalin who don't need it; they are harmed by the induced chemical imbalance, and this is often used by those who oppose medication as "case studies" of why "meds are bad".
And of course some maladies overlay one another. For instance, the talk therapy used to treat my roommate's PTSD (related to his two tours in Iraq) is complicated by his underlying ADD (which he denies). and the probability of minor brain injury caused by some of the explosions he lived through, which leads to severe migraine headaches, irritability, and increased anxiety.
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Sodium is a metal that reacts explosively when exposed to water. Chlorine is a gas that'll kill you dead in moments. Together they make my fries taste good.
20 Nov 2010, 1:43 am
That's a ridiculous thing to say. These are serious drugs with serious side effects. Read the pack already. Those are the problems they tell you about. I had quite a few that weren't listed. If they work for you OK, but they don't work for everyone. I got sick of my zombie possesion and I feel better without them.
