If physical illness was treated like mental illness..

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If you Google: "Huffington Post if physical illness was treated like mental illness,"
you will find some brilliant cartoons as you scroll down the article.

As depression and anxiety is such a huge issue on the spectrum, I hope this brightens everyone's day, whether you are under the weather or not.

For those who are surrounded by/living with people who refuse to understand, or can't, you might want to print the article and cartoons out and leave them lying around...

Pictures really can say more than a thousand words.

Sorry, my system could not copy and paste the link itself directly to WP.

Here's a link to the article mentioned.

I've gotten "why don't you just be happy" before.

You might be interested in this:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/pro ... re/5864512

The podcast features an interview with Susannah Cahalan, a journalist who has chronicled her experience of mental illness as a result of the very rare condition named anti-NMDA receptor auto immune encephalitis.

A part of the interview that stood out for me was:

Thank you very much for posting that extraordinary article. I would like to make it compulsory reading for all "mental health professionals" and before they were allowed to practice, they would have to demonstrate that they could recite it word for word from memory.

What is so very disturbing in it is that her "physical" medical history was not taken until after she was "treated" for a mental illness she did not have and had never had.

This case really encapsulates the tunnel vision of psychiatry, they have their mental illness hammers, so everyone that comes into their orbit looks like a nail. You could sum it up in this sentence: "If you are sent to where they work, that alone means you must be mentally ill".

At the risk of offending somebody, I personally do not see how they are comparable.

No offence taken. They are both forms of unwellness. I take a different view from you in that I firmly believe: what affects the body affects the mind, and what affects the mind affects the body. For me, the division into "mental" or "physical" is spurious.

Did anyone see the film "The Madness of King George" about George the third of England? His "mental illness" was a physical condition called Porphyria, which affects different parts of the body and may manifest as unusual and atypical behaviour. It seems to me that people sometimes tend to minimise the fact that the brain is part of the body, and they discuss "mental illness" as if it was something completely separate from physical illness. Both lay people and medical people do this.

There are many illnesses that have physical and mental effects simultaneously. (Possibly all).

Treating porphyria with pyschiatric drugs makes it worse. There have been cases where patients have been treated for many years as "schizophrenic" because the psychiatric doctors completely ignored the protocol of differential diagnoses and failed to bother with adequate history taking.

It's pretty appalling really.

Those cartoons are awesome.

There are lots of biological causes of mental illness that most people probably don't think about, like vitamin deficiency, heavy metal poisoning, or parasitic infection. I wonder how many people never get diagnosed properly because it is looked at as a "mental" problem rather than physical.

House MD had some great episodes about misdiagnosed mental illness. two in particular made a big impression on me. One where a woman had been diagnosed schizophrenic, but it turned out she actually had Wilson's disease (caused by too much copper in the body) and a vitamin K deficiency.

The other was the one where a woman had passed out in the bathtub with her baby, and the baby almost drowned. Then in the hospital, before they figured out what was wrong with her, she started hearing voices and smothered her baby. It turned out she had Celiac disease and a severe nutritional deficiency.

Personally, if I were a doctor or a psychiatrist, I would make sure someone got a full physical work up to check for things like that, before I wrote a script for any kind of psych drugs. I bet some people go their entire lives taking medication for the wrong thing when there is really something else making them sick.

http://mentalillnesspolicy.org/coping/misdiagnosis.html

Dianthus, I think you will find the above article elaborates on what you had to say (with which I agree).

Good one Not that these are EXACTLY the same, but still both mental and physical illnesses are to some extent out of the "sufferer's" control

Here's another, not the same type (comparing one to another), but sort of the same topic:

Like!

You might like the blog "Hyperbole and a Half" if you don't already know it. Looking at what you shared brought it instantly to mind for me.

I think there's a real short shrift given to mental illnesses - even when they're obviously biological in nature. For example, in the UK if you have cancer and are incapacitated by it you will get some follow up help at home through the NHS, but if you have dementia you probably won't.

On the other hand, some of the stuff about depression "Lying in bed obviously hasn't helped you..." may make sense - sometimes you need to short circuit the chemical depression by introducing new chemicals by getting up and moving around and smiling and exercising and yes, even thinking happy thoughts. As someone who has had lifelong issues with depression this is one of the ways I now manage my depression (though it's not entirely effective on its own, but the other treatments don't work without this). For physical ailments, too, sometimes getting up and working to get better is also helpful! (not always!).