24 replies to this topic

[luluinthefog]

One psychiatrist tells you one thing, another tells you the opposite, meanwhile you're the one who has to suffer for their mistakes when they prescribe a wacky medication or take you off of something too fast or just keep prescribing benzos until you become dependent and your anxiety gets worse. Every medication they give you is just a shot in the dark, and they all have their own personal preference. Personal preference belongs in art, not sciences, especially when it comes to your health. 50 years or so from now when they look back at our psychiatry they'll probably consider it barbaric. I'll admit that brain medication does help some, but it hurts some too, even ruins lives, and it has never helped me. Many of us have tried psych med after psych med and have nothing to show for it but worsening mental health and unbearable side effects (that psychiatrists dont understand and cant explain). I wish I had been born in a time where psychiatry was much more advanced. Just a little rant, I hope I'm wrong and you all have good experiences with meds of course.

[REB]

Truer words have never been spoken here at DPselfhelp. 

 

The amount of lives lost to and ravaged by western medicine's murderous ineptitude is inconceiveable.

[PerfectFifth]

The amount of lives lost to and ravaged by western medicine's murderous ineptitude is inconceiveable.

Anything for profits. Those pharma companies have a lot to gain by contaminating science with biased junk and indoctrinating psychiatrists into prescribing their garbage. 

[Psyborg]

I completely agree

I hope my brain will heal from all the med abuse .in a recent thread I encouraged members telling them the meds havent done permanent damage and that is what I believe on one hand but am scared too on the other . according to people on another forum dedicated to the issue they say that the brain definitely heals over time and a mod told me this personally too . so I am hoping for the best

my doc is good but even him I cant trust fully . I look at psychiatry with different eyes now after years of experience with it

[PerfectFifth]

They’re more impressive at treating some conditions than others. Mental health is one of the things they’re less impressive at treating, especially since plain old misery and personality dysfunction get lumped in with genetic disorders like Schizophrenia and Bipolar.

Yes, that's one of my issues with it. Everything psychological tends to be medicalized nowadays. You can't be sad without being Depressed™ and apparently being in need of having your neurotransmitters readjusted with highly dubious drugs whose exact mechanism is a mystery, not to mention possible damaging long-term effects. Instead of pushing pills on people, I think these issues would better be treated as natural human problems, not so much as brain diseases. They were externally-caused, at least in a vast majority of cases, and they can be treated the same way.

 

The whole psychopharmacological treatment methodology is just so crude. Instead of identifying the cause of the illness through objective, empirical means and prescribing a specific drug with a verified mechanism that targets that cause—you know, like in any other branch of medicine—they engage in blind, unscientific trial & error. Yes, the neuroscience is primitive, but that's no excuse to blindly push drugs that may cause brain damage or unforeseen changes in brain function. 

[forestx5]

It's how they treat "behavioral disorders".  That's what the publicly funded mental health centers  call mental illness.  Then they ask for funding to combat stigmatization.  

Give us the funding or we take away their medications.  You won't want that.  LOL

50 years into the future, and they will not be looking back at todays psychiatric treatment, and thinking it was barbaric.

In order for that to happen, there would have to be a revolution in the understanding of the brain, its illness, and its treatment.

That is very unlikely to happen.

I first became ill in 1971.  That is almost 49 years ago.  The decade of the brain (1990-2000) came and went.

Nothing came of it.

Very little has changed in those 49 years, I sadly report.  Fasten your seat belts.  It could be a very long trip.

[Chip1021]

I think this is the perfect thread to pose this question: what is the subject matter of psychiatry? For example, cardiology is the study of the heart and the diseases that can affect it’s proper functioning. Neurology is the study of the brain and central nervous system and its associated diseases. What does psychiatry study? You ask even mental health professionals and even academics in the field and you get a surprising variation in responses. Some say it’s the study of human behavior, which is fine in and of itself, but how does that relate to the idea of the body as a machine? They use analogies like “dysfunctional behavior” which is sort of a misnomer, since all behavior has a function (what they really mean is “disapproved” or “maladaptive”). Some say that it’s the study of the mind. But is mind even a scientific concept, or is it a philosophical idea? Others say that it’s the study of the brain. Okay, but how does that differentiate psychiatry from neurology? They might then reply that neurology studies brain diseases that cause physical problems, like mobility issues, numbness and tingling and aches and pains, whereas psychiatry studies brain diseases that cause behavioral issues, like schizophrenia or bipolar. But don’t all brain diseases affect behavior? And does it seem likely that a person could have a brain disease that affects only behavior, and does not produce any physical discomforts? And what’s more, I think it’s naive to think that when a person is experiencing emotional and behavioral issues, and we assume that is due to a problem within the body, that the problem MUST be with the brain. We know if several other issues (e.g. hypothyroidism) that can affect mood.

I guess I’m making a couple of points here. First, I would think that it would be a prerequisite to being considered a science that your field be able to define your subject matter in a specific way that includes everything that you study and excludes those things that are outside its scope (which doesn’t mean it has no relationship to other fields, of course, as all things are linked and related to one another).

But most importantly consider this: every time in history, on an individual and collective level, whenever we’ve discovered the biological source of a person’s “mental illness”, that person’s problem immediately exits the field of psychiatry and enters another field of medicine. If it’s discovered that they have a brain tumor or Ms, they are sent to neurology. If they have syphilis, they are sent to infectious disease specialists, etc. What do you think would happen, hypothetically, if it were discovered that schizophrenia were a legit brain disease, or that bipolar were an endocrine problem? Would psychiatrists still be responsible for treating them?

By the way, if you were to ask me what the subject matter of psychiatry is based on how it is actually practiced presently and historically I would answer with one word: conflict. Psychiatry is the study and “treatment” of inter- and intra-personal conflict.

[James_80]

I agree with a lot of posts here. Psychiatrists are sanctioned drug dealers on a salary. They make educated guesses because the science is lagging behind the effects of psychiatric treatment. No one can say for sure how drugs like ssris or treatments like ECT really affect the brain. They can make a guess e.g. drugs that increase serotonin sometimes help depression, therefore depression is caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain. This is like saying hangovers are improved by consuming coffee and eating bacon so therefore hangovers are caused by a lack of coffee and bacon in the system.  I've taken drugs that helped but mostly the drugs I have taken have made me a lot worse. The drugs that helped had a withdrawal period that lasted for as long as I was on the drug itself, which I was never made aware of before starting.

 

I don't think psychiatrists are malevolent. They are mostly good people wanting to earn a living - that's all. They have a medical training but the understanding of the brain is so primitive that it renders the training almost useless. What upsets me the most is how psychiatrists act with so much authority when they could be more honest about what they really know, which is.... not much. If this lack of understanding was more clearly stated then perhaps more effort would be put into alternative forms of support for people suffering with poor mental health and more research on alternative treatments. I think the best people to dispense medication and other treatments are people who have had direct experience of the drugs/treatment themselves. At least that way they have the experience to rely on, which is more valuable in my opinion.

 

I'm hoping in the future there will be more of a holistic focus on treatment rather than "one pill fixes all" and I'm excited to see how the trials on psychedelics are progressing. You never know, there might be a revolution in psychiatry around the corner. Hopefully it will be very different and unrecognisable compared to the way it is at the moment.

[PerfectFifth]

No one can say for sure how drugs like ssris or treatments like ECT really affect the brain. They can make a guess e.g. drugs that increase serotonin sometimes help depression, therefore depression is caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain. This is like saying hangovers are improved by consuming coffee and eating bacon so therefore hangovers are caused by a lack of coffee and bacon in the system. 

Yep! That's a great analogy. 

[James_80]

Yep! That's a great analogy.

They might be better off prescribing daily coffee and bacon for depression. Baconzac and Coffexor.

[Chip1021]

I think you hit the nail on the head there, James. I agree with everything you said, especially the part about psychiatrists having authority when they would be much more respectable if they were honest about what they do and what they know. I think beyond the conceptual problems with the field, the other major problem is political: the power differential between doctor and patient in psychiatry I think results in these boastful and arrogant claims (psychiatry still is in great part a custodial enterprise). The doctor, by dint of being a doctor is the “rational” one, and the patient, by dint of being a mental case, is the “irrational” one.

[hanginginhere_ramen]

The worst part too is that a lot of psychiatrists look down on therapists because they think we need more "help" than they can give, even though even something like cbt or dbt can help people change the way they think and bring their illnesses down to a manageable level.