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Are Psychiatric Medications Hurting More Patients Than They Help? (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American's Cross-Check blog:
Two new posts on this website have me contemplating, once again, the terrible possibility that psychiatry is hurting more people than it helps. Reporter Sarah G. Miller notes in "1 in 6 Americans Takes a Psychiatric Drug" that prescriptions for mental illness keep surging. As of 2013, almost 17 percent of Americans were taking at least one psychiatric drug, up from 10 percent in 2011, according to a new study. "Antidepressants were the most common type of psychiatric drug in the survey, with 12 percent of adults reporting that they filled prescriptions for these drugs..."
This increase in medications must be boosting our mental health, right? Wrong. In "Is Mental Health Declining in the U.S.?," Edmund S. Higgins, professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, acknowledges the "inconvenient truth" that Americans' mental health has, according to some measures, deteriorated...
It's all more evidence of something their blogger wrote in 2012. "American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis -- harmful medical treatment -- in history."
This increase in medications must be boosting our mental health, right? Wrong. In "Is Mental Health Declining in the U.S.?," Edmund S. Higgins, professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, acknowledges the "inconvenient truth" that Americans' mental health has, according to some measures, deteriorated...
It's all more evidence of something their blogger wrote in 2012. "American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis -- harmful medical treatment -- in history."
This piece is written by a kook who frequently writes on various "spiritual" and pseudoscientific topics. Among his recent posts:
Seeing the Miracle of Existence in the Darkest of Times
Does Evolution Have a "Higher Purpose"?
Astrophysicist Says Experiments Might Soon Reveal Dark Matter's "True Nature"
What Would a Machine as Smart as God Want?
My Doubts about Deepak Chopra and the Monetization of Meditation
World's Smartest Physicist Thinks Science Can't Crack Consciousness
The Mind–Body Problem, Scientific Regress and "Woo"
Dear "Skeptics," Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More
True to form, this article's point is a passive-agressive claim based on absence of evidence:
"Like most psychiatrists, Higgins does not consider the possibility that medications might be contributing to the decline of mental health."
Actually, I'm sure most psychiatrists HAVE considered this possibility, and they follow the peer-reviewed evidence which concludes the opposite.
If anyone wants to argue with this scientific consensus, they are welcome to do their own peer-reviewed studies. But this article and its sources haven't.
You know when a non techie talk about the Internet as a series of tubes? This is one of those times but about psychiatric meds.
First off, of course it's wrong if you take meds so you can handle the stress of two full time jobs or assume you can just take a couple of pills and your depression will be gone.
But for most people out there with a psychiatric condition meds and therapy (and some more therapy) is a life saver. The meds will remove some of the symptoms so you can live an almost normal life while therapy helps with the cause for them. A depression is nothing like feeling a bit under the weather, a panic disorder does not go away with a gluten free diet, and grave OCD is as easy to just hold in as Ipecac
Oh, good, pseudo intellectual cynicism has dismissed the whole topic. No need to discuss this, ilsaloving has seen through all of the smoke bombs and has clearly articulated the fundamental explanation.
Enjoy the karma boost you get from people who only want to reward opinions matching their own.
And how do you propose to fix society so it's not a "shit heap?" Extra points if you can also figure out what we should do with people with mental disorders until you "fix society?" How are you going to make it that nobody is in a bad relationship, loses their job, has a catastrophic medical event that significantly impacts their daily lives, and nobody experiences inconsolable grief over someone close to them dying?
Oh hay, it's a false dichotomy /and/ a straw-man argument all in one!
You can improve society so that when things like you posted don't harm people /as much/ as they do today. It's a spectrum, not a binary state.
Improve availability of education
Relax or eliminate victimless-crime statutes
Social safety net - losing a job should not be life or family-threatening.
Medical safety net - Universal healthcare, like the rest of the developed nations have.
Decent infrastructure so companies can thrive instead of their trucks being dumped in a river because a bridge collapsed, for example.
Mandatory vacation time > 1.5 weeks USians
Enforce labor laws.
All of these things contribute to societal and mental health. But we can't have that /here/ because that's SOCIALIZUM!#@$!@#$@#$!
Come back when you get a clue.
--
BMO
I have numerous issues created by just 3 months on Celexia. I am changed, asexual, and developed drinking and financial problems that were not present before medication. Also I have been off the meds for 4 months I may add and will never know if I will return to my normal self again.
There is a whole site called survingantideppressents.com
http://saveie6.com/