2009-02-19, 08:56 PM
nannerz Wrote:I don't think the mentality that popping a pill should always be the first quick and easy solution someone thinks of. However, they can help, and the benefits can outweigh the risks. Yes it does suck to depend on medicine to get you through every single day, but that is reality for some people living with certain illnesses. This is not a problem that only mental health patients have to deal with. There are people with hypertension who require medication for high blood pressure, diabetics who require diligent monitoring of their blood sugar and consequent titration with insulin, etc. etc. The positive difference these drugs can make in somebody's quality of life is phenomenal, and they have accepted the inconveniences of living with the disease.
For mental health, I know pretty much all of my psych profs emphasized psychotherapy over medication, which seems like the safe way to go. It's not as clean-cut as yay or nay. Some are effective in some patients and not others. If you feel that you don't require medication, and are getting along fine, then it shouldn't be something you need.
Yes, the pharmaceutical industry does need to reform, but that will also require much more pressure from the government since it certainly does not seem like it will want to reform itself. As to the person who trusts aspirin...well there are plenty of possible nasty side effects there too.
yeah i guess i am indoctrinated by psychology (4 years in undergraduate psychology will make you paranoid) too. i guess i have phrased my question specifically towards mental health because a pill or an injection is a physical thing. when we aren't even sure exactly what job a neurotransmitter does, why are we messing with it?
i mean, with a broken leg it's entirely physical. the problem is physical (maybe you have psychological flow-on effects), the solution is physical, and the test of functioning is physical. but for mental illnesses it's not physical. we're offering a physical solution to a problem which we don't know to be purely physical or not; and the test of how well it works, if it's a good test, is definitely not physical. (you're not going to test the effectiveness of an ssri by putting neurotransmitter probes into someone's neurons and detecting the level of serotonin.)
how can the discerning patient even begin to be convinced that medication is a completely safe option for mental health? the research isn't even conclusive for some of these things.