Psychiatry is psedoscience. A chemical imbalance in a brain is not backed up by any medical evidence. If you have such a high opinion about psychiatry, why not try it yourself. It is impossible nowadays for anyone to visit a psychiatrist and not get a diagnosis and a prescription. Go and get one. Learn and feel psychiatry yourself before you suggest it to somebody else.Originally Posted by OrphanPip
Last edited by virginiawang; 03-04-2010 at 05:36 AM.
As someone who has survived a suicide attempt and been through extensive therapy, I have experience with psychiatry and I didn't get a prescription for an antidepressant.
Whether the chemical imbalance hypothesis of depression is right or not has nothing to do with the legitimacy of psychiatry. You're creating a strawman and ignoring the fact that my post was about the huge advances in the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Not to mention that even Kirsch from the previous post admits that talk therapy works for the treatment of depression.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
Hi Nax: if the stress gets too high; you can go for an emergency room visit. Is it possible to call the clinic scheduling and find out when the appt. is instead of waiting for the paper? Meanwhile, I find the about.com and other depression chat lines are very helpful. Good Luck...
Orphan Pip, It is the story of my life that all the good ones with great looks and hygiene are..You are very bright and you are quite right about all of your information; I hope you are going into the medical field
Hi Gladys, I liked your thoughts on the fish, sunlight and exercise. I can only speak for my own experience regarding medications and have noticed profound effects regarding the use of antidepressants for neuropathic pain in hospice patients. It often reduces the need for narcotics. In addition, medications such as Wellbutrin; have several positive and a few negative side effects that our patients would not be aware of because they are only on very obscure studies; they, never the less, turn up.
Hey Nax, I really feel for you dude, because I suffer from the same bouts of low self-esteem, social anxiety and subtle mania. I've been seeing a psychiatrist for about a year and a half now and it really helps, even if it doesn't solve everything every week, things gradually get better. For example, I could hardly go outside for a walk in the city last year without having a panic attack because I would start to get those symptoms you described and then my mind would start going in one hundred different directions.
Now going out into the city is nothing and I can do everyday things in public with no problem at all (though there are still times in which I begin to slightly panic, but those are rare).
Meds help, but therapy is the main cause of my healing. Meds set you up for the therapy, but they're no ends-in-themselves and should be taken with a low dosage because they can easily turn you into a robot, and that to be is worse than anything.
The Moments of Dominion
That happen on the Soul
And leave it with a Discontent
Too exquisite — to tell —
-Emily Dickinson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVW8GCnr9-I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckGIvr6WVw4
This is interesting and to me it indicates that you should try to detach yourself any intense feeling in relation to the clinc or with physchiatry in general. When I think about your problem, of course I don't to give advice carelessly, without knowledge, etc... but I am pretty sure about this, you don't need that stress in dealing with the clinic.
So two things, one is try - and this is something you should always do, as practice - to view anything which might be disturbing, view with calmness, and then do not react without thoughtful decision. You should practice to do this until you gain much more control over your impulses.
Also don't think that psychiatry or any other system or group has a monopoly on their "field." Psychiatrists are just a group like any other, and they are a vast group, that they surely include a bit of all humanity, like all other groups do. But what makes a true healer is quality which includes all good qualities, and a true healer is rare, one in a billion, and they are not necessarily found in clinics or hospitals, or any other place for that matter.
You can find healing for yourself and by yourself. Unfortunately there are no absolutes. You can study all that humanity has written, and you can try their remedies (living in nature, living in a church, living in a city, living in the country, etc...)
But you have to make your own path and follow your own guidance. And for you to have peace you will have to work at it. But if you attain that peace, there won't be anything left for you to know. The path to peace unlocks unlimited worlds.
I hope any of this made sense..
A medical student at Adelaide University once told me that most would-be doctors choose psychiatry to shed light on their own mental illness. Be that as it may, the chronically ill people I've encountered, revere and venerate their psychiatrists beyond all reason. To that extent NikolaiI is right in saying, "You can find healing for yourself and by yourself".
Confidant in your personal quest, avail yourself of what psychiatrists or anyone else can offer. Ultimately, if nothing else works, there are always drugs and ETC, for what they're worth.
For a dying patient, any treatment that gives relief is laudable if the side effects are bearable, but the mentally ill wish to survive in the long run. A 60-year-old friend died last year after four decades of psychotropic cocktails. His faith in his doctors was absolute, in himself non-existent. His physical state in latter years was appalling: an ailing, crippled and incoherent Hunchback from Notre Dame.
"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"
Don't be afraid to dump a clinic, or psychiatrist, or Counselor, if they seem ineffective.
When I was a young teenager, I had trouble making friends, and my parents took me to a psychiatrist who taught me how to "breathe". I assume they felt I had social anxiety. I really didn't, I just didn't understand how my peers operated. It was fairly pointless and a waste of time.
Later in my life I went to a couple counselors who actually gave me advice or just let me vent my frustration. That helped a lot more than a million "blow the candles out" exercises.
Hi Virginia, I think most of us on the forum do have personal experience with psychiatrists. I am a nurse, so I have friends who are psychiatrists, patients who are cared for by psychiatrists and when my husband passed away; I went to a psychiatrist for depression. It's true, there are alot of incompetent medical professionals and it is more difficult to hold psychiatrist to a standard than an internist. I began with light antidepressants and antianxieties and talk therapy. I kept a low dosage so that I could continue to block repressed memories that were disturbing and I could return to work. I continued talk therapy and antidepressants until I felt, 1 year later, that they were no longer necessary. They were of great help at a time I needed them.
Orphan Pip, Daniel and Katy: my hat is off to all of you and I am so glad for your health
Gladys: I am so sorry for your friend and your grief. These medications do have there side effects; that is why it is so important to monitor yourself and keep in close contact with your primary doctor for liver testing and your psychiatrists for any adverse reactions. I have acquaintances who have had lifelong mental illness; while they are not on medication, their bodies have still deteriorated faster than others without mental illness do...I wonder if such studies exist.
I don't know whether you were medicated or not in the intensive therapy. If that process only involved talk, it would not harm you in any way. However if you like to be medicated, it's your own choice.
However a chemical imbalance in a brain does invalidate psychiatry once and for all, and your use of the word, hypothesis, explained everything. Psychiatry did advance a great deal in its scale to make their victims more manageable, but it has never cured a single patient from long time ago since now. A word you used in your last post," semi-?" is ludicrous. One can never be changed into another. Why did psychiatrists try to make their victims something like vegetables, which can also nod to you when a puff of wind comes? I do not think they have the right to change any human beings out of their original form, which is the most precious type.
Hi DanielBenoit,
I respect your choice and opinion here, but I cannot help wanting to vent my opinions about this issue.
To have my mind working in a hundred different paths when I am walking around sounds exciting. It gives me the image of a network of wires which do not work as they were expected. They give off sparks when the currents meet. I am sure this muddled state of mind will give me the most strange ideas which I can never imagine with a prosaic mind. If I had such experince, I would cherish it for anything in the world. Even if it hurts, I won't try to get rid of it. It will pass when the right time comes. No matter what happens, I won't change the way my brain was wired.
Don't care about what I wrote here.
Before I close, I really want to tell you that a slight dosage will also hurt. It will not make one a complete robot, but it will make one something like a robot. It will dull the senses. One cannot feel as keely as he used to do after being medicated.
Hi, Gladys, I agree with you completely, 100% completely. When one wishes to die and loses all hopes in the world, he can choose psychiatry, which will not kill him in a moment but will torture him on a long term basis. It is a even more severe torture than death.
It will perhaps lengthen a life, but it degrages the quality of it, kills off the dignity, the nobility, and the freshness of it at the moment one swallows the pills.
I agree with you, Gladys.
To take a break from trying to be busy, although I am actually busy, I am rather on the median between virginia's understandable mistrust, a mistrust I share to a great extent, and Orphan's advocacy of the medical model, especially since I have been in the trenches with significantly disturbed and sometimes violent people--but I think much of what makes human beings sick is low class status tied to poverty and economic stress, with the usual bogeymen of racism and other discriminating factors. We are, after all, members of the great ape family, cognitively ahead of other apes by a few leaps, perhaps, thanks to a wrist bone or toe bone and a bipedal advance in locomotion, but we are still just large primates unwilling to accept that we behave a lot like baboons, only that we've been too successful, are too numerous, and increasingly have too much faith in the process, or cannot always resolve procedure from personal autonomy.
I paid apt attention to _Suicide Tourist_, the other night, a recycled Frontline piece, and thought, "Ah, I still have enough money to fly to Switzerland so I can legally die without guilt!" (I am not sick enough, however.)
What struck me in viewing the death porn documentary, tasteful done as it was, is how much control we still cede to methodology, whether we are a right to die advocate, or an angry exiled disability activist, or a mental health patient, who, after their downfall and climb back from the dung heap, approaching the nearest publisher with our junkie paranoid loaded memoir, will then appear on Charlie Rose and say, "Hey I'm great!"
I do not know that as a species, we're truly cut out for our own increasingly complex paradigms.
Just a thought.
I've always had trouble making friends or getting along with people. When I was in my early teens, my classmates called me by the nickname, " idiot." When I grew older and entered a senior high school, I learned to be proud, and to look at everyone from above. I had no friends at all, but that suited me better. I accept myself till now. I do not want to change myself by the hands of psychiatrists. I want to be the way I am, though I wish I could become an ordinary woman.
Last edited by virginiawang; 03-06-2010 at 09:38 AM.
Hi Virginia, I wanted to bring up a point: No one who feels totally well, mentally and physically (except for those who are trying to fake disability for cash assets) goes to psychiatrist. Psychiatrist only treat people who not only have mental issues; but are disturbed enough by them to seek help.
When on the proper medications and dosage, a person can focus better, it is wonderful for anxiety disorders; the more complex the disorder, the harder it is to treat with medications. Sometimes, bipolar people change so rapidly that it is difficult to medicate them. Of course, violent people are put on high doses of medication to prevent them from hurting themselves and others.
I am a hospice nurse. I assure you, in most cases, death is not dignified even without medication. Yet, most people prefer any form of life to death.
Now, if you think being too weak to bath or go to the bathroom, soiling yourself and having to have a son or a loved one change your diaper, losing all taste for food or the ability to eat your favorite foods...spending your last days eating pudding, ensure and jello; Spending 24 hours a day in bed because no one can lift you and lifting equipment cannot be brought into your room, losing all of your friends who just think it is too sad to come see you, having your skin breakdown from extensive weight loss and pressure.
If you find this dignified, I encourage you to try it in your 80th year; me, when I'm on the way to that place, I'm swallowing a big bottle of narcotics.
Last edited by soundofmusic; 03-04-2010 at 08:39 PM.
That reminds me sort of what happened when I gave birth to my son. While I was pregnant, I swore to myself that I would not have an epidural. I wanted the experience to be "real" and "natural". When I actually went into labor and I was screaming because it felt like I was dying, I realized all bets were off, and got me one of those things right away.
If you are truly in need of medication, it is probably obvious the moment you start taking it and your thoughts start evening out. I consider myself lucky because I am able to pull myself out of depression a couple times without drugs, but I am sure that if I was constantly plagued by suicidal thoughts and a psychiatrist recommended it I would rather take a couple pills than be constantly extremely depressed.
My point exactly, Katy. Those who need it, take it; those who don't philosophize
music: One of our Disabled In Action activists just passed, thankfully, in much the way you describe; he was 79 and it was a terrible ordeal, which is one of my criticisms of the independent living movement. I do not believe in hanging on at all costs, and losing all my old friends like this has been taking its toll on me.
I have been trying to tell my family in no uncertain terms that I am not going to die like Terri Schiavo and my friend. I will not. The activists fought to keep him going on the respirator with a feeding tube, and I am writing an angry essay, as there is no dignity in what he went through; his aide is my housekeeper, and we were all stretched to the breaking point.
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