medication

From the Wall Street Journal…

Why Psychiatry Needs a Therapist

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704188104575083700227601116

I do find the trend toward making more and more of our population diagnoseably (not exactly a word) mentally ill highly concerning.

Oh you’re sad? We have a pill for that. You have a test or a try out or a date tomorrow and you’re  nervous? We have a pill for that. Have trouble falling asleep? We have a pill for that…

Here’s the thing… humans surviving the human condition are not normal. There is no normal, and no one should strive to fit into some set ideal of what normal is.

Live your life. Take care of yourself. Try not to hurt anybody else. Be happy.

If you’ve got it in you to do more than that, to build something, create something, help others – awesome – go for it. If not, and you’re happy with who you are and what you do, call it good. We get one turn here. I’d say doing what we can do to be as happy as we can be as much of the time as possible – that’s what we’re here for.

Is Free Thinking A Mental Illness?

There’s got to be a better way to insert links. I’ll figure it out, but for now, I’m sorry my links aren’t very pretty.  The title of this blog post is actually the title to the article I’m going to link to, and the comments attached to that article are important. They run the gamut from “you people are paranoid freaks and have no idea what you’re talking about” to “right on, I’ve been there and seen this” – and I believe all the people commenting are speaking some measure of truth.

People who have lived with persons diagnosed probably correctly with ODD have an understanding of the disorder as it was meant to be diagnosed, that the DSM-WhateverVolumeWe’reCurrentlyOn is intended to be noting these behaviors in extreme severity.

It doesn’t mean that all clinicians are diagnosing all patients correctly. It doesn’t mean people are not being misdiagnosed every day. It doesn’t mean these diagnosis aren’t being used to control behaviors and thinking patterns that are disliked by the mainstream. It doesn’t mean diagnosis cannot be manipulated and medications used in an attempt to make “weird kids” become “normal.”

And my saying that doesn’t mean the above will ever, ever work, by the way.

And it doesn’t mean that clinicians aren’t encouraged to make diagnosis in order to prescribe drugs, and that drug companies don’t benefit financially from the prescribing of said drugs. Or that clinics and hospitals and doctors and providers don’t benefit from follow-up visits to manage the prescribing of said drugs.

So arguments in comments notwithstanding, I still ask…. is it paranoid or fear-mongering to question the breaking down of “depression” or “anxiety” or “schizophrenia” into lesser diagnosis in order to prescribe essentially the same drugs?

Here’s the link. What do you think?

http://www.offthegridnews.com/how-to-2/is-free-thinking-a-mental-illness/

Psychopharmacology

Psych meds.

Not all bad, but not all good, either. As with so many things in our world, holding onto black and white thinking is a mistake because there are so many shades of gray. The key is, and always will be, knowing what you want and arming yourself with education.

Based on my own experience with anti-depressants, I’ve often told people that the correct psych medication should make you recognize yourself again. I have never believed that an anti-depressant will or should change a person’s personality, such as turning a typically melancholy personality into a sunny one…

But. I look back on my time taking anti-depressants and note, rather sadly, the creative wasteland that was that time of my life. I wrote nothing. No poetry. No stories. Nothing. I went to work in cube-land and was content to stare at the television until bedtime. Sleep. Repeat.

No real happiness. No real sadness. So even though I felt like myself, I was NOT myself, and 2.5 years later, when I dared to stop taking the anti-depressant, I kind of felt like I’d been duped into a false sense of happiness, because it had been pretty easy to pop a pill and feel like my usual, happy self again. But when I woke up, I had created nothing from the grand depths of my grief.

Anyway. Here’s an interesting article that questions if there is any such thing as a chemical imbalance of the brain that causes various mental illnesses. Food for thought. Click below.

Click to access Blaming_The_Brain_The_Chemical_Imbalance_Fraud.pdf