Original SDMB thread What's the appropriate use for antidepressants?
spectrum
quote:
There is a stigma, a hateful, destructive stigma, in our society, that objectifies and punishes those with mental illnesses. Calls us weak, pathetic, blames us for our condition. Then when some of us get the help we need, people like Lander slime their way in and compare us to junkies and drug abusers, simply because we're trying to live normal -- not high, not special, normal -- lives. It is one of the more evil components of our society, one of the last acceptable prejudices. It's okay to hate the mentally ill, the depressed, the suicidal, because obviously, we deserve it. It's our fault. People like Lander help perpetuate and spread this myth.
There is also a social myth, a hateful, destructive social myth in our society, that venerates and praises the wonders of the pharmaceutical industry and the efficacy of the psychiatric profession. Says mental illness is a biological condition of the brain, a physiological brain malfunction, and that the pills the pharmaceutical companies manufacture and the psychiatrists prescribe are magic bullets that go right in there and fix the nasty old chemical imbalances and make everything right as rain. And when some of us find these little mind modifiers to be not to our liking, we are said to lack insight into our condition, for which reason we should be stripped of our right to make our own treatment decisions. And when people like Lander point out that arguments supporting psychiatric drugging here in this thread could be applied in support of (recreational) drug pushers and junkies and their relationship with each other, people get offended.
Hey, if medication helps you face the day, more power to you.
But it is true that the arsenal of psychiatric medicines is composed mainly of clumsy systemic neurological impediments -- broadly effective chemicals that mess around with synapsing either by directly impacting neurotransmitters or indirectly by impacting uptake mechanisms that would otherwise soak up certain naturally occurring neurotransmitters or neurotransmitter catalysts.
The ones that have been around long enough to have been studied tend to show signs of being dangerous. Every decade brings its new shiny "atypicals" or "new generation" antipsychotics and antidepressants which don't have such side effects, and then time goes on and it turns out they do, too.
And it remains as true as ever that depression, like all the other psychiatric diagnoses, consists of its symptoms. There is no underlying physiological condition that has ever been substituted in the definition such that if you have the symptoms but don't have the physiological condition you don't have the mental illness. Furthermore, the symptoms which constitute the disease are spelled out in such a way that there are no formal explicit criteria which must be met before the diagnoses can be confirmed, nor any which, if present, rules it out, so its existence in any given case remains a matter of opinion.
Kindly keep in mind that while the psychiatric profession and its pills may have saved your life, many others have not experienced them so benignly, and we are tired of hearing their positions reflected in the general social opinion as if they were neither dangerous nor controversial.