This is a good article, if a little long. I mostly skimmed the sections on specific classes of medications. There are two quotes that I especially want to 'boo

This is a good article, if a little long. I mostly skimmed the sections on specific classes of medications. There are two quotes that I especially want to 'bookmark' with a comment here. This was on medicating "schizophrenics" with tranquilizers: "[...] from what I have learned, we are trading more humane treatments for a solution that superficially seems effective, but on closer examination is not helping patients in any long-term way and may actually be killing them." Robert Whitaker discusses the old "humane" treatments for the mentally ill in his book, Mad in America [0]. The Quakers had "asylums" where patients were kept safe and provided 4 meals a day. Most patients recovered well enough to leave the asylum after a while. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=Cw6MlCXhN5MC https://books.google.com/books?id=Cw6MlCXhN5MC This quote alludes to the corruption of the psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM) to justify the modern mental health industry's medication-centered practices: "Modern psychopharmacology goes hand in hand with a psychiatric diagnostic system that has, over time, been redefined to rely on medicating symptoms away rather than looking at the structure of the mind and its complex permutations in order to work with a patient in a deeply engaged way over the long haul." (emphasis added). My recent comment [1] discussed medication strategies that address causes rather than treat symptoms. Very few patients get such rational medication strategies, they just get patent medicines that are FDA-approved to treat their symptoms. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18525361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18525361 The author's fixation on Freud's body of work is interesting. Certainly there are more current insights that [s]he could have drawn upon. (edit1: minor edits & changed book link)