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I think my issue with conventional psychiatric drugs and talk therapy is that they are what Tylenol is to a headache, they don't actually cure the condition, th

I think my issue with conventional psychiatric drugs and talk therapy is that they are what Tylenol is to a headache, they don't actually cure the condition, they simply mitigate the symptoms. The same is true of insulin, though, and many, many other drugs. Somethings just slow down a disease (drugs for autoimmune disorders often do this). I find it completely unfair to expect everything to be a cure: Treating symptoms doesn't make the drugs bad. Treating symptoms is better than not treating them - this helps people not suffer. Actual cures are much, much harder to come by, especially when we don't know what causes them or what to fix to cure them. Medicine doesn't have to be perfect or ideal to be helpful.

didibus 5y ago
I don't think I negated anything about that. But here you've got a situation where a treatment that appears to cure a condition, and which has a root cause explanation of the problem, and addressing the root cause shows remission of the symptoms. And yet they are struggling to find funding for more research into it. Now personally, I think research should prioritize those leads over some other brain numbing pill. Also, I do think it's very different in psychiatry. Your example of insulin for diabetes is very different than my example of Tylenol for a headache. We know that your pancreas is failing to produce insulin, we often know why it is, but we can't repair it, so we need to manually do the job that it should be doing, and that will restore your body to a more normal state. It isn't a cure, but it also isn't simply masking symptoms, it's taking over the functions of the body through some other mechanism, for which we understand the bodily function well enough to supplement them ourselves. I don't believe psychiatry is at this point. We don't know why you have schizophrenia, we don't even know what in the body or brain is wrong, we simply observe symptoms, and we find that some pills which have effect on your brain mitigate your symptoms, often by producing other mental changes that distract from them. That's a farcry from our understanding of diabetes and its treatments.

didibus 5y ago

I don't think I negated anything about that. But here you've got a situation where a treatment that appears to cure a condition, and which has a root cause explanation of the problem, and addressing the root cause shows remission of the symptoms. And yet they are struggling to find funding for more research into it. Now personally, I think research should prioritize those leads over some other brain numbing pill. Also, I do think it's very different in psychiatry. Your example of insulin for diabetes is very different than my example of Tylenol for a headache. We know that your pancreas is failing to produce insulin, we often know why it is, but we can't repair it, so we need to manually do the job that it should be doing, and that will restore your body to a more normal state. It isn't a cure, but it also isn't simply masking symptoms, it's taking over the functions of the body through some other mechanism, for which we understand the bodily function well enough to supplement them ourselves. I don't believe psychiatry is at this point. We don't know why you have schizophrenia, we don't even know what in the body or brain is wrong, we simply observe symptoms, and we find that some pills which have effect on your brain mitigate your symptoms, often by producing other mental changes that distract from them. That's a farcry from our understanding of diabetes and its treatments.