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Please try and remember that while there may be many problematic practices and practitioners in the world of psychiatry, the majority are just trying to heal th

Please try and remember that while there may be many problematic practices and practitioners in the world of psychiatry, the majority are just trying to heal the sick like all other doctors. There is a big difference between putting someone on pills to stop them from presenting a problem in school or at work, and putting someone on pills to stop them cutting out their own eyes, or to help them regain their desire to breathe in and out. A large number of mental disorders are extremely debilitating and often fatal to the patient. When successfully healed, sufferers are usually extremely grateful to their psychiatrist, feeling that they owe them their life. You only hear in the media and online about the times when it all goes wrong, because it makes a good story. Who wants to hear blog posts about how someone was sick, and then they got well? Especially when talking about your experience with mental illness is seen as an admission of weakness or personal failure by society, which it is. This is not to discount the fact that there is a huge amount of malpractice, abuse, and just plain poor quality thinking out there in the world of psychiatry. Most of it is connected to big pharma and their big dollars, as you might expect. You also can't absolve the patient of all responsibility. Go to any psychiatrist, particularly here in the UK with our NHS where doctors don't sit around hoping for more ill people, and they will tell you that they are sick and tired of the parade of perfectly healthy middle class idiots shuffling before them with non-problems, or worse, dragging children with non-problems. You can't really just turn these people away, it's unethical (illegal?) to just deny someone treatment. Unless you can invoke something like Münchausen syndrome, you have to treat these people or their charges in some way if they are in distress. Doctors are reduced to giving them some pills and complaining to each other behind closed doors about the endless stream of "worried well" affecting their ability to help those with the actual problems discussed at the start of this now overly-long comment. Actually, increasingly they send them off to a homeopathy clinic or something like that. That in my eyes is the one good use for alternative medicine, it keeps little jemima off the hard stuff when her dangerously irrational mother decides she needs to be fixed. The DSM and it's ilk make this worse by giving the public cosmo-style checklists they can run against themselves, without all the other contextual understanding that a diagnostician has. It is then made worse again with the DSM published on the internet.

fooandbarify 15y ago
I had to log in just to upvote this. Yes, diagnosing mental illness is less clear-cut than the problems we typically enjoy as programmers. Yes, mistakes are made. But for every mistake there are 9, or 99, or 999 successes (EDIT: I have no statistical reference for this assertion, please take with large grain of salt) who, as you say, feel that they owe their life to the professional(s) who helped them. I know, because I am one, and regardless of society's opinion that is no less an admission of weakness than admitting that I had chicken pox one time, and occasionally come down with the flu.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  "But for every mistake there are 9, or 99, or 999 successes who, as you say, feel that they owe their life to the professional(s) who helped them." The problem is that isn't true. The amount of people helped is generally lower than the amount of people harmed, at least with longterm use of many of the major psychopharmaceutical drugs. The book the blog is promoting explains this quite well. Just this morning there were a flurry of articles on a new study showing that the most commonly prescribed sleeping pills raise your all cause mortality 3x - 5x, and that's over only 2.5 years. One can only imagine what the all-cause mortality over 10+ years is.
  - fooandbarify 15y ago
    You're right, I have no source to back that up and was making a flimsy emotional assertion. (I've edited my comment to reflect that.) I stand by the (desired) sentiment of my comment, though: psychiatry and the related sciences are important and there should be no related stigma.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  I don't know that you have any way of measuring mistakes vs successes in any objective way. Sometimes mistakes are helpful even (as they were with me--- a misdiagnosis for depression helped me out and lead to a very real ADD diagnosis, but I refuse to give up on my anti-authoritarian tendencies--- and indeed I do not take prescription medication for ADD and haven't regularly since I was 17). The problem I see is that there are a lot of people who genuinely think that they are treating sick patients who will get better and have fewer problems in life if they just get in line and stop resisting authority. I see it in schools and among mental health professionals. But those people have a very narrow and misguided IMNSHO opinion of success in life. As (early psychotherapist) Roberto Assagioli put it, clinically normal means mediocre, and to excel, you have to step outside of that. He claimed that there were criteria you could use to tell whether a disturbance was pathological or morbid, or whether it was a first step towards growth and breaking free. This brings me to ODD. The concern is that some people who are habitually defiant get worse and can become sociopathic later. But if that's the concern, it's grotesquely overdiagnosed.

fooandbarify 15y ago

I had to log in just to upvote this. Yes, diagnosing mental illness is less clear-cut than the problems we typically enjoy as programmers. Yes, mistakes are made. But for every mistake there are 9, or 99, or 999 successes (EDIT: I have no statistical reference for this assertion, please take with large grain of salt) who, as you say, feel that they owe their life to the professional(s) who helped them. I know, because I am one, and regardless of society's opinion that is no less an admission of weakness than admitting that I had chicken pox one time, and occasionally come down with the flu.

Alex3917 15y ago
"But for every mistake there are 9, or 99, or 999 successes who, as you say, feel that they owe their life to the professional(s) who helped them." The problem is that isn't true. The amount of people helped is generally lower than the amount of people harmed, at least with longterm use of many of the major psychopharmaceutical drugs. The book the blog is promoting explains this quite well. Just this morning there were a flurry of articles on a new study showing that the most commonly prescribed sleeping pills raise your all cause mortality 3x - 5x, and that's over only 2.5 years. One can only imagine what the all-cause mortality over 10+ years is.
- fooandbarify 15y ago
  You're right, I have no source to back that up and was making a flimsy emotional assertion. (I've edited my comment to reflect that.) I stand by the (desired) sentiment of my comment, though: psychiatry and the related sciences are important and there should be no related stigma.
einhverfr 15y ago
I don't know that you have any way of measuring mistakes vs successes in any objective way. Sometimes mistakes are helpful even (as they were with me--- a misdiagnosis for depression helped me out and lead to a very real ADD diagnosis, but I refuse to give up on my anti-authoritarian tendencies--- and indeed I do not take prescription medication for ADD and haven't regularly since I was 17). The problem I see is that there are a lot of people who genuinely think that they are treating sick patients who will get better and have fewer problems in life if they just get in line and stop resisting authority. I see it in schools and among mental health professionals. But those people have a very narrow and misguided IMNSHO opinion of success in life. As (early psychotherapist) Roberto Assagioli put it, clinically normal means mediocre, and to excel, you have to step outside of that. He claimed that there were criteria you could use to tell whether a disturbance was pathological or morbid, or whether it was a first step towards growth and breaking free. This brings me to ODD. The concern is that some people who are habitually defiant get worse and can become sociopathic later. But if that's the concern, it's grotesquely overdiagnosed.