These days, many people in America who have mental health issues go to psychiatrists to complain about their problems. But after they go there, every little problem they have gets labelled and turned into a mental disorder. And then people start to panic about it more, which worsens their conditions. Even someone who has experienced a moderate level of stress and/or depression may get written off as having an "illness" in his brain that needs to be treated with psychotropic drugging.

Psychiatrists oftentimes tell their patients something along the lines of "What you have is basically a chemical imbalance in your brain that's causing you to feel the way you feel. But the good news is that there is a pill that can fix that, and you should take it," without conducting any kind of lab or physical tests on the patients to prove that there really is a "chemical imbalance" in the brain. Therefore it is not unreasonable to conclude that modern psychiatry, shamefully, lacks scientific validity. And this is something that even psychiatrists admitted.

"Despite more than two hundred years of intensive research, no commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorders have proven to be either genetic or biological in origin, including schizophrenia, major depression, manic-depressive disorder, the various anxiety disorders, and childhood disorders such as attention-deficit hyperactivity. At present there are no known biochemical imbalances in the brain of typical psychiatric patients - until they are given psychiatric drugs." - Peter Breggin, Psychiatrist

Even more laughable is the fact that many of the antidepressants doesn't actually make you better. Instead they simply numb down your attention and your emotions and oftentimes will lead to extremely dangerous side effects, including suicidal thoughts. So the question is (and it's rhetorical), why should any person who has a sound reasoning capacity, and is aware of these facts, ever take such a risk in an attempt to cure himself?

Psychological side-effects of anti-depressants worse than thought

Anti-depressants likely do more harm than good, study suggests

What are the real risks of antidepressants?

Part 1: The Roots - Robert Whitaker - Psychiatric Epidemic (Video)

A Dry Pipeline for Psychiatric Drugs

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

Pharmageddon


It doesn't require much investigation to realize that the whole psychiatry industry today is rather a nicely packaged fraud, a deception, making people think that taking these drugs will "help" them, even though it actually hurts them more. They've been able to convince just enough people to take drugs like this, with duplicitous commercials and selective suppression of facts, which as a result of they're amassing billions of dollars every year. And that's pretty much the number one motivation behind selling these psychiatric drugs - i.e. money. It doesn't matter if the drugs are dangerous to health as long as people are gullible enough and the Pharma-funded psychiatry industry is chiseling out pots of money out of them.

The Corrupt Alliance of the Psychiatric-Pharmaceutical Industry

The Psychiatrist Whistleblower Big Pharma Can’t Shut Up


Here are two documentaries that provide more exposure of some of the slimy, double-dealing tactics of psychiatry and how it has pulled people into its tangled web of lies while acting under the guise of being the most ardent savior of mental health:

Making a Killing: The Untold Story of Psychotropic Drugging

The DSM: Psychiatry's Deadliest Scam


I must add the following point also: I don't deny that there are good psychiatric programs out there that are indeed helpful to some extent (the ones which take a more humanistic approach, such as talk therapy and counseling). But, on a larger scale, psychiatry seems be more destructive than helpful, especially when drugs are involved. And, unfortunately, with the rise of pharmaceutical and insurance industries, the practice of psychiatry has considerably shifted from talk therapy to drug therapy.

Anyway, that'll be enough for now. I think that there still might be many disagreements from members with what I wrote in this post, but that's fine.

I'll consider all the disagreements/criticisms/feedback as best as I can.

Psychiatry is tolerated because it is quick and cheap, and extremely profitable.

"Making a killing" really opened my eyes.
You have a solution to sell, you "create" the problem.

(July 7, 2014 at 5:32 pm)Rayaan Wrote: So the question is (and it's rhetorical), why should any person who has a sound reasoning capacity, and is aware of these facts, ever take such a risk in an attempt to cure himself?

As an attempt to leverage what others have leveraged in pursuit of quality of life. When your current symptoms outweigh (and only the patient can make this decision) any potential side effects - it's a non-issue. You will at least be determining the manner in which your quality of life is suffering. Control(by any means) lends itself to management - and that's what alot of people are after. Not a cure, management.

Our ability to create compounds has, currently, exceeded our ability to project what it is they do, why, and how it might affect an individual (if it will at all) in some cases. That's hardly a reason not to avail oneself of a tool - though I'd agree that it;s a reason to be highly critical of that tool. Is our own "natural" chemistry any better in this regard? I wouldn't (and couldn't) argue so, personally.

It is very true that the psychiatric community is extremely flawed. Not only are doctors given strong incentive to prescribe medication, many of them are over worked and do not have enough time to actually assess their patients properly. This leads them to lean heavily on medication, because despite the fact that these medications are over-prescribed, they do get results.

The anti-depressants thing is definitely sketchy. We don't know the actual mechanisms that cause them to work, and there are even people out there that think they are no more effective than a placebo. I rely heavily on them, but I have been on them for years. I often wonder how differently my depression and anxiety would have been had I not been prescribed drugs at the age of 16. Nowadays, they're not really supposed to prescribe them for people under 18, but doctors still do. Another problem is that parents either get frustrated or lazy, and that causes them to medicate their kids.

After 19 years in the mental health system, I do feel like I've been chewed up and spit out by a system that treats you more like a consumer than a human being. But that's how our regular healthcare works, so I'm not sure why we expect the mental health system to do any better.

I once 'suffered' from having forged many neural pathways which were unhealthy, and lead to various undesired behaviors. Once I realized that I had created these maps within my brain structure/chemistry, the task became one of finding my way back to their origins, and once at that point, to take another direction. It's called cognitive self-discovery, and it works well to ease the strains we sometimes put onto ourselves through unconscious decisions we've unwittingly (or otherwise) made.

I'll be honest and say that I could not even consider such a concept prior to participating in several shamanic rites and rituals (including natural 'medicines'), but now that I've seen the errors in my thinking, I no longer need those tools to gain full recovery when I find myself just outside the camp.

(July 7, 2014 at 5:38 pm)Rhythm Wrote:

(July 7, 2014 at 5:32 pm)Rayaan Wrote: So the question is (and it's rhetorical), why should any person who has a sound reasoning capacity, and is aware of these facts, ever take such a risk in an attempt to cure himself?

As an attempt to leverage what others have leveraged in pursuit of quality of life. When your current symptoms outweigh (and only the patient can make this decision) any potential side effects - it's a non-issue.

Or, put in quite another way: It beats trying to find the guts to pull the trigger of the revolver that's stuck in your mouth.

A depressive moment that only seems to re-enforce all the things you were depressed about in the first place, eh you gutless worm?

Honestly after studying psychology for years I was extremely disappointed. To me you have a couple of parts to it. The scientific parts with neuroscience where they actually get real results and everything is on the up and up. Problem is you need machines that can cost hundreds of thousands just to run so the whole thing runs in a experimental and completely impractical way. It's just not yet useful to the majority of people who need help. On the other hand you have something that mimics sociology where you just kind of make educated guesses and do broad studies that can be interpreted in a load of different ways.

For the treatment side you have a bizarre mix of the two, you have the trial and error guesswork from what the studies seem to suggest could work. On its own it might help but really your just slowing down the issues and trying to keep the person in check with talking therapy. Then you have a variety of drugs that are an absolute pain in the ass to get right. For example anti-depressants can take weeks to work then leave the person worse off than when they started, then you have weeks of waiting for the drugs effects to ware off. Then the onto the next drug. Without doing the science the trial and error is just inevitable.

Psychology as a medical discipline is just a clusterfuck. You start with a doctor that rarely has much in depth knowledge of disorders. So that doctor has to guess which problem you have based on a bunch of symptoms that can mean anything from Schizophrenia, anxiety, depression or a physical condition with psychological effects. Usually the easiest option is just to pick one to make them feel better now they have a name for the thing and give them anti-depressants as they tend to nuke some of the symptoms for some with mild issues. Now assuming it's more than something that can be brushed off with a few days off and some happy pills the real clusterfuck begins. The patient now gets to enjoy being passed from person to person making up a new diagnoses. Here you get put on a waiting list (Years long) for therapy and you get to have new drugs with all new side effects each month until you either get sick of coming back for help or are lucky enough to find the right drug for you.

Way I see it psychology is just nowhere near ready to be effective in treating people effectively. Your average doctor doesn't have the knowledge to diagnose the myriad of disorders and the quest to fix an imbalance is years long and full of awful shit. My advice personally would be to talk to a councillor not a psychiatrist, I think the actual act of speaking your thoughts out loud will help and councillors are cheaper and easier to find. If you're really struggling take the drug quest but do a lot of research and take a friend or family member to help keep an eye on you and help you find the best one for you.

(July 7, 2014 at 6:14 pm)Insanity Wrote: If you're really struggling take the drug quest but do a lot of research and take a friend or family member to help keep an eye on you and help you find the best one for you.

That would be my advice also. The most smart thing to do is to do some research before you take the drugs, especially when it comes to treating mental illnesses because there's a good chance that are that taking the pills will mess you up even more. Then you may get cornered into a deadly viscous cycle where you will be prescribed to take more psychiatric drugs for the new problems. I'm not saying don't take drugs at all, but if you do, then at least be well-informed about the possible side effects that it may have on you. That way you'll be able to make better decisions. Just be very cautious.