Tell me of one instance you know of, as I have asked before [unsurprisingly without anything concrete], where someone was "healed" of schizophrenia without the use of medication. Tell me of one instance where someone with schizophrenia, with non-medical "correction." And it's important that you ensure that medication was not used, because if medication WAS used then you have to admit that it is an illness, an actual, tangible illness caused not by thinking but by body chemistry. If it is just a way of thinking that stems just from the beliefs of the individual in question, then it should be easily corrected without medication and can just be corrected through talk-therapy, or thought-processing. I would be very interested [and I don't mean this sarcastically, I actually mean it] in seeing an instance where this happened. But something tells me you're not going to find anything like that. It's just. Not. Possible.
And I don't mean the talk therapy that makes the patients overcome the emotional stigmata (I am aware of treatments that exists for that; in fact it's worth noting that talk-therapy, henceforth known as psychology, helps with the emotional aspects involved with all mental illnesses). I mean therapy that gets rid of the hallucinations and delusions and paranoia; the "positive" symptoms, which is what the medications treat.
Mental illnesses are particularly rough because their effects are like a coin; two different sides but both part of the same issue. One side is the cognitive functioning, the other side is the emotional output. You must treat both for treatment to be truly effective. Talk therapy is effective for schizophrenics (albeit extraordinarily difficult, expensive, and requires a long duration of time) in mitigating the "negative" symptoms; the way the patient feels, which is often brought about by the hallucinations, the delusions, the inability to focus, all that "fun" stuff that expresses itself in the "positive" form (and I don't say positive to mean good).
An not-entirely-accurate analogy but a decent enough one for our purposes is the way in which you treat an illness. You dunno how to cure the illness, so you treat it. Say the illness causes massive burns or something. Well, there's the treatment that gets rid of the burns that manifest, and prevent them from showing up later on in the future, as long as treatment is constant and ongoing. That'd be the psychiatric aspect in this analogy. But the burns also cause pain. So you also give painkillers while the burns are showing up. That is the psychological aspect of the treatment. And say that the burns will last quite some time even while the treatment is progressing. Well, even if the cause of the discomfort is being treated and it's going away, it's still gonna cause pain. And the memories of that pain might linger, and induce fear in the patient that the pain will begin again. But if you treat with painkillers as well, the pain goes away, and the illness becomes less debilitating.
Again, it's not a perfect analogy but it's the best I can think of right now. See what I'm getting at? Mental illness is a disease that can't be cured because the actual study of it is still ongoing. It's perhaps the most complex form of disease we can suffer from, made even more so because of how complex the human mind is. It's not even just the brain itself; it's the sheer number of chemicals and chemical processes and how they affect different regions in different ways depending on their different levels. But it's something that can be treated. And treatment is very complex. It requires a medical approach AND a therapeutic approach to be truly effective.
You may deny it's a disease all you'd like, but again, just consider the thing with schizophrenia. Or, hell, Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is perhaps the best [and worst] example of mental illness. You sure as fuck aren't going to be able to just talk someone out of Alzheimer's. Hell, they've only just recently been able to start producing treatments of any kind that have any sort of effect. And even then the most the treatments can do is slow its progression. Reversing it...we're not even sure if it's possible to do so.
And I don't mean the talk therapy that makes the patients overcome the emotional stigmata (I am aware of treatments that exists for that; in fact it's worth noting that talk-therapy, henceforth known as psychology, helps with the emotional aspects involved with all mental illnesses). I mean therapy that gets rid of the hallucinations and delusions and paranoia; the "positive" symptoms, which is what the medications treat.
Mental illnesses are particularly rough because their effects are like a coin; two different sides but both part of the same issue. One side is the cognitive functioning, the other side is the emotional output. You must treat both for treatment to be truly effective. Talk therapy is effective for schizophrenics (albeit extraordinarily difficult, expensive, and requires a long duration of time) in mitigating the "negative" symptoms; the way the patient feels, which is often brought about by the hallucinations, the delusions, the inability to focus, all that "fun" stuff that expresses itself in the "positive" form (and I don't say positive to mean good).
An not-entirely-accurate analogy but a decent enough one for our purposes is the way in which you treat an illness. You dunno how to cure the illness, so you treat it. Say the illness causes massive burns or something. Well, there's the treatment that gets rid of the burns that manifest, and prevent them from showing up later on in the future, as long as treatment is constant and ongoing. That'd be the psychiatric aspect in this analogy. But the burns also cause pain. So you also give painkillers while the burns are showing up. That is the psychological aspect of the treatment. And say that the burns will last quite some time even while the treatment is progressing. Well, even if the cause of the discomfort is being treated and it's going away, it's still gonna cause pain. And the memories of that pain might linger, and induce fear in the patient that the pain will begin again. But if you treat with painkillers as well, the pain goes away, and the illness becomes less debilitating.
Again, it's not a perfect analogy but it's the best I can think of right now. See what I'm getting at? Mental illness is a disease that can't be cured because the actual study of it is still ongoing. It's perhaps the most complex form of disease we can suffer from, made even more so because of how complex the human mind is. It's not even just the brain itself; it's the sheer number of chemicals and chemical processes and how they affect different regions in different ways depending on their different levels. But it's something that can be treated. And treatment is very complex. It requires a medical approach AND a therapeutic approach to be truly effective.
You may deny it's a disease all you'd like, but again, just consider the thing with schizophrenia. Or, hell, Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is perhaps the best [and worst] example of mental illness. You sure as fuck aren't going to be able to just talk someone out of Alzheimer's. Hell, they've only just recently been able to start producing treatments of any kind that have any sort of effect. And even then the most the treatments can do is slow its progression. Reversing it...we're not even sure if it's possible to do so.
