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.
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.
