(July 8, 2014 at 5:37 pm)Insanity Wrote: I'm not completely against the meds, I am against the way that psychology/psychiatry are currently integrated with the medical world. With most common problems most see a doctor with little experience with mental health issues who will probably give them some cure all anti depressants. Most people don't actually know they are mostly just to manage symptoms and not all that reliably.
Definitely. General practitioners are woefully unprepared to deal with mental illness - and the only tools at their disposal is the RX pad and the referral.
Therapy is effective. Therapy is also expensive, and difficult (for the patient, particularly).
A large part of the problem is the system, as you noted. I have no idea what it's like in the UK where you live, but I do know what it's like here, and it sounds like we have similar models.
One other leg of the problem is the patients - who doesn't want a quick cure-all pill that's cheap and easy, instead of having to go through all that hard therapy?
We're probably more on the same page than first glance might suggest. :p
You're absolutely right regarding treating "run-of-the mill" depression (though I hate characterizing it as that, I don't want to diminish anyone's experience with mental illness - but we do need to distinguish acute typical cases from the chronic difficult profound cases, they are *very different*). Many if not most in the former category will benefit *most* from behavioral therapy, and may not need meds at all, or just for a short time.
Sadly, the common approach is to have the GP just throw pills at the problem.
