<p>^^^^ Pharmaceuticals do not help people with mental illness. They’re a quick fix because it’s easier to prescribe someone with medication than sit in a room talking to them for years and going through the slow process that is therapy so they can recover. Except they’re not much of a “fix” because they don’t actually help anything.</p>
<p>If pharmaceuticals are the god-send of mental health, why do industrialized nations have lower recovery rates from schizophrenia than the developing ones that can’t afford drugs? The pharmaceutical industry’s success in marketing amazes me.</p>
<p>When I was fifteen I became very angry one night and scratched all the skin off my left arm with my nails. My mother took me to the family doctor. He didn’t send me to a therapist or a psychiatrist, instead he said I was “passive aggressive” and gave me some anti-depressants. They didn’t fix anything. They made me miserable because they made me act happy when internally I was still depressed and wanted to hurt myself. I couldn’t stop laughing and smiling at nothing. I told my mother one day that I was done taking them. My sister was given antidepressants, too. They didn’t make her happy. Anytime she stopped taking them she became horribly depressed. She had to wean herself off the anti-depressants because if she missed just one dose it made her tired and apathetic.</p>
<p>My mother had bipolar disorder. What triggered it? She gave birth to me, then the severe postpartum depression triggered the first episode of bipolar disorder. Guess she should have avoided having that third child. So much for the “gift” of motherhood. Her psychiatrist never gave her therapy, instead he gave her more and more and more pills. These pills made her gain weight, kept her from being able to lose weight, made her hands shake constantly, etc. They didn’t help her moods at all. She still went from extreme depression to extreme mania her entire life. When I think about my childhood she was never even there because she spent all her time sleeping because of her depression. She was suicidal during her depressed stages. She mutilated herself. Those drugs did nothing for her and no one cared because they could just keep feeding her medication until she died from all the meds in her system. And that’s what happened. She died because her doctors had her on too many meds for her bipolar disorder. I’m so thankful for all those medical developments that made her life miserable and in the end killed her.</p>
<p>Sorry for being OT, I just can’t stand how everyone thinks those with mental illness need medication.</p>
<p>kaxane ~ how painful to have gone through what you have. I’m so sorry to hear what your mother went through, I can’t imagine what that must have been like for you as her child. I would have the same perspective as you having experienced such pain and loss.</p>
<p>Sorry you had such a tough time, kaxane, but a few corrections. One doesn’t “recover” from schizophrenia. Episodes may abate, but it is a lifelong illness. Ditto with Bipolar disorder. These are genetic illnesses. A postpartum depression certainly can follow the birth of a child, and this may trigger the onset of an episode of mood destabilization, but the birth of a child in an of itself wouldnt “cause” Bipolar disorder. I hope you aren’t blaming yourself. And antidepressants don’t “make you happy”. Meds are intended to stabilize mood, not “make one happy”. Sometimes an antidepressant can trigger a manic episode in a person who is predisposed to them (which may have happened to your mom) but in general there aren’t any “happy pills”. Also, there is a big difference between an acute psychotic disorder triggered by some event vs psychosis associated with schizophrenia. I am sorry if you had a negative experience with medications, but they are very helpful for many individuals in improving their quality of life.</p>
<p>Pharmaceuticals can be used effectively in a crisis situation to get a
patient to the point where they can be effectively helped by therapy.
They can also be used over a longer period of time so that the patient
can better benefit from therapy. It may be cheaper in the short run to
just prescribe medications to control psychosis and aspects of our
medical system might encourage that approach but that doesn’t imply
that it isn’t effective.</p>
<p>If you look through research databases, you’ll see that research on
therapy dropped quite a bit several decades ago and that research on
medication (and figuring out causes) picked up. Medication just
happens to work better than therapy, especially in a crisis.</p>
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<p>I see nothing in that study related to the effectiveness of medication
over therapy.</p>
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<p>Pharmaceuticals are far from ideal. They typically have a bunch of
negative side-effects and patients often stop taking them when they’ve
gotten over a crisis. The pharmaceuticals are typically expensive in
the US. I do not know if they cost as much in other countries. If you
wanted to make your point, though, you’d be better off finding a study
that directly compares the effectiveness of medication vs. therapy.</p>
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<p>The approach for meds is usually trial and error. It’s trial and error
to find the best medication and trial and error to find the best dose.
This can take a while and it can be quite frustrating. It does require
the support of a psychiatrist.</p>
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<p>A psychiatrist doesn’t provide therapy; that’s what a psychologist
does. The psychiatrist prescribes medication after relatively short
sessions with a patient. The psychologist provides therapy
sessions. Ideally they work together.</p>
<p>She might have been predisposed to bipolar with pregnancy as a trigger
or might have been suffering from post-partum depression as a one-time
thing.</p>
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<p>These are known side-effects of antipsychotics.</p>
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<p>Antipsychotics are to control psychosis. They may or may not affect
mood.</p>
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<p>In the end, it is about someone caring. The medical system is a tool
but it is often an imperfect tool. The patient or their family often
has to do a fair amount of research on a patient’s condition to guide
or direct care for that patient and there can be some pretty bad
outcomes when someone isn’t watching the treatment process. The Mental
Health system in this country has lots of problems and much of that is
due to the desire to control costs. That doesn’t mean that medications
are not useful. It more so points out the problems in overal treatment.</p>
<p>I have a question about this…What about people who have depression as the result of a traumatic experience? Do drugs necessarily work in that case?</p>
<p>The research that I’ve done is more geared to dealing with psychosis and it’s usually in research done on schizophrenia but depression and bipolar disorder can result in psychosis too. AFAIK, psychosis is caused by excessive neurotransmitter chemicals and antipsychotics seek to decrease neurotransmitter activity to get rid of the psychosis.</p>
<p>Situational depression is very common – such as hormonal shifts, divorce, a death, etc. Antidepressants can be very effective in stabilizing moods so that the person can refocus. Usually, this kind of depression is very recoverable with talk therapy.</p>
<p>I am a student and I have been affected by student suicide. I am currently a senior at a small private school in MD. We only have about 300 students which means that everyone knows everyone. We are a big family. </p>
<p>In the winter of my junior year, my friend committed suicide. He was in my grade and I knew him for about 3 years. He was the kindest kid in the whole entire world. His older brother was a freshman in college, his brother was a senior at school, his sister was a freshman, and had two younger siblings. He played varsity lacrosse and football and was one of the so-called “popular” kids. It was Sunday morning and I went to check my e-mail to see if my friend had sent me a review sheet for mid-terms since it was on Monday. I first saw the e-mail that said we wouldn’t have school the next day and there would be a memorial mass. I didn’t really know what was going on at this point. I then got the e-mail from my principal that one of my friend’s had committed suicide. I and everyone in my school was devastated. For the week after his death, everyone wandered around like ghosts as we wondered why he did it. He hanged himself in his closet and his older brother found him since they were supposed to be having lacrosse pictures. He did write a not but it was said to make no sense. </p>
<p>Before Thanksgiving, the senior class decided to raise money to put a memorial tree in the senior garden. We went out after homeroom and stood in a circle with the teacher’s around us. We stood there and stared at the tree. Emotions were still as bold as they were in January. I have never felt connected to my school community before and that moment was powerful. We stared at that tree and we wanted out friend to come out of it and say that everything is okay. </p>
<p>Student suicide is real. My senior class is an example of people who have been affected by it.</p>
<p>Friends in Palo Alto, CA have told me that a local high school has had 4 suicides, all by jumping in front of a train. Chilling to me. The problem with teen suicides is that they are “contagious” as others here have noted. It shows how impressionable these kids are at this age, and how the group mentality works. When suicide becomes a possibility in their minds, young people will be more likely to take that route. It has been shown in studies that having a close friend, classmate, someone you know committing suicide does increase an individual’s chances for attempting suicide. Particularly young adults.</p>
<p>I don’t know if the numbers have gone up that much from our days either, because we did not publicize suicide the same way. I know of three suicides that were not released in the news. This still happens today, but not as often. One of my kids’ classmates died under very suspicious circumstances, but the family blocked the investigation and the news has not carried any information since the funeral though it did report then that the police were going to be continuing to investigate. I have a friend who knew of several suicides, including family members, where the cause of death was hushed up and she found out many years later as an adult that the “heart failure” and “accidents” had self help involved.</p>
<p>Compass, it is not the situation of a community “glorifying” suicide so much as the delicate balance on how much attention the suicide should get in terms of discussion, news, written eulogies, etc. For some young people who are thinking that their life is just hopeless, this looks like a way to gain some face. We know a young man who killed himself in a period of time when everything he touched seemed to go wrong. Upon his death, he got more positive attention than he did in the last several years. This was followed by a number of suicide attempts. This is truly a tough situation to manage, and I certainly have no idea what the best way to handle a young person’s suicide in terms of counseling, news, life memorial, attention.</p>