I enjoyed Michael F. Shaughnessy's interview with Charles Barber on his book Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation. In the interview Charles Barber says:
"I make it clear in every interview I do that the drugs can be very effective – life-saving – for legitimate psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression.What's happened is that we've generalized the use of the drugs every outward to less and less severe conditions, and to everyday life problems.
As you move into lesser or non-mental illnesses, the cost-benefit ratio of the drugs becomes more dubious, and we overlook some common-sense approaches to everyday problems and milder depression that can be very effective --changes in diet, exercise, cognitive-behavioral and other therapies.
I argue that certainly for everyday problems of living the drugs are not the answer."
It looks like a book worth reading. I have read too much instances of children being giving heavy duty drugs for normal situations.
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Technorati tags: psychiatric, drugs, mental illnesses
2 comments:
I also know of someone (an adult) given Prozac when having normal grieving after his father passed away. Do the psychiatrists not respect or understand normal grieving?
THe person took themselves off it as it was not working. They are still working through their grief and they are not clinically depressed, the person is just normal and working through the grieving.
I think they need to be careful and understand that something like a death gives sadness but that is normal.
Reminds me too of the Pink Floyd song "Comfortably Numb". Are some doctors using drugs to numb people off from feeling emotions that they SHOULD be feeling??
The hippies of the 60s were condemed, rightly so, for the heavy use of mind altering drugs.
Today too many doctors are giving mind altering drugs for perfectly appropriate emotions, like grief.
It is scary.
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