1y ago

What Helped—and What Didn’t Help—My Recovery

www.madinamerica.com /2024/01/what-helped-my-recovery/

I found this article interesting.

The website is known for its critical view of psychiatry, which I think is good. Any field with as much power as psychiatry (being allowed to lock people up and drug them) should be approached from a critical perspective.

Psychiatrists would argue that their methods are well-intentioned, but are their methods helpful? The author of the article thinks some of the methods are not helpful.

2 comments

Mongers gonna monger. Criticism should be backed by reality and data, not anecdotes and a writer's desire for an audience. If an intervention is not working for you or not working as well as you'd like, that means it's time to talk with your doctor.
- The article was written by a person who says "I have spent several years of my life in various psychiatric institutions". So it is a person with experience of this system, and what helped them. I don't see at all how they can be seen as fear mongering. They seem to be giving their honest account of their experiences as a patient in the mental health system.
  As for reality and data, there is a lot of reality and data showing that psych drugs are not perfect. There is evidence that antipsychotics cause movement disorders (restlessness, involuntary movements), metabolic effects (changing blood sugar levels), effects on heart function, weight gain, etc. And there is evidence of negative effects from antidepressants too, like sexual dysfunction, and a small increase in the risk of birth defects, just as an example:
  There is evidence that taking SSRIs early in pregnancy slightly increases the risk of your baby developing heart defects, spina bifida or cleft lip.
  I support patient choice. If a person wants to take psych meds, okay. But I think they should be informed by reputable authorities (CDC in the US, national health organisations in other countries, including regulatory bodies of psychiatry) about the positives and negatives of these drugs. That is the only way to make an informed choice.
  Ultimately I hope for non-drug approaches to mental issues. Approaches that recognise the real issues in people's lives that cause them distress, rather than approaches that label the patient as "ill" and dismiss them with a powerful and sometimes unpleasant drug.