sounds like a fairly biased course. "electro-shock therapy" (aka ECT) is actually an extremely effective treatment for treatment resistant/difficult to treat depression. it has been given a bad name in the media but is actually a great form of treatment. as for medications, why the stigma against them. would your opinion be the same if it was medication for diabetes or hypertension? mental illness is a medical illness just like those others. some can be treated with non-pharmacological measures, some require prescription medications.
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Originally Posted by Flames Draft Watcher
I'd be extremely wary about prescription drugs. Big pharmaceutical has a lot of money to push drugs through the FDA and market these drugs to doctors. The system is somewhat corrupt. Lots of these drugs alleviate certain symptoms while at the same time producing very harmful effects. Atypical anti-psychotics sound particularly scary
Just did a course on Madness and Sanity in society and the history of psychiatry is not pretty at all. Lots of treatments were approved because they made patients more manageable, not because they helped the patients. The names of mental illnesses have changed many times over in the past few hundred years and their supposed "causes" have changed many times as well. Basically we still don't the root causes of many mental illnesses nor how to "cure" them without messing up the brain in other ways.
Drugs would be a last resort IMO. I'd explore counselling and try and exhaust that route first. Some of these prescription drugs have very, very nasty "side-effects" and can be dangerous to go off of after you've been on them for a while.
Trusting psychiatrists blindly less than one hundred years could have resulted in a lobotomy, or sexual sterilization. Electo-shock therapy still goes on today. We really haven't come as far in understanding mental illness as most would think, its a lot of guesswork, and a lot of direct experimentation on people through the use of drug cocktails. Some people are definitely helped by drugs. Some people are made permanently worse.
I'd just be very careful about what you put in your body. Be wary of newer drugs that don't have as many studies done of them. Do your own research. Try counselling first. Thats my advice.
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