Sorry to hear about your friend. I swear psychiatrists are exempt from observing the Hippocratic oath.
"I need help. My life is falling apart. I'm struggling with work and school. I might have a learning disability."
"You sound depressed. Here's a prescription for some obscure variant of an SSRI not covered by your insurance."
"These meds you put me on make me feel sick."
"Let's increase your dose."
"I want to hurt other people. I want to die."
"It takes 4-6 weeks for it to take full effect."
"This just isn't working."
"Let's add another variable to the equation. Here's a second prescription. Take both and see what happens."
The experiment must continue. It always ends the same way.
I know psychiatry helps some people (especially where sedatives are involved), but for the rest of us who slip through the cracks it's just the new Nazi science.
I can only imagine the frustration you are describing, but I still wonder if the blame is really on the doctors or the branch of medicine. Is there a better alternative?
The first thing you need to ask is are we, collectively, seeing an improvement or a deterioration of aggregate mental health? And how does this compare and contrast against nations where pharmacological treatment of illness is less and, if such a thing exists, more common? In other words is what we are doing better than nothing? The answer to this question is not always yes, because it's entirely possible that in the process of trying to do something you end up going backwards.
This also cannot be answered with isolated consideration such as the effectiveness of drug 'x' since there are externalities involved. What happens to these individuals in the longrun? The treatment of ADHD with amphetamines is a great one for this question. For those who showed no response to the treatment, are their outcomes better or worse than if they had never pursued treatment? What is the false positive rate and what is the affect of medication on these individuals?
The answer to this question should be obvious, but I'm not so sure it is anymore.
I don't disagree with your basic point, but that's a huge correlation bias. Why would a country with little mental illness introduce these medications?
It's not countries introducing drugs, but companies. And companies are driven primarily by a profit motive. This is not a bad thing in and of itself since it creates a private incentive for the research and development of drugs. However, when the money starts to become prioritized more heavily than the product being made, it creates a severe conflict of interest. The recent issue with opioids being an obvious example of this. Quoting this [1] great article from the Houston Chronicle:
----
"The trigger of the opioid crisis was a misrepresentation of a 1980 letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reporting on 11,000 hospitalized patients receiving opioids. It concluded that “despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals… addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.” This became a landmark study, cited more than 600 times, particularly after Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin (extended-release oxycodone) in 1995.
Large opioids manufacturers began funding nonprofit groups such as the American Pain Society; and pain experts advocated for pain to become an important “fifth vital sign” to be queried in every doctor’s visit when checking blood pressure, heart rate, respiration and temperature.
Caught in the trend, the Federation of American Medical Boards encouraged punishing physicians for under-treating pain. This policy was drafted by individuals with ties to opioids manufacturers. Some were members of industry speakers’ bureaus, and later became company executives.
Purdue funded more than 20,000 educational programs between 1996 and 2002 to influence physician prescription habits nationwide, and developed a misleading advertising campaign that claimed that the risk of addiction from prescription opioids was “much less than 1%.” OxyContin sales grew from $48 million in 1996, to over $1.5 billion in 2002. With increased sales came increased abuse and addiction. By 2004, OxyContin was the leading drug of abuse in the United States.
In 2007, Purdue (and three executives) pleaded guilty to misrepresenting the risks of OxyContin addiction and paid $634 million in penalties, a fraction of the $35 billion in sales in two decades."
----
It's pretty sick stuff, but extremely clear evidence that these comes have come to see profit as the sole point of their existence. And these companies have extensive reach. And opioids are obviously not the only example here. This is a typical pattern, even if a rather extreme case. For instance the nonprofit industry tool used to push medicating and diagnosing of ADD is CHADD - Children and Adults with ADD.
I think the branch itself is too immature to have as much clout as it does, but we'd make a lot of progress if they'd start listening to their patients more than they listen to their drug reps.
I don't know what they're teaching at psych school but it should include a single class on "researching all the shit your ADHD and depression patients, who will be your most common patients, have to look up on their own."
So, knowledge of all the treatments to depression, from ssris (and what they do to you) through diet and exercise, meditation, mindfulness, etc. Basically Try Harder.
It's a difficult one because sometimes it _does_ help people. 50mg of sertraline does nothing (other than making me sleep less, thus aggravating the base symptoms), 200mg made me feel sick for a week, but after that I'm noticeably better (OCD).
The thing is, when there are so many people who insist it isn't working, or even makes things worse, (while nobody has much of idea why the drugs should work in the first place, and there seems to be a growing movement to try treating people with currently illicit drugs instead), maybe the drugs are actually not working and the "experts" actually have no idea what they are doing.
"I need help. My life is falling apart. I'm struggling with work and school. I might have a learning disability."
"You sound depressed. Here's a prescription for some obscure variant of an SSRI not covered by your insurance."
"These meds you put me on make me feel sick."
"Let's increase your dose."
"I want to hurt other people. I want to die."
"It takes 4-6 weeks for it to take full effect."
"This just isn't working."
"Let's add another variable to the equation. Here's a second prescription. Take both and see what happens."
The experiment must continue. It always ends the same way.
I know psychiatry helps some people (especially where sedatives are involved), but for the rest of us who slip through the cracks it's just the new Nazi science.