6
"The status quo, preoccupied with biomedical interventions... is no longer defensible"
(documents-dds-ny.un.org)
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
6 points (80.0% liked)
Mental Health
4208 readers
144 users here now
Welcome!
This is a safe place to discuss, vent, support, and share information about mental health, illness, and wellness.
Thank you for being here. We appreciate who you are today. Please show respect and empathy when making or replying to posts.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
1-Posts promoting paid products and services of any kind are not allowed here.
2-All posts and comments must be helpful and supportive. Do not put vulnerable people at risk.
3-Do not DM or ask to speak privately to any of our members unless they specifically request it.
If a person from this community disturbs you in a comment, please report the comment. If you receive a DM you did not request, send a screenshot of the DM in a message to a moderator. This is a bannable offense.
4-Suicide, Self-Harm, Death-- Extended discussions are STRONGLY DISCOURAGED here. First, mods and community members are caring people, but not experts in crisis situations. Second, we want to avoid Lemmy becoming like many commercial social media platforms, where comments can snowball into counterproductive talk.
If you or someone you know needs more help than can be found here, please refer to the pinned resources.
If BRIEF mention of these topics is an important part of your post, please flag your post as NSFW and include a (trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, death, etc.)in the title so that other readers who may feel triggered can avoid it. Please also include a trigger warning on all comments mentioning these topics in a post that was not already tagged as such.
Partner Communities
- Therapy
Neurodegenerative Disease Support
Friends and Family of People with Addiction
To partner with our community and be included here, you are free to message the current moderators or comment on our pinned post.
Community Moderation
Some moderators are mental health professionals and some are not. All are carefully selected by the moderation team and will be actively monitoring posts and comments. If you are interested in joining the team, you can send a message to ZenGrammy for more information.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fearmongering about evil big pharma is always in style. "Reductive" (and other forms) is one of those words that tends to get tagged in whenever evidence-based medicine is in the crosshairs. This report tiptoes back from actually pulling the trigger and explicitly supporting the SCAM^1^ stuff but it'd be easy to pull quotes without context and make it look like an endorsement of new-age woo-woo bullshit.
1
Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative MedicineI strongly dislike SCAM stuff, like homeopathy etc. And Scientology (who are anti-psychiatry) is obviously a scam too.
Some people find psychiatric drugs helpful, yes. But I have met psych patients, drugged against their will for months, who were still miserable after months of drugging. I think a psychological approach, such as counselling, is probably better.
I think a lot of psych patients are trying to understand what's going on in their head. If they can reach this understanding, then they no longer need drugs, with all the negative health effects that the drugs cause (such as movement disorders, restlessness, muscle spasms, weight gain, sexual dysfunction, etc).
The if-then in your last paragraph is very weak. Understanding that I'm injured or ill doesn't replace a need for treatment, it just helps me manage my expectations for things like recovery time, lasting effects and follow-up encounters.
Can't just start handing out Pez dispensers full of Prozac and call it a day though, I agree with you on the importance of counseling as part of the process. To borrow an analogy, it's like needing glasses while learning to read. You can squint and stare your way through for a while but it gets much easier with corrective lenses. Some people just need a little extra clarity, others might as well be blind without their glasses. Either way, they still need to go to class or open up a book to make use of their improved vision.
Maybe people with mental difficulties (and I've been through this system myself, for a long time) aren't injured or ill. Instead they had genuine reasons to feel angry or distressed at the time of their "illness".
I'm reminded of what I heard in an interview with a training psychiatrist who took antidepressants himself (within recent years, he contributed to the advice that Britain's Royal College of Psychiatrists gives to patients trying to come off antidepressants):
If some people want to take these drugs then okay. But the evidence shows real negative effects of these drugs. I support patient choice. If we support the right of people to take these drugs, then we should also support the right of people to find other ways to manage their problems.