Dainin and Adam West

[SFJane]

I believe you two are Taobums' resident pro-meds bums. I would really love your comments on my review of 'Anatomy of an Epidemic' by Robert Whitaker.

 

Tell me how brain rewiring is good for cultivation or apprehension of qualities of stillness?

[Dainin]

Hello SF Jane,

 

Thanks for sharing your informative (and lengthy!) review. It sounds like it would be a worthwhile and enlightening read. I would not describe myself as pro-med, and in fact I'm against many or all of the states of affairs that you decribe in your review, and not only in psychiatry, but in biomedicine as a whole. I did work for a while in a private psych hospital back in the late 1980s-early 90s. Sometimes patients did seem to be helped, at least in the short term, especially those with "bipolar disorder." Were they cured, or were their symptoms supressed? This is the same question we can ask about biomedicine in general.

 

Would the dangers of the medications outweigh the dangers of certain behaviors exhibited by those in crisis? I'm not sure, and not qualified to say. Sometimes it seemed to. However, I did see many of the same patients return over and over again, which led me to question the effectiveness of what was being done there. This, plus business practices which I considered to be unethical (and were exposed on 60 Minutes), led me to change professions, and get out of the mental health field entirely. I'm glad that you were able to work your way out of the system. Thanks again.

[SFJane]

Hello Dainin,

 

Thanks for taking the time to read the post and for coming in to clarify your position. I think I got the impression from some of your posts in the past that you were a psych nurse once and that you also had experience on antidepressants. I may be wrong on that point. Either that or you were recommending another Bum try meds. The brother or friend of a self-taught Chia retention guy that was having psychosis, depression and other weirdness.

 

Some people, a lot of people really, report some benefit from psych med use. There is no doubt these things can and do work for some people. But exactly how they are working is of great interest.

 

Does an SSRI work as a placebo talisman? Is handing a person an antidepressant the modern-day equivalent to giving someone a bitter herb to rub three times over their third-eye and then eat before bed to receive a healing balance in a few weeks time? Because the studies show that SSRIs work for people for awhile, and then stop. What happened to the voodoo in the pill? Your brain adjusted to work around it and you are left back where you started, looking for another med.

 

We are told they are correcting an imbalance when the evidence points to the opposite; they cause an imbalance. Is that artificially created imbalance worth the risk-reward ratio in ameliorating symptoms?

 

What is the point of handing them out to people with transient depression? Telling them to tough out the side effects for a few weeks so the med has a chance to 'work'? Which we now know means 'scramble' a very carefully modulated system in the brain developed by natural evolution. A lot of depression incidents can clear up by themselves in less time than it takes an SSRI to 'kick in'.

 

The point apparently is, some people just reach a place where they say, "Help me! Make it stop!" when it comes to mental or emotional suffering and it's so easy and obvious even, to hand them a pill, a quick fix. But a quick fix shortcut often becomes the longest cut, as a person enters deeper and deeper into a world of drug induced damage. Had they stuck with the depression and worked with it, and in it, and through it, they might have been over it by now. And without a serotonin damaged brain that now prevents a woman from achieving her orgasm threshold or makes it so a guy needs a forklift to get his Johnson up.

 

All for what? A fake happiness? An illusion? A chemical induced Maya that obscures the true nature of self? What does Chuang Tze have to say about real happiness? I think Old Chuang had a better understanding of the human condition than Freud, Maslow and Kiekergaard put together.

 

Anyhoo, I respect your criticism of biomedicine as a whole as well. 'Anatomy of an Epidemic' repeats itself in every aspect of our lives. Statins created to prevent heart disease that don't really. Weight-loss pills that hurt women's hearts. Erectile dysfunction meds that cause men to have sudden unpredictable drops in blood pressure that can cause a full-grown proud, tough man to tip over like a fainting goat. First comes the pill. Then comes the epidemic. Then comes malfunction and death. Over and over again.

 

Thanks again for reading and replying. I hope the All-Seeing Unblinking Eye of Adam West catches this thread and weighs in, as you have. All the best.

Edited August 15, 2010 by SFJane