It's easy for doctors to issue a script for pills to control symptoms rather than treat the cause and big pharma is greedy so the more pills they make to cover symptoms the more doctors will prescribe. The answer is too often "follow the money".
Well then you take the pill. But this isn't the circumstance I was thinking about. Remember our opioid epidemic? That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. I've been told literally hundreds of stories by people who go to their doctor who spends 5-10 minutes with them, doesn't touch them, asks a couple questions and prescribes pain pills or antidepressants. Medical clinics are production environments -- the more people you see, the more tests you run, the more surgeries you do -- regardless of the necessity -- the more money you make. My DH is inundated with candidates for 2 nurse practitioner positions in his office and all of them are desperate to leave their production-oriented environments and hoping for a job in slower more care-giving environment. My DH can see double the number of patients he chooses to see each day but he'd rather be a good doctor rather than a rich one at the expense of giving good care.
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Not so large, but other pockets like that were pretty much everywhere we went. It was certainly an expression of something...cultural. The new Mecca for a group of Americans? I'm just not able to slap an easy label on it.
Ksinger, not wanting to argue either...I went to Vancouver, B.C., after a hiatus of several years. Same picture as in Denver.[QUOTE
Not wanting to argue, really, but no. Quite simply, we do not know that. There are entire worlds of cultural assumptions under the concept of mental illness, which changes as the culture changes. There is also the fact that people have been altering their consciousness for millennia, for many reasons - fun, pain relief, as part of their religion. It clearly (to me anyway) falls into the category of "normal" human behavior. I could argue that me having 2 drinks in quick succession at the end of a rough week, is "self-medicating" (stress reduction/pain deadening). Does that make me mentally ill? If not, at what point would drinking become a sign of mental illness? You see the problem I'm sure.
Back down from philosophical airy-fairy land, I will say that I just got back from a trip to Denver. Wow. I have been going there since I was a kid - lots of family there. And wow, has it changed, just since I was there last (pre-pot). In the downtown area we saw one 2-block stretch that had homeless 3 to 4 deep on the sidewalk - all the way down the street.
And why not? There is a database registering what drugs people use. All our cars are in a database. All our assets are known to IRS. Our fingerprints and irises are scanned. Our DNAs are known. Why can't we register all guns? Top secret?
I don't think they are violent, after all, I made it here, totally on my own, and in fact, i find Americans friendly. But it is a huge country, for a while sparsely populated, with many rural areas. It is not Germany, where one city down the Rhein follows another one. (But if you drive to the North, village after village, you encounter a lot of paranoia, too).
is also the part of my brain that tries to kill me.
Random thoughts about mental illness in our society in no particular order:
As a person who has been through the mental health system in all of the wrong ways, I definitely think we have it all wrong. I've sat in the ICU of one of our local mental hospitals many times and watched as people shuffled in circles because their bodies hurt from medication side effects if they sat still. They were blank faced because their medication doses were so high. They were zombies. But...the doctors were keeping them alive? Saving them from themselves? Who knows? I didn't know any of these people. They could have been horribly homicidal? Probably not, they would have been tied to a bed, like many.
Me...I'm dumbed down on many meds myself. I'm not even half of "myself." My musical talents are gone, my concentration is shot, intelligence isn't there. But what's the option? You see, it seems that the part of my brain that possesses all of my "gifts"
Or maybe, the brain science is so primitive that they are unable to treat the part of my brain that tries to kill me without dumbing down the rest of "me." Maybe they are unable to treat the part that makes those poor people in the ICU so acute, without making them zombies.
I think a lot of this boils down to stigma. (Please bear with me.) Being a loved one or a friend of someone with mental illness sucks....sometimes. Being a coworker of that "unstable bipolar" individual can make people angry which leads to them talking a lot of shit. What I am trying to say is dealing with mental illness is painful and tough. THEN, you have the untreated individuals who actually do unspeakable harm. This adds to society's desire to stigmatize the mentally ill. When there is great stigma, I think maybe, there is less desire to donate, research, and find new treatments for these illnesses.
Honestly, what I see going on with the meds is they are just combining two old meds into one new pill, getting a new patent and collecting the big bucks. I have seen very few new drugs over the last ten years.
We are in the dark ages with brain science and mental illness.
On a near daily basis, I think..In fifty years, we will see how we had it all wrong.
-Shaman treat people like me very differently. Many other societies have treated me very differently. I wonder how the mentally ill felt about themselves in these societies. I wonder if they suffered as much.
-I don't feel my issues are due to exposure to toxins. There is a long line of mental illness in my family. But I see that point in young children and possibly autism, which is neurological and not MI.
-I think people would benefit so much more from therapy, good therapy. But we have so much going on in our lives and there are a lot of crappy therapists out there. I wish there was just a straight model that worked that people could go through to sort of cleanse out the feeling of depression.
-I do wonder if everyone felt depression just as much in the past but chose to drink instead of seek help.
-Finally, I am very disturbed with what the media is doing with the shooter in Vegas. He was a loner and he had an Rx for Valium. To those of us who take multiple psych meds, Valium is a very mild medication. I hope that for most of society, they can keep their perspective and see that although this guy was most likely very ill...being a loner on Valium wasn't the stigmatizing criteria, shooting 600 people was.
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