It has been shown that after 10 years of illness a psychotic not taking medications is four times more likely to be symptom free than one that is taking medications. Read that again. You would expect the complete opposite. In spite of the hype, the quality of life in patients using the older medications are better than the new. So we are paying more, endangering more and getting less. Not very impressive is it? The mantra of today's Psychiatric Services are something like this:
- A patient gets ill.
- He goes to the emergency room where he is admitted or referred to community service organizations.
- On admission he is diagnosed, medicated and sent home to continue care in the community.
- He continues his therapy in the community.
- He is only re-referred if the community cannot cope.
- There are no hard and fast rules or consistency as to who is received and why. A large proportion of first time hospitalized patients will never re-appear in the Mental-Health system. Why were they hospitalized in the first place?
- Referrals to community care from the ER are done badly, if at all.
- The vast majority of hospitalized patients remain unknown to community care after discharge.
- A large proportion of the patients are no longer taking medications in a meaningful way three months after discharge from hospital.
- Most of the patients seen in community care were not hospitalized.
Grim reading indeed.
Over 30% of the adult population will visit their Family Doctor in any year. 30% of them, 10% of the population, are considered to have emotional problems.
For some reason these emotional disturbances are treated as if they are mild forms of mental illness. They are not. Very often we are seeing stress caused by poor coping styles or skills. They are treated as if they have, or about to have depression, anxiety, or panic. The vast majority are offered medication. They should be offered alternative drug-free modalities such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Psychotherapy.
Article comments
1 - Matthew Holford
Dear Dr Benjamin,
I found this piece quite interesting. I'm currently engaged in a toe-to-toe exchange with the MHRA in the UK over its assessment procedure (it appears to amount to rubber-stamping the opinion of the company applying for a marketing authorization). I'm posting the correspondence on the Uncommon Knowledge depression forum (UKDF), in the hope that the MHRA's evasive replies will be more influential than anything that I could say.
Which brings me to the point, I suppose. There are those members of UKDF who have appear to have serious issues, but for the most part, people just want to have somebody to talk to about their "stuff". People don't appear to "want" or "need" drugs - they appear to need solutions, and just learning how other people have dealt with similar issues to their own is often valuable. The more serious cases are those who are at the point where they absolutely refuse to try anything new, and won't even discuss their issues in depth, even though they've taken the effort to visit a support forum.
Anyway, I'm not sure if that adds anything to your experience, but, as you suggest, at one point, above, life skills are what most people are lacking. No drug provides those.
Best regards
Matthew Holford
2 - The Irreverent Buddhist
Most people involved in the Mental Health System did not learn proper skills in life because they were sexually abused or physically abused as children.
The lies and manipulations, and living in lies, that results, as well as the lack of felt ownership of their bodies means these people do noyt feel - and are not - in cotrol of their lives.
There is no strict divide between "orgnanic illness" and psychological problems rooted in childhood. There is as great or greater a correlation between surviving an abusive childhood and getting a diagnosis of Schoizophrenia or Psychosis as an adult.
On average survivors or Childhood Sexual Abuse spend years in the system before getting appropriate diagnosis if at all. Most never do.
Psychiatry is forced into a mad world by the division of mind and body medicine into such false camps. We are seeing this with the increasing realisation that the strict barriers erected between mind and matter by Descartes do not exist and the thinking that has lead to in medicine and elsewhere is faulted.