Let’s face the facts: some people probably do get better after undergoing psychiatric treatment. However, some people also get better from a placebo or on their own. In such complex emotional problems, a small trigger can occasionally lead to a huge mental shift, provided that a person was nearly ready to make that shift. With placebo treatment, this ‘positiveness’ is usually more temporary, but is also beneficial.
But even so, biopsychiatry’s ‘treatment’ figures fail to properly state the failures of the profession. What’s an easy way to this? Blame the person as a biological entity for being ‘treatment resistant’ rather than relating to them and trying to ascertain what made them feel that way. This easily absolves psychiatry of admitting ‘treatment failure’ and rather blames the patient. Thus, instead of laying off, they now have the go ahead to force more drugs and possibly electroshock. It’s brilliant, but sickening. Here, psychiatry has created a logical loop which always ends up with them winning out. By refusing to acknowledge the dismal conditions of ‘hospitals’ and the lobotomizing effects of drugs, the field has come to be viewed as ‘ironclad’ by many misguided individuals.
Also, biopsychiatry neglects the fact that ‘treatment’ or ‘improvement’ is highly subjective, and that this judgment is probably best made by the person being ‘treated’. Of course, placebo can play a role, and in a drugged up fog, people may think they’re doing better because they’ve been blunted and can’t feel anything, but often psychiatrists will judge someone as ‘better’ simply because they’re less expressive and easier to control. This hardly constitutes an improvement at the root of the problems at hand, and may actually worsen them (especially if these problems are with authority).
If one references to David Rosenhan’s sham patient experiment, ‘normal’ individuals found that the only way to escape hospitalization was to pretend that they were insane and had gotten better. This, of course, could account for even more of the ‘improvement’ since ‘treated’ individuals are largely not heard out.Human beings are complex.
There’s no doubt about that amongst people with common sense. But biological psychiatry tends to be devoid of it. I’m not going to deny that this may be difficult for some to understand, because it not only represents a loss of trust that has been placed in the system of many but a deeper flaw in our population itself. But in order to eliminate the stigma of mental illness we need to understand that emotional help is NOT an objective phenomenon, is NOT necessarily dependent on university work, and cannot simply be centered around convenience or simplification.
by sociopathicregret
I like this. I think it’s important to add in order to reduce stigma/prejudice that people do recover and do get better and get their lives back, with and without treatment, a much higher percentage than we are told do. Not to say that people who haven’t recovered deserve prejudice and stigma at all, but the idea that people with mental illness never recover does I think add to the prejudice against us. Of course when folks do recover, they are often told either that they are just in remission or that they were never sick in the first place….
Yeah, I agree. Something like 1/3 of people with schizophrenia eventually recover, I believe, and it is even higher in third world countries surprisingly. My story is one of recovery; I had severe depression for four years and have been depression free for 20 months.