This is an article I discovered on Digg.com which I found to be an excellent piece on mental illness. It was described by the author as: “My discussion on mental illness and the challenges we have as both a society and as someone afflicted with mental illness in seeking health.”

read more | digg story

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