🚀 go-pugleaf

I want to reply to Stacey's response.
You said:
However, I CAN'T agree with Jason on the point that prescribing
medication and doing therapy defeats the purpose.  I feel that we are
learning how much physiology plays a role in mental illness.
Depresssion,Schizophrenia, and Bipolar Disorder for instance.
True, physiology is essential for all mental processes. Does this mean
that we treat things through this mode? How about giving
African-American children "at risk" some anxiotropics, as the former
head of NIMH, Fred Goodwin, wanted to, since we all know that violence
is a limbically-mediated and functional defect in the brain.
Does wanting to build muscle mass make taking steroids okay with you? I
have no problem with people taking meds. But what values do you have?

More importantly, I must take issue with your next comment.
You said:
I don't feel that therapy alone is going to have any effect on a
severely depressed person-I do feel that meds are important.

This simply is not supported by the evidence. In fact, statistically
speaking, it is the more acutely and mildly depressed patients who make
better "responders" to these drugs than do chronic, severely distressed
people. If you actually read the literature, it is filled with people
who recover from schizophrenia. Without Drugs. The psychiatric survivor
movement is filled with these folks who feel like they were not able to
start getting better until they went off of them. Drugs manage. Therapy
cures. Neither are very good at doing either much of the time, though.
The fact that drug effects lead people to change their behaviors and
thus the environmental contingencies that might keep them stuck, is nice
when it works, but it works quite capriciously and can have some pretty
wierd side effects on one's social life (as many patients, spouses, and
exspouses of patients on SSRI's will tell you). The hope of therapy is
that it makes the person responsible for being in the world in such a
way as to "manufacture" his or her own "drugs" _contingent_ on the
reality of the way he or she actually is in the world of human
beings--not induced by chemicals. Check the literature. Chronicity and
severity are not effective arguments for medication, popular press
reports to the contrary.
Peace, granola, and flowers,
Jason