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Stop demonizing medication.

Started by SparrowtheFallen, June 19, 2020, 08:50:37 AM

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Nibor the Priest

Quote from: Pergamos on July 10, 2020, 06:32:18 PMLess orgasms and creativity.

When my depression was untreated and I was prone to spending days at a time hiding in bed, neither orgasms nor creativity were a part of my life at all.

altered

"I am that worst of all type of criminal...I cannot bring myself to do what you tell me, because you told me."

There's over 100 of us in this meat-suit. You'd think it runs like a ship, but it's more like a hundred and ten angry ghosts having an old-school QuakeWorld tournament, three people desperately trying to make sure the gamers don't go hungry or soil themselves, and the Facilities manager weeping in the corner as the garbage piles high.

Pergamos

Quote from: Doktor Howl on July 10, 2020, 07:46:34 PM
Quote from: Pergamos on July 10, 2020, 06:32:18 PM
Quote from: Faust on June 19, 2020, 09:07:40 AM
You flew into our window, broke the wing and are now sitting in the pool on the roof chirping at a bunch of people who often espouse the legalization of all substances, for medical or recreational use, to stop demonising medication.

I assume you are specifically talking about SSRI's and not grandmothers insulin, they work for some people, they dont for others

Insulin will very definitely kill you if your body already makes it in sufficient quantities.  SSRI's won't unless you combine them with the wrong things.  SSRI's without a perscpription, or as a lazy prescription by a doctor who doesn't really know what's wrong aren't going to do much harm.  Less orgasms and creativity.  Insulin without a prescription will probably kill you.  Insulin from a lazy doctor sounds unlikely, unless that doctor cheated their way through medical school.

Was there a point to this, or was this just pedantry?

That Insulin, which everyone knows is good medicine, is WAY worse for you than SSRI's which are commonly demonized.

altered

AHEM

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I said I want this thread to die, and by god I'll do it myself if I must, in the time-honored PD way: shitting mightily.

A fool made this thread, and a fool is keeping it alive, and I hate it. If you want to pretend that this sort of thread on this forum isn't just preaching to the choir, then you're an imbecile, and if you're venting about other people off forum you need to REALLY SHIT ABOUT IT. Don't just lecture or info dump at me, befoul your fucking seat.

For the TL;DR crowd: If your pants are not full when you post then do not bump this, just let it die an ignominious death.
"I am that worst of all type of criminal...I cannot bring myself to do what you tell me, because you told me."

There's over 100 of us in this meat-suit. You'd think it runs like a ship, but it's more like a hundred and ten angry ghosts having an old-school QuakeWorld tournament, three people desperately trying to make sure the gamers don't go hungry or soil themselves, and the Facilities manager weeping in the corner as the garbage piles high.

picoli

I get what you mean, so many people would have more problems without meds.  :eek:

Doktor Howl

Quote from: picoli on August 01, 2020, 09:51:27 PM
I get what you mean, so many people would have more problems without meds.  :eek:

:wave:
Molon Lube

Fujikoma

I can confidently say that guy isn't me. More on topic, there's a little potential issue with SSRIs, but it's only certain cases that have it. It happened to me. I didn't know I was bipolar, the doctors didn't either, they just knew I was very depressed at the time, so they gave me SSRIs. The problem with that is it can trigger a manic episode. Again plenty of people take SSRIs without any major issues whatsoever, so they're not somehow inherently bad, and in fact for the people they work for they can be a godsend.

But that's not what happened to me, it snowballed into literally the worst manic episode in my life. This is why you should be totally honest with your doctors, so they can get a gauge of your mood and know that something might be, off. It was really scary. That said I would never say "medication bad", but I would tell anyone willing to listen that it's also important you are aware of your mental state and don't just take it for granted, lest you end up playing matador with 75 mph traffic on the interstate like I did.

If one is ever considering not taking their medications it is important to discuss it with their doctor. These folks go to school for a very long time  to know the things they do, and provided there's no scum-tells from them you should actually, you know, trust them, don't pull a dumbass and embarrass yourself and possibly cause accidents like I did.

Fomalhaut

#52
Fuck it, deleted my dumb posts.

It really doesn't matter to me. This is just a topic that I'm kind of invested in.

Doctors went to school for a long time. Mistakes still happen. Psychiatry is a fairly young and still imperfect science. Some doctors are wonderful people who ultimately just want to help, other doctors are in it mostly for the money, some have become jaded over the years and are burnt out, some may have done worse in school than others but just well enough to pass. Doctors are fallible humans. It's really the luck of the draw with which sort of doctor you'll find, and Godspeed trying to figure it out during the 10 minute conversations you'll have with them. Better off just hoping for the best. In the end, you're paying to be a Psychiatric guinea pig, and denying that is just as dumb as denying that SSRIs and Antipsychotics can be helpful. In most cases it turns out well as long as you have a good doctor, and yields good results.  In America, at least, it's also unfortunately very expensive. Some people are able to find other methods of healing, and as long as their methods of doing so aren't harming themselves or others, why should anyone give a shit.  I don't see how that takes away from the fact that many people are helped by psychiatric treatment.

Mental health treatment has pretty much always, historically, been a pretty abusive system, so the distrust we see from those who DO demonize psychiatry may be misguided, but isn't entirely unfounded. It's only fairly recently with the advent of these medications that it has even begun to be seen as "helpful" to the patient rather than a way to get those people out of society's hair or study them (which allowed us to get this far, so thank the poor tormented souls who went through lobotomies, abusive archaic therapeutic experimentation, the old shock treatments, etc for their sacrifice). This is progress, at least.

"Medication Bad" and "Mental Health System perfect" are both forms of Black and White thinking, which is disordered.

Fujikoma

#53
Well yeah, it's imperfect, and what came before was a serious humanitarian tragedy. To try to deny that or sweep it under the rug is, in my opinion, the worst kind of willful-ignorance. Sometimes, it's easy for folks to forget that our policies were a source of inspiration for the Nazis. Eugenics is a constant stain on our history that persists in society like a dank, bloody fart. But now things are a lot better, and at this point refusing to seek help for mental illness is highly dangerous and irresponsible. It's no longer like the days of my grandparents where people were sterilized to maintain some mistaken notion of genetic superiority.

EDITED TO ADD: Also the issue of funding may be a challenge. For a while I couldn't get treatment, but if you're in the United States, you could try calling the United Way at 211 to ask about social services, there may be some available for you that you didn't previously know about, it worked for me when I was homeless, they got me set up with the services I needed to at least maintain some semblance of stability. But unlike say, a suicide hotline, you likely won't get the police called on you, get wrestled to the ground, potentially shot, just inquire about available services because it's much more fraught with peril in the event of an emergency.

Fujikoma

#54
Well, I admit that's a bit of a blind spot for me, as I haven't spent much time inside a mental health hospital. This is because I barely got my shit together before such time as I might be hospitalized. I've heard horror stories from people who've been inside them, and while vague, it's not pretty. I'm honestly lucky I never had that experience. Most of my experience is what you get if you get help before society resorts to such measures. I appreciate you giving your perspective and hope mine doesn't upset you.

EDIT: Now I look like I'm talking to myself because someone keeps deleting their posts.

Fomalhaut

#55
Quote from: Fujikoma on October 10, 2020, 11:37:25 PM
Well, I admit that's a bit of a blind spot for me, as I haven't spent much time inside a mental health hospital. This is because I barely got my shit together before such time as I might be hospitalized. I've heard horror stories from people who've been inside them, and while vague, it's not pretty. I'm honestly lucky I never had that experience. Most of my experience is what you get if you get help before society resorts to such measures. I appreciate you giving your perspective and hope mine doesn't upset you.

EDIT: Now I look like I'm talking to myself because someone keeps deleting their posts.

I'm sorry for deleting. I thought my post may have been considered beside the point  or as oversharing personal stuff. Basically thought it would be ignored, so I didn't realize I'd look like a jerk and make you look like you're talking to yourself. That experience was very painful and I'm still working through a lot of the trauma surrounding it, so you didn't upset me. The memories upset me. I don't ultimately blame the mental health system itself for it, what I went through and witnessed was like the infected asshole of mental treatment that's usually covered up by the veneer of breakthrough treatments and good Therapy (the positive progress) and experienced by people who are are too far gone to defend themselves. But my heart breaks for the people trapped in those situations and hospitals right now with severe, treatment resistant issues, who did nothing wrong but have a severely messed up and confused brain, who nobody who cares about and with nobody to advocate for them.

What happened to me and the weeks of abuse I endured and witnessed was due to a mistake in medication. I was  prescribed an SSRI, antipsychotic, and some kind of barbiturate. The staff at the hospital took the reaction I had to the medication-concoction  as being symptoms of one of those severe, treatment resistant issues, and the doctor assigned to me went on vacation for weeks the day after prescribing them so it couldn't be changed. Nurses can't go against doctors orders, so they kept giving me these meds that were making me severely psychotic (so psychotic I didn't know who I was or where I was and was speaking gibberish), and it snowballed until I ended up in a place like that. The only thing that got me out was the fact that I had a boyfriend at the time who kept coming to visit and advocating for me and trying to get them to understand that I had never behaved like that before, it must've been the new meds. These other folks aren't so lucky as their issues aren't negative reactions, but rather disorders that don't get resolved by their medications. Or, potentially, some rare horror stories like mine but without a single fucking person in the world who cares enough or knows them well enough to advocate for them.

I'm sorry that you've been through what you have, and glad that you've found access to good treatment. Like  I said in the post that was deleted, I agree with everything you wrote. The old abuse is just still present in some severe cases and in some low income and/or neglectful hospitals with untrained staff and doctors who unfortunately don't care enough. Some state hospitals are likely better than others. One reason abuse is still able to occur is the fact that the science has not yet caught up to the point where we actually know how to help those people beyond institutionalization, and too few people ever come out of it cognizant enough to talk about it. And not enough people care, due to the stigma that these people must be violent or done something terrible (or have the potential to) even though most of them aren't. Some people in state hospitals were sent there by the court system, other people have just been dumped there because there was no where else to put them. They're just the worthless ones, the ones who can't speak, or when they do speak its garbled and lost in sanity-translation. They can't work, can't live on their own or functionally in group homes, there's nowhere for them. If they don't die in the street, they potentially end up in one of those abusive hospitals and never get out. Most people who need or seek treatment likely (and thankfully) won't ever experience it.

It's not in every place anymore thankfully but still there. And it's not all staff members who take part in the abuse. I have one friend who actually quit her job at at one of the local state mental hospitals despite good pay because she couldn't sit back and watch the way other staff treated patients, but was powerless in the system hierarchy to do anything about it.

Fomalhaut

#56
Holy shit.
Okie dokie.
Gonna take MY meds now and go to sleep.
Typing all this brought a rollercoaster of horrific memories, and jarring feelings from repressed ones. And I only went through it a short amount of time. Again, sorry for deleting posts. This is the first time I've ever even more-or-less publicly shared any of this. Mostly I've just been silenced in my regular life. Nobody wants to hear about it. It kills the vibe. It leads people to think less of me for having went through it. I'm afraid sharing will lead people to think they shouldn't get treatment, or shouldn't trust their doctor, so I keep my mouth shut. I'm glad I have found good doctors at this point and eternally grateful and privileged to be in a much better place in life now. I'm safe. They're not. Somebody has to speak for them, even if just on a Discordian forum for now in my case, I guess.

But it's bad shit. Rape, other forms of sexual abuse, humiliation, verbal abuse, negligence, beatings, the occasional inhumane use of antipsychotic injections and restraints and good ole reliable (forced shock treatments. Yeah, they're better now than they were back in the day. No, they still shouldn't be used often or as a punishment. Even with advancements,  they're risky and cause potential further brain damage), forced sterilization surgeries (rare now, but they happen. Not all states have completely repealed the Eugenics laws from the past, so they've been able to continue the practice with no real legal repercussion in those rare cases). all while getting spat on and laughed at. None of its unheard of in those places and in the worst places most of it's still commonplace. Goddamn it all, it's gross and sad.

Fujikoma

#57
Fomal, I am the least person to listen to here but your experiences are important for other people to know. Unsure how the community will receive it but you should vent some all the same. It's really shitty how some people are marginalized and treated, and knowing I could've been one of those people is not an easy thing. I respect what you and people you know have endured. If you need to talk to someone through private messages then I'm willing to listen.

EDIT: But I mostly lurk here, everyone seems to hate me, possibly with good reason. I don't check here often so if you do message me a reply will almost certainly not be immediate.

Fomalhaut

#58
Quote from: Fujikoma on October 11, 2020, 08:40:03 AM
Fomal, I am the least person to listen to here but your experiences are important for other people to know. Unsure how the community will receive it but you should vent some all the same. It's really shitty how some people are marginalized and treated, and knowing I could've been one of those people is not an easy thing. I respect what you and people you know have endured. If you need to talk to someone through private messages then I'm willing to listen.

EDIT: But I mostly lurk here, everyone seems to hate me, possibly with good reason. I don't check here often so if you do message me a reply will almost certainly not be immediate.

I don't really care about any of that (people not liking you here), don't know anything about the community that's formulated here over time, and I appreciate at least one understanding response. I just ended up here out of boredom and a soft spot for Discordianism, Chaos Magick, and other somewhat related wacky topics. Also very glad that you didn't end up in an abusive situation at the hands of the mental health system. Most people fortunately don't anymore, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored to me.

It's B.S. that the narrative has become so divisive around mental health treatment that mental health system reform is shoved aside as not being important right now because things have gotten somewhat better. If you ask me personally, it's equally misguided of us to see current psychiatric care, as it is, as the be-all-end-all, foolproof cure of all our mental ills as it is to say that it shouldn't be trusted at all. As stated before, it's only recently that we even started to see mental treatment as helpful to the patient, and we may be feeding some people to the proverbial wolves by jumping gung-ho into a social narrative where any and all emotional or behavioral ills we have can face will be solved if we just "get treatment". It's gotten so Black and White that on one side we have folks still denying that mental ills even exist, and on the other side folks act like the science has caught up to where any and all people with a Psychology or Psychiatry degree know exactly what they're doing, there's nothing more about the human mind to be discovered, and mistakes are only rare so they shouldn't hold clout in these discussions. I'd be very interested to see an actual accurate statistic on how rare they are, but I'd wager unbiased or accurate ones are difficult to come by.

Plus something something trillion dollar industry with gargantuan, decades-running, marketing campaigns, I'm sure there is NO monetary incentive to spread such a narrative, pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain. "It works. The only real problem is those morons who don't trust us and get their treatment! It has to be shame, stupidity, or maliciousness to their fellow man, no way it ever has anything to do with our history of abuse and mistakes! I, being an elitist fuck, don't believe there's any way the uneducated would even know anything about that, so it has to come from ignorant distrust of my expensive, *cough* I mean extensive education! They must all be stupid anti-progress hippies or Fundie Christians who still think mental illness is caused by demons in the head! Pay no mind also to the fact that most mass shooters were currently ON some kind of psych meds at the time of the shootings! Irrelevant. Or the fact that it's the medication that significantly lowers the life span of most mentally ill individuals because many antipsychotics shut down the kidneys and other necessary organs over time, or can cause suicidal ideation, or the very psychosis they are meant to sedate if mis-prescribed (which they commonly are, as a supplement to anti-depressants, without informing the patient of any of this! I'm sure the patient would be too stupid to understand if we did inform them and may even choose to not comply, or worse try to find another doctor or try some other method of mental healing that we spend a lot of energy getting people to consider more pseudoscientific than our field because they compete monetarily with Psychiatry and lose us money if they work for anybody!) Oh, posh! The progress that still remains to be had is minuscule! Shut up about reform and further progress and take your first-generation sedative, or we will have you labeled as "Anti-Science"! I mean really, who gives a fuck about crazy people anyway? Aren't they a pain in the ass to put up with? A burden? Just send  them to us! They're all dangerous. Fear them! We're not abusive anymore! I mean, only to the ones who don't get better or do t respond well  to the treatment, or only to the poor ones who get dumped on our doorstep with no outside support that could otherwise get us sued. I mean, who cares anyway? You all need our help and I need more money in my bank account to pay off all this student loan debt, remember?"

Again, I'm not in any way trying to advocate that people distrust doctors or psychiatrists, just not to BLINDLY trust anybody regardless of their profession or education. I'm also a tad bit justifiably bitter. Granted, we should also try to educate ourselves as much as possible on any topic or speak from personal experience before ever spouting distrust of any expert in any field. I'd love to get a Psychology degree and become a card-holding expert myself. Unfortunately all that crap ruined me financially at a young age, so that'll take longer and be more difficult to do. But anyway,  humans are all fallible, and there is still much progress to be made within our bodies of knowledge and any system or institution. In our medical system in the U.S. especially, too often the patient really does need to advocate for themselves or have someone who cares advocate for them.

They do have genetic tests now that help to rule out which meds will react particularly badly with an individual's body chemistry, but they're still unaffordable and inaccessible to most people, and most psychiatrists will still just guinea pig it based on the ones that most commonly work.

The Johnny


The problem with "mental health" as a field, is that its intrinsically political and ideological, and their legislators and practitioners refuse to acknowledge it.

-Out of all of the bunch, neurologists are the most reliable and consistent, since they stick closely to the physical evaluation of the functioning of the relevant organs.

-Psychiatrists are like a flawed version of neurologists, because they deal with "mental disorders"... mental disorders which are based on criterions of "normality" and which their diagnosis is based on superficial symptoms rather than a deep understanding of the causes behind them... also theyre corrupted by pharma money, so they peddle medication like its god's mana.

-The psychotherapies... the field got poisoned by some notion that their supposed task is to accomplish that the patients "adapt to society", if a given society is very homogenous, this objective can devolve into brainwashing, but if a given society is very heterogenous this objective is not as damaging or dangerous... another problem is not being relativistic enough to understand and acknowledge differences in personal values between practitioner and patient, thus molding the patient to their own expectations and ideals. Another big problem is being too "trauma-oriented", while neglecting issues that revolve around inner conflict.
<<My image in some places, is of a monster of some kind who wants to pull a string and manipulate people. Nothing could be further from the truth. People are manipulated; I just want them to be manipulated more effectively.>>

-B.F. Skinner