I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that
Recently I went on a rant about how slating the eeeeevil Big Pharma without acknowledging that some people need medication to function fucks over disabled people.
(For the people in the back, if the evil drugs from evil Big Pharma didn't exist, a hell of a lot more people would be dead. I hate a lot of drug companies' practices. I also acknowledge that illness is a real thing, and that medication can work even if development and marketing of drugs is done in a hugely troubling way, because I am not comfortable writing off millions of people's lives.)
What I find grating is that several of the people who complain about how mental illness isn't real have...absolutely zero experience with mental illness, either as living with one or as having any kind of medical training. This is unsurprising; the less experience people have with a subject, the worse they are at appraising their own competence.
They tend to assume that treatment for a mental illness is always medication or electroshock therapy (which is rightly controversial; use varies widely between different countries). They also forget how many families of medication exist; for example, a lot of people assume that SSRIs are the only medication available for depression. They're really not. Here is a quick list I grabbed from Wikipedia. Note that SSRIs are one of about ten different families, excluding combination treatments, adjuncts and agents under development.
Interestingly, they tend to forget that talking treatments exist - even though they're an incredibly important part of mental health care - and usually just brush them off as "oh, these are fine". I have no idea why this is. Maybe sitting in a room with a therapist has less of a fear factor than medication does?
They also tend to forget that treatments can be used together; for example, combining medications and talking treatments is common (and effective). Or that there's more than one way of treating the same condition and very much depends on individual circumstances (and how understanding your doctor is).
I don't mean to portray psychiatry or pharmaceutical companies as golden, because there's a lot wrong. I personally think that talking treatments should be more widely available, compared to basically being sent away with medication after a 5-minute appointment (the NHS is ridiculously overstretched). I think that information on what treatment is best for the individual should be more widely available as well.
Most of all, I'm fed up of sane people with no medical experience deciding that somebody died and made them Emperor of Mental Health Care. There's a lot wrong systematically which needs to be fixed, but blabbing without knowing the first thing about mental health care only makes matters worse.
(For the people in the back, if the evil drugs from evil Big Pharma didn't exist, a hell of a lot more people would be dead. I hate a lot of drug companies' practices. I also acknowledge that illness is a real thing, and that medication can work even if development and marketing of drugs is done in a hugely troubling way, because I am not comfortable writing off millions of people's lives.)
What I find grating is that several of the people who complain about how mental illness isn't real have...absolutely zero experience with mental illness, either as living with one or as having any kind of medical training. This is unsurprising; the less experience people have with a subject, the worse they are at appraising their own competence.
They tend to assume that treatment for a mental illness is always medication or electroshock therapy (which is rightly controversial; use varies widely between different countries). They also forget how many families of medication exist; for example, a lot of people assume that SSRIs are the only medication available for depression. They're really not. Here is a quick list I grabbed from Wikipedia. Note that SSRIs are one of about ten different families, excluding combination treatments, adjuncts and agents under development.
Interestingly, they tend to forget that talking treatments exist - even though they're an incredibly important part of mental health care - and usually just brush them off as "oh, these are fine". I have no idea why this is. Maybe sitting in a room with a therapist has less of a fear factor than medication does?
They also tend to forget that treatments can be used together; for example, combining medications and talking treatments is common (and effective). Or that there's more than one way of treating the same condition and very much depends on individual circumstances (and how understanding your doctor is).
I don't mean to portray psychiatry or pharmaceutical companies as golden, because there's a lot wrong. I personally think that talking treatments should be more widely available, compared to basically being sent away with medication after a 5-minute appointment (the NHS is ridiculously overstretched). I think that information on what treatment is best for the individual should be more widely available as well.
Most of all, I'm fed up of sane people with no medical experience deciding that somebody died and made them Emperor of Mental Health Care. There's a lot wrong systematically which needs to be fixed, but blabbing without knowing the first thing about mental health care only makes matters worse.
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