What are your thoughts on psych drugs, such as antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilisers, etc?
Doctors love to prescribe these drugs. But they have very bad side effects, based on what I’ve read. And they can give you strong withdrawals when you try to come off them. Also, should we really be medicalising emotions and taking drugs to emotionally cope with the world? Maybe we need things like friends, family, social connections, to make the world more enjoyable.
What do you think?
Like everything, some people need them and some don’t … and some ppl are on them who don’t need to be and some are not on their meds who REALLY need to be.
Everyone is different… treat the patient not just the disease
If hard to be mentally healthy in todays world full of despair and news constantly bashing you with negatives, some people need medicine to regulate those chemicals.
Not everyone needs medicine but becareful about search bias as you will find someone with terrible advice that has the answer you were already looking for.
I have bipolar, and I cannot function normally without medication. It’s not about “taking drugs to emotionally cope with the world” but about addressing biochemical issues in my brain that is structurally and functionally different from yours. Mania is not any different from diabetes.
While you are absolutely correct that thing like social connections make the world more enjoyable, you wouldn’t tell a diabetic that all he needs is friends and family, forget the insulin, right? I need both my antipsychotics and my quality time with my partner to live well.
Having said that, I think that it’s fair to make an argument about overprescribing to people who don’t need the meds. Let’s just not paint everyone who takes them with a broad brush of “medicalising emotions” because all that’s doing is promoting an ableist attitude to mental health.
When you break your leg they’ll reset it and plaster it while it grows back.
When you are in immense physical pain or need surgery, they’ll give you painkillers/narcotics.
When you mind is off, they’ll give you meds to suppress this so you can become better. There is a conversation to be had about society and if we give too much medication. But the brain is complex and when you are in a depressive spiral, where you contemplate suicide once every 5 seconds, it helps to suppress the fuck out of that so you can heal. speaking from experience there and you can heal
Then there are simply people/disorders which have a changed or disrupted brain chemistry (outside normal variation), if we have medicine to help these people function: we should use it.
I recommend reading The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, he makes a really compelling argument for mental health treatment.
