Comments on: Army Suicide Report Ignores Suicide-Producing Drugs

By: franco_american1962

franco_american1962 — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:08:39 +0000

This discussion does not concern itself, as you seem to believe, with any scientific worthy discussion. The real discussion of institutional psychiatry in modern culture, is more so a moral discussion, passing off as medical. The latter is truly what I allude to as psychiatry as the social and political tranquilizer. I would not dare or care to lower my moral outlook on psychiatry to suit your medicalizing the moral and social.

By: BartFargo

BartFargo — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:39:40 +0000

And it’s easy to miss the thrust of your argument because you don’t have one- it’s just a bunch of hand-waving and pseudo-intellectual vocabulary. When you’re confronted on the nonsense, you say the obvious, logical truth is just inconsistent with your “enlightened” (hah!) worldview. Give me a break.

By: BartFargo

BartFargo — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:31:41 +0000

Then you’re acquainted with bad science and bad medicine, because none of the anti-seizure drugs are approved as anti-depressants. Some of them are approved only as mood-stabilizing drugs, which is a far different from having an anti-depressant effect. Keep tilting at windmills, since you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about.

By: franco_american1962

franco_american1962 — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:42:38 +0000

I am personally acquainted with the anti-seizure medications used as anti-depressants. As for your response in kind, you obviously missed the entire thrust of my argument. Good luck with your personal weltanshauung.

By: BartFargo

BartFargo — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:47:47 +0000

Uh, no, it’s not morality masquerading as medicine, since there is obvious, objective damage done when someone is left bankrupt, infected with gonorrhea or chlamydia or potentially something far more serious, and has taken the first steps toward developing a dependence on IV drugs (which carries all sorts of other objective health risks like addiction, Hep B, HIV, endocarditis) following a prolonged manic episode. I should also mention that during manic episodes patients may go out of their way to break the law, committing brazen acts of theft and violence because they feel invincible. Depending on how mania manifests itself in an individual, a patient could easily become a danger to himself and others, and in that case any doctor or psychiatrist who is acting in that patients’ best interest should intervene before more harm can be done- just as needs to be done for a suicidal patient.

By: franco_american1962

franco_american1962 — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:30:02 +0000

Or how about the person suffering from a bipolar “problem in living” who during the manic phase simply doesn’t want to solve their “problem” because they feel so good- despite the fact they’ve spent away their life savings, caught a few STDs as a result of promiscuous sex, and engaged in risky behavior like using IV drugs during their episode.
So where is the disease in all this, other than the obvious, physical ones? This is morality, passing as medical. I suspect that someone as this would be “subject” to treatment, under the “right to treatment” law? The latter would most certainly be a logical conclusion to draw, especially if this person’s behavior is troubling and troublesome…to others.

By: franco_american1962

franco_american1962 — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:24:54 +0000

Sorry, dude, I thought I was responding to another one of my posts. Now I really feel stupid. I cannot nor will not try to answer your emotional response, as there is just too much for me to respond to in kind-and my pain meds are muddling my thinking. I can say this, however. If you look at your “faith” in psychiatry as you would, say, of a religious faith, you and I could not conceivably touch base on any commonality of view and outlook. I suggest that if you are really steeped in the myth of mental illness, and you persist in seeing “problems in living” as that of a diseased “mind” (a verbal, by the way), then you have every right to ascribe to this moral view; after all, true liberty demands that you follow your conscience!

By: franco_american1962

franco_american1962 — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:15:42 +0000

I have to remember that I tend to be a sloppy typist! I trust that what I shared might add and not detract from any debate over the ameliorative.

By: franco_american1962

franco_american1962 — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:11:44 +0000

Alright then franco_american, how do you suggest individuals go about solving their “problems in living
Anomy and the loss of the individual. Perhaps it is no fault of your own, however, maybe you ought not search for the oracular. May I suggest first understanding the “complementarity responsibility and liberty”. No appeal to the “collective” will solve the problem of the first statement of this response, but neither will the individual giving his social, political, and economic destiny to a some collectivist, statist bureaucrats. Yes, in regards to an individualistic, and practical working democracy, I am most reactionary. I defend the Constitution, and the rule of law, not the agenda of a world order “rational planning”, heavy on the “class-struggle” (what is class identification in America? Is it merely of the “corporate” and the rest of us? Might I suggest you read Frederick Hayek’s, “Constitution of Liberty”, or Karl Popper’s ‘The open society and its enemies”- both volumes being a most enjoyable and enlightening read.

By: BartFargo

BartFargo — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:21:58 +0000

Alright then franco_american, how do you suggest individuals go about solving their “problems in living”?

Realize that most schizophrenics are completely unaware they have any “problem in living” at all, even though they may have lost their job, home, and family as a result of their “problem in living” and are now sleeping on a park bench and experiencing persistent malnutrition, pneumonia and skin infections. Many will even actively refuse medical attention of any sort.

Or the person experiencing the “problem in living” of serious depression, who may lack any hope, confidence, or even energy to try and better his condition and instead stays in bed for a week or two at a time.

Or the person experiencing the “problem in living” of epilepsy- which is what many of the drugs mentioned in the above article are used to treat. Seizures are physically demonstrable and potentially life-threatening phenomena that demand attention. Since surgical ablation of the epileptogenic center invariably leads to side effects, medication and avoidance of triggers are currently the only other options. That antiseizure drugs have an increased risk of suicide is regrettable, but the risk of death from uncontrolled epilepsy or uncontrolled bipolar disorder is much greater.

Medication can only go so far in treating any patient- the need for one-on-one, group, and family psychotherapy still exists and should always be an integral part of psychiatric therapy. But medications likewise also have their place in psychiatric medicine, enhancing the gains made during therapy sessions, and (to put it broadly) giving the patient the strength and stability needed to cope with or overcome their disorder.

Something tells me you have very little knowledge of the fields of mental health and neurology, (beyond what you’ve read in one-sided critiques of it) nor do you have much experience interacting with patients suffering from mental or neurological disorders, and so instead you simply play semantics couched in pseudo-intellectual abstractions that fit your anti-pharma agenda.

By: franco_american1962

franco_american1962 — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:42:26 +0000

I have read much in the way of psyche critique, including the “anti-psych” literature of the 1960s and early 1970s (Foucault, Laing, Cooper, et.al.) Both the “old- guard” left, and the “new- left”, anti-drugging critique accept the “reality” of madness as the coin of the realm. Both “positions” admittedly have a different take, principally Marxist and Liberal-statist, respectively. I am a Libertarian-Humanist, as T. Szasz, and disagree with madness as disease. Rather, I see psychiatriy’s mission as that of medicalizing ” problems in living”, and of transforming moral values into health values.

I think that the singlemost confounding issue on this present debate, is the manner in which the myth of mental illness informs this “dialogue”. Whether one is speaking of the old-guard, Marxist left, as in the likes of Laing,Cooper Foucault, or, the new-left, anti-drug critique, as articulated by the likes of P. Breggin, and R.Whitaker, the result is as predictable as it is expectable: mental illess qua disease-state is still the coin of the realm.

The transformation of moral values into health values, has unquestionable been the bane of our culture, where “problems in living” have become any one of present mental illnesses or, that weasel term, disorder. It is indeed lamentable to see such unanimity, however, given such a captive audience, its no surprise that any liberal psychiatrist can, simultaneously, expiate personal guilt, and find a means of taking credit for having reinvented the wheel that is psychiatry. This is what liberal psychiatry wants more than anything: that of social engineer. And I believe, to date, it has been a resounding success.
I fear that the only outcome of this “over-medicating” critique will be a consolidation of the psych profession in general. Little will actually change, as the force and coercion now deployed by the psych enterprise will go unabated. Plus ca change.