I looked at this blog post and it mentions a UN report which seems to be quite critical of modern psychiatry.
The doctor who made the report seems to be saying that drugging people is not a great approach, and really we should recognise that poor mental health is a result of social and psychological pressures:
Public policies continue to neglect the importance of the preconditions of poor mental health, such as violence, disempowerment, social exclusion and isolation and the breakdown of communities, systemic socioeconomic disadvantage and harmful conditions at work and in schools… Reductive biomedical approaches to treatment that do not adequately address contexts and relationships can no longer be considered compliant with the right to health.
Thoughts on this? Is the medical model of psychiatry just created by money-hungry pharma companies? Of course some people think they cannot function without their meds, and I sympathise with that view. But perhaps this belief is reinforced by strong withdrawal effects of these drugs, which are well-known. So somebody who has been on the drug for a while tries coming off, they have strong withdrawal symptoms, and they think “I can’t cope without this drug, I must go back on it”. Perhaps this is where tapering can help, because it helps people come off drugs (if they choose to do so) while reducing withdrawal effects.
Edit: The report was from 2017 but I still find it interesting. More info about it can be seen here: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc3521-report-special-rapporteur-right-everyone-enjoyment-highest
Fearmongering about evil big pharma is always in style. “Reductive” (and other forms) is one of those words that tends to get tagged in whenever evidence-based medicine is in the crosshairs. This report tiptoes back from actually pulling the trigger and explicitly supporting the SCAM1 stuff but it’d be easy to pull quotes without context and make it look like an endorsement of new-age woo-woo bullshit.
1
Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine
I strongly dislike SCAM stuff, like homeopathy etc. And Scientology (who are anti-psychiatry) is obviously a scam too.
Some people find psychiatric drugs helpful, yes. But I have met psych patients, drugged against their will for months, who were still miserable after months of drugging. I think a psychological approach, such as counselling, is probably better.
I think a lot of psych patients are trying to understand what’s going on in their head. If they can reach this understanding, then they no longer need drugs, with all the negative health effects that the drugs cause (such as movement disorders, restlessness, muscle spasms, weight gain, sexual dysfunction, etc).
The if-then in your last paragraph is very weak. Understanding that I’m injured or ill doesn’t replace a need for treatment, it just helps me manage my expectations for things like recovery time, lasting effects and follow-up encounters.
Can’t just start handing out Pez dispensers full of Prozac and call it a day though, I agree with you on the importance of counseling as part of the process. To borrow an analogy, it’s like needing glasses while learning to read. You can squint and stare your way through for a while but it gets much easier with corrective lenses. Some people just need a little extra clarity, others might as well be blind without their glasses. Either way, they still need to go to class or open up a book to make use of their improved vision.
Maybe people with mental difficulties (and I’ve been through this system myself, for a long time) aren’t injured or ill. Instead they had genuine reasons to feel angry or distressed at the time of their “illness”.
I’m reminded of what I heard in an interview with a training psychiatrist who took antidepressants himself (within recent years, he contributed to the advice that Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists gives to patients trying to come off antidepressants):
If some people want to take these drugs then okay. But the evidence shows real negative effects of these drugs. I support patient choice. If we support the right of people to take these drugs, then we should also support the right of people to find other ways to manage their problems.