I understand the need for medication with mental illness - but there are enormous gaps in our knowledge about these drugs and the actual mechanisms of mental illness - it's still not even clear if the meds are treating the symptoms rather than the underlying causes. By that I mean that most mental illnesses have an environmental trigger or history (abuse, trauma, etc.) and the chemical imbalance may simply be a symptom stemming from that experience. When we add in the genetic aspect, it gets even more complex with natal genetic make-up being part of it, as well as epigenetic changes triggered by subjective and objective experience.
Safe Space Radio interviewed Robert Whitaker, one of the most prominent critics of the "magic pill" philosophy.
Medicating Mental Illness
This show aired on May 4th, 2011.An interview with award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker on whether psychotropic medications may be worsening the long term outcomes of people with severe mental illness. Bob, was drawn to this research because he noticed that since the advent of psychotropic medication, the numbers of Americans on psychiatric disability has tripled. He also notes that people with schizophrenia tend to do better in some developing countries with less access to medication, than they do in the United States, where they are encouraged to take medication for life. Bob examines the role of the pharmaceutical industry in influencing the development of academic psychiatry, and in most of the clinical studies done on medication. He offers an alternative way to approach severe mental illness from Finland, where more time is taken to discern which patients actually need medication before using it on everyone.
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