“We can all agree that too much medicine is being prescribed by the wrong people to the wrong people and for the wrong indications. Eighty percent of all psychiatric medicine is prescribed by primary care doctors after very brief visits that are primed for over prescribing by misleading drug company advertising”
1) we need to work for the freedom of those who have been inappropriately imprisoned; 2) we need to provide adequate housing to reduce the risks and indignities of homelessness; 3) we need to provide medication for those who really need it and to avoid medicating those who don’t; and 4) we need to provide adequate and easily accessible psychosocial support and treatment in the community.
And all together, acting on these four principles would solve a lot of problems so that those who don’t need psyche meds would be free of them, and those who do would have access to hospitalization when they need it, and would have sufficient time to recover. But, I’d like to add that unless the field of psychiatry makes a point of helping people who aren’t in need of medication safely withdraw from it, and aren’t determined to study the effects of the drugs they’re already prescribing with some scientific integrity, then it can’t be assumed that they know what they’re doing in a truly meaningful sense.
And, unless they directly challenge the idea that all things they label as “mental illness” are biologically based, then at least half of what they do is based on bullshit.
wiley, you said it. I posted this comment on Dr. Frances’s article:
Thank you, Dr. Frances.
Reasonable people should also consider a FIFTH common goal, perhaps not as obvious to psychiatrists: The extent of injury from psychiatric drugs.
Along with all the other questionable information disseminated in pursuit of sales and distribution of psychiatric drugs, the scientific literature fails to accurately describe their potential for injury.
For accurate risk-benefit analysis for any individual patient, the physician must know the risk. The pharma-sponsored clinical trials on record are inadequate in this regard.
Psychiatry has a responsibility to patients to revisit the harm potential of psychiatric drugs and update the literature by studying post-marketing reports of actual injury from patients. No institution is doing this.
Only after a truly realistic reassessment of drug risk can psychiatry make good on treatment of so-called underserved populations. Otherwise, it is following the same bad pharma-designed road maps and only extending potential iatrogenic harm to more people.
Glad to see you agree with Dr. Frances, who was just as critical of the antipsychiatry crowd as the hypesters.
He noted:
“Some inflexible anti-psychiatrists are blind ideologues who see only the limits and harms of mental health treatment, not its necessity or any of its benefits.”
That wasn’t my question it was a dodge. I see the risks as my posts will clearly attest to. All doctors are trained in risk/benefit analysis, so spare me the lecture. I was fully versed this concept by second year medical school. I’m not sure you see the benefits. At all.
Are there any benefits to psychiatric drugs, in your expert opinion? At all?
If not, you are firmly in the second camp that Dr. Frances is talking about.
Watch out with some of this crowd, they salivate when posts like the above have the word “antipsychiatry” in it.
Like the gunshot draws the zombies to the area of the shot. Their logic is so failed when they refuse to address my analogy with the way the police have been so pathetic in their repeated assaults on the public throughout the country.
Only if it fits the paradigm. Gee, like the leaders of our field do with repetitive zeal just like the abolitionists end up echoing as well. And like what the Democrats shout at the Republicans and then vice versa.
and the moderates and negotiators get crushed by the zealots. America, whatta country! Compromise is just not an option, eh?
What defines mostly characterological disorder in the extremist participants. Reason is not an option! But, thanks for the link Dr N.
Dr. O’Brien, actually, many doctors, not just psychiatrists, are clueless about the risks and routinely blow their patients off when they complain about side effects even when they are well known such as statins causing memory loss. So until they do, folks will complain about being harmed and it has nothing to do with being anti psychiatry vs. pro psychiatry or pro physician vs. anti physician.
And by the way, I love my cardiologist so what does that make me since according to your logic if I don’t think most drugs have benefits, I must be a hater?
Really, the argument that if someone objects to a practice in a medical specialty makes them a hater is really getting old.
You think that most approved drugs do not have benefits? That’s interesting. So all the efficacy literature on Lasix, Digoxin, and ACE inhibitors is a fabrication? And statins do nothing? That’s not anticardiology, that’s antiscience. This is not to say that in an individual the beneficial effects are not outweighed by the side effects. But I practice in the real world, where sitting on your hands paralyzed by fear is not an option. Every PDR insert lists hundreds of side effects and one or two beneficial effects. If you obsess enough, and do so with a lack of perspective, you will never give anyone anything. Some of us have to see suffering people in the real world, and not in the 100% efficacy/0% side effect utopia you imagine.
Frightening:
“We can all agree that too much medicine is being prescribed by the wrong people to the wrong people and for the wrong indications. Eighty percent of all psychiatric medicine is prescribed by primary care doctors after very brief visits that are primed for over prescribing by misleading drug company advertising”
Steve Lucas
I absolutely agree with his points.
1) we need to work for the freedom of those who have been inappropriately imprisoned; 2) we need to provide adequate housing to reduce the risks and indignities of homelessness; 3) we need to provide medication for those who really need it and to avoid medicating those who don’t; and 4) we need to provide adequate and easily accessible psychosocial support and treatment in the community.
And all together, acting on these four principles would solve a lot of problems so that those who don’t need psyche meds would be free of them, and those who do would have access to hospitalization when they need it, and would have sufficient time to recover. But, I’d like to add that unless the field of psychiatry makes a point of helping people who aren’t in need of medication safely withdraw from it, and aren’t determined to study the effects of the drugs they’re already prescribing with some scientific integrity, then it can’t be assumed that they know what they’re doing in a truly meaningful sense.
And, unless they directly challenge the idea that all things they label as “mental illness” are biologically based, then at least half of what they do is based on bullshit.
wiley, you said it. I posted this comment on Dr. Frances’s article:
Thank you, Dr. Frances.
Reasonable people should also consider a FIFTH common goal, perhaps not as obvious to psychiatrists: The extent of injury from psychiatric drugs.
Along with all the other questionable information disseminated in pursuit of sales and distribution of psychiatric drugs, the scientific literature fails to accurately describe their potential for injury.
For accurate risk-benefit analysis for any individual patient, the physician must know the risk. The pharma-sponsored clinical trials on record are inadequate in this regard.
Psychiatry has a responsibility to patients to revisit the harm potential of psychiatric drugs and update the literature by studying post-marketing reports of actual injury from patients. No institution is doing this.
Only after a truly realistic reassessment of drug risk can psychiatry make good on treatment of so-called underserved populations. Otherwise, it is following the same bad pharma-designed road maps and only extending potential iatrogenic harm to more people.
Glad to see you agree with Dr. Frances, who was just as critical of the antipsychiatry crowd as the hypesters.
He noted:
“Some inflexible anti-psychiatrists are blind ideologues who see only the limits and harms of mental health treatment, not its necessity or any of its benefits.”
I assume you also agree with that statement.
I believe you need to know the degree of harm before you can trumpet benefit. Risk/benefit requires a numerator as well as denominator.
Otherwise, all you’re doing is expressing blind faith in the value of drug treatment.
That wasn’t my question it was a dodge. I see the risks as my posts will clearly attest to. All doctors are trained in risk/benefit analysis, so spare me the lecture. I was fully versed this concept by second year medical school. I’m not sure you see the benefits. At all.
Are there any benefits to psychiatric drugs, in your expert opinion? At all?
If not, you are firmly in the second camp that Dr. Frances is talking about.
Watch out with some of this crowd, they salivate when posts like the above have the word “antipsychiatry” in it.
Like the gunshot draws the zombies to the area of the shot. Their logic is so failed when they refuse to address my analogy with the way the police have been so pathetic in their repeated assaults on the public throughout the country.
Only if it fits the paradigm. Gee, like the leaders of our field do with repetitive zeal just like the abolitionists end up echoing as well. And like what the Democrats shout at the Republicans and then vice versa.
and the moderates and negotiators get crushed by the zealots. America, whatta country! Compromise is just not an option, eh?
What defines mostly characterological disorder in the extremist participants. Reason is not an option! But, thanks for the link Dr N.
Dr. O’Brien, actually, many doctors, not just psychiatrists, are clueless about the risks and routinely blow their patients off when they complain about side effects even when they are well known such as statins causing memory loss. So until they do, folks will complain about being harmed and it has nothing to do with being anti psychiatry vs. pro psychiatry or pro physician vs. anti physician.
And by the way, I love my cardiologist so what does that make me since according to your logic if I don’t think most drugs have benefits, I must be a hater?
Really, the argument that if someone objects to a practice in a medical specialty makes them a hater is really getting old.
You think that most approved drugs do not have benefits? That’s interesting. So all the efficacy literature on Lasix, Digoxin, and ACE inhibitors is a fabrication? And statins do nothing? That’s not anticardiology, that’s antiscience. This is not to say that in an individual the beneficial effects are not outweighed by the side effects. But I practice in the real world, where sitting on your hands paralyzed by fear is not an option. Every PDR insert lists hundreds of side effects and one or two beneficial effects. If you obsess enough, and do so with a lack of perspective, you will never give anyone anything. Some of us have to see suffering people in the real world, and not in the 100% efficacy/0% side effect utopia you imagine.