From the OP:
I should clarify something here. Or maybe I should at any rate… It’s eating at me a bit to have been described as having a “stance against meds prescribed for conditions such as depression” on this board, where the standards of ignorance-fighting is high enough to handle more subtlety and exactitude.
(But if you want to skip over this as an exercise in self-important mental masturbation and soapbox-standing, I understand)
It’s not that that’s not my position in a gross oversimplified way, but part of ignorance fighting is getting beyond the sound bite, yes?
a) “Elevator Statement / Off-the-cuff Sound Bite” — AHunter3 says psychiatrists are mostly quacks and psych meds are snake oil and you shouldn’t take 'em and no one should be forced to take 'em
b) “Conversational Expression of a Point of View” —AHunter3 says that psychiatry has a long history of pretending to know with certainty a lot more than it does about disturbing human behavior, emotions, and cognitive content and what causes it, and is still largely operating from conjecture; and that psychiatric medication, although it does has efficacious results for many people, doesn’t work that way for everybody and can actively harm people (including those who were having pleasant experiences with it except for the side effects, but also including those who experienced no benefit from them). Furthermore, as with aspirin, the mechanism by which they do work is also only understood conjecturally, and in many cases the theory of what constitutes the ailment is arrived at by working backwards from what certain pharmaceuticals do to the nervous system. So psych meds may be of great benefit to some people but they can be dangerous; you should be aware that claims are made on their behalf with flimsy support; and, as with any citizen, a person with a psych diagnosis should be allowed to refuse unwanted treatment and should not be involuntarily incarcerated except for having committed an arrestible crime, unless legal standards of mental incompetence can be shown to apply.
c) “The Historical Lecture” —AHunter3 begins with an overview of the institutional practice of pyschiatry and shows how psychiatry has always had a “split personality” of its own, being on the one hand the mechanism by which disturbing people were removed from the public sphere for the benefit of those they disturbed, and treated with an end-goal of making them socially palatable to the rest of society if such a thing were possible, otherwise keeping them locked up out of sight; and, on the other hand, an inquiry into the personal pain and disability of these maladies as they are experienced by those suffering from them, to see what might enable them to live fuller lives, to be rescued from some of the anguish that they experience, and to rescue them from lives of isolation and mental incapacity.
The first of those two roles has tended to lead to ‘treatments’ that pacify, that reduce a person’s ability to behave at all as a means of reducing the likelihood of them behaving badly, and that accept as tolerable tradeoffs treatments that destroy much of a person’s creativity, passion, capacity for imaginative or original thought, or formulation of decisive intentionality and pursuit of self-definition and purpose, as long as they blunt externally discernable symptoms that others find disturbing. Because the mantle of “medicine” is useful, in the social-politics sense, for legitimating the ‘police powers’ role of the profession, the history of psychiatry is rife with claims of medical legitimacy and precision science for ‘treatments’ that are of this nature.
And that kind of politics means playing really loose and sloppy with the medical science — the serious research, the well-intentioned endeavors to really help people, get all entangled with the social-control lies and the ‘treatments’ that were often worse than the ailments except from the perspective of the folks who wanted the crazies off the streets. That gave psychiatry a bad name among the branches of medicine, one result of which was that every time someone actually, in no-kidding legitimate real life figured out what was causing it, a given “mental illness” was removed from the jurisdiction of psychiatrists and given over to branches of medicine considered more legitimate. Examples: one dementia was found to be caused by late-stage infection by the syphilis spirochete; another set of patterns of odd behavior and thought disturbance was understood as a neurological problem called a “seizure”; yet another mental and emotional malady, once understood as an insufficiency of the thyroid gland, was offloaded to endocrinology. They may not be doing that any more (Alzheimer’s is at least in part still treated by psychiatrists even though we now know in a pretty specific sense what’s going on there), but it went on long enough that the effect was to leave behind, in the basket of ailments called “mental illnesses”, the patterns of human thought feeling and behavor that had not yielded up answers in response to conventional medical approaches.
Is there, therefore, at least a solidly good chance that the remaining constellations of symptoms & experiences & behavior are not exclusively those of a physiological condition of the body, brain, or its neurochemistry? Yeah, in my opinion — most likely, they are states of mind that the human mind (any human mind) ends up in under the right situation, and then on top of that some people are more prone to end up in those states than others, perhaps because of physiological predispositions but perhaps not exclusive due to that either. So a psychiatric profession, steeped in the medical-model tradition and for the most part insistent that the ailments it exists to treat are by definition illnesses in the medical sense (brain, neuron, neurotransmitter, etc), is probably treating conditions that don’t exist in the sense that they think they do, and approaching those conditions with strategies based on those misapprehensions. “Snake oil” is perhaps a rude and uncharitable way of putting it, but since they impose their treatments on us without our consent via those still-extant police powers, while insisting to the general public that they are doctors guided by the precise insights of modern medical science and know what they are doing, I think it’s appropriate. And, as you can see, is applicable to both sides of the two roles I said that the profession plays. The stubborn insistence on a linear physical-cause-yielding-mental-illness model very much permeates the sincere research and tends to inform the best-intentioned of program planning and development strategies.
Does any of that mean psych meds don’t alleviate suffering for some people and make it possible for them to tolerate life and get on with the business of living? Certainly not. Meds for the symptom-pattern called “depression” seem to be most favorably received and enthusiastically consumed by the folks for whom they are prescribed, with meds for the condtion known as “bipolar disorder” apparently lagging somewhat behind in popularity among those who take them, and meds for those of us bearing the label “schizophrenic” bringing up the rear. Is it fair to call something that works, for at least a decent percentage of the people who take it, “snake oil”? I’d say they are fine for those who take them voluntarily and under conditions of truly informed consent (i.e., they haven’t been sold a bill of goods about how the Good Doctors know exactly, in a highly detailed etiological sense, what is causing their problem and that the pill they’re handing out will restore their “chemical balance” just like insulin replaces natural pancreatic insulin for diabetics). But dammit, peddling that stuff making the unsupported claims that they make, and forcing it on people who don’t want it entitles me to sometimes call it “snake oil”, too, OK?
Meanwhile, the real problems probably won’t yield to inquiry until and unless funding for more complex research becomes more readily available. The second and more lofty role that psychiatry has attempted to play requires expensive investment. In particular, research designs that don’t assume a simple physiological mechanism to underlie the mental illnesses would tend to be pricey.
