Well, at what point do you think a person is sufficiently impaired that they cannot give meaningful consent? Do you think it’s unethical to put someone on suicide watch if they have been diagnosed with clinical depression?
Also, given some of the anti-social behavior we have discussed as a result of various disorders, do you favor a law enforcement response over a medical one?
I’m curious as to how you’d approach this from a policy perspective. Though I do agree that over medicating, and resistance to quantifying it, is not good law or good science.
Well, the circumstances should be identical for schizzies and nonschizzies. There are standards that determine if and when you (for purposes of this post assumed to NOT have a psychiatric diagnosis) no longer get to make your own medical (and other) decisions. For most practical purposes, someone alleging you to be incompetent needs to bring a case to a civil court and demonstrate to the judge why you should not be allowed to sign your own documents, manage your own checkbook, or make your own medical decisions. And the burden of proof lies with that someone — can’t have Aunt Esmeralda’s greedy son having her determined incompetent w/o good grounds just because he doesn’t want her to marry Joe Silverhair and perhaps compromise his inheritance!
The presence or absence of psychiatric diagnosis in and of itself should not only not be considered relevant, but in addition, due to the prejudicial attitudes that are very much in existence, should be illegal to speak of in a competency hearing.
I don’t personally believe it. As a single example over half of men who do not respond to conventional antidepressants have low testosterone levels. When given higher testosterone levels the depression cleared up for a third of them, the rest got some benefits.
Take me for example. I am usually reasonably happy but for the last month I have been mostly depressed and irritable. I have considered this to be a really bad part of my life and I didn’t know how to change it. Meditation didn’t work, other cognitive tools didnt work, various antidepressants didn’t work. However when I was reading the book ‘dealing with depression naturally’ they covered the fact that allergies can trigger depression. I have noticed my eyes itch alot and I was told by an eye doctor a year ago that I have a mild chronic allergy to ‘something’ so I started claritin yesterday and I feel much better and I hope to hell that it stays this way.
IMO mental illness is only a problem when the individual or to a lesser degree the individual’s friends/family start to suffer because of it. If you are always moody, angry or so out of it that you are homeless then that is a problem. However the deviation between ‘illness’ and ‘eccentric’ is very blurry. Why is a schizophrenic with religious delusions ill while someone who wholly believes in teachings to a religion that could be totally false is sane (mainstream religions could be just as false as a schizophrenics delusions)? The definition is when your life or the lives of those around you end up being harmed. If you can maintain a happy demeanor, hold down a job and not harm those around you it doesn’t matter if you are mentally ill or not.
Absolutely. If I, as a schizophrenic, do something that would get you, a nonschizophrenic, busted and charged with a crime, I ought to be busted and charged.
If Tom Businessman can get drunk with the other salesmen, pee in the fountain, get in a fistfight with a supporter of the Other Sports Team or Other Political Party, and get off with no more than a stern warning from Officer Friendly, then I should get the same treatment for being incoherent in public, arguing with people who aren’t there, and attacking a guy who stares at me funny. But if Tom goes to jail, so should I.
And my psychiatric diagnosis should have no bearing on how severely I’m sentenced.
[QUOTE=AHunter3• Of those of us who have been involuntarily psychiatrized and/or were sufficiently disappointed with psychiatric treatment to discontinue it, you’ll find many who say, in essence, “I’m not schizo/bipolar/whatever because there’s no such thing”, you’ll find some who say “I’m not schizo/depressed/etc because they misdiagnose left and right, maybe some people are but there’s nothing wrong with me”, and you’ll find some who say “I am different from the folks who don’t tend to get psychiatric diagnoses, I don’t know if there’s such thing as ‘schizophrenia’ or whatever or not, but whatever it is, it’s who I am and I like it and don’t want to be ‘cured’.” . . . Damn right, I’d love to follow the lead of the gay-rights movement, at least in part — at a minimum, pride in who we are despite whatever difficulties our condition may impose on us (as with disabilities-rights folks), and for those of us who feel that way about it, pride in our condition, embrace of it as a positive, and demands that people not only stop discriminating against us in the sense of putting up undue barriers or having laws that pertain to us but not other people, but also get over their mentalism and be neither hateful nor pitying towards us. We are everywhere :)[/QUOTE]
However I will agree that the label of ‘chemical imbalance due to serotonin’ is far too simplistic to describe depression. Many chemicals and neurotransmitters can play a role in depression. Dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, NMDA receptor activators/inhibitors, methyl donors, testosterone, estrogen, sleep levels, thyroid, various nutritional deficiencies (zinc, magnesium, the B vitamins, calcium, various amino acids). The list of all the causes of depression is long and only partially complete and to just label all depressed people as ‘not having enough serotonin’ and prescribing a reuptake inhibitor (which doesn’t work anyway in people who don’t naturally produce enough serotonin) is very simplistic. It is like prescribing penicillin to everyone who has a microbial infection.
Peer review means the first definition - review by others in the field to determine whether the paper is publishable. It does not mean that the work is correct- reviewers do not reproduce the experiment or even look at the original data.
If the paper is important, then others will try to reproduce it. This reproducibility (not a review) is the second level. Sometime others who know more about the subject will write in with objections too.
I edit an opinion column, and the articles don’t get reviewed, except for length and grammar. Opinions are opinions, and not facts.
But what happens when someone is truly NOT responsible for his or her behavior? Should we punish them for it? That was the whole point of bringing in insanity as a legal issue-if someone is not in his or her right mind-and I don’t just mean a little, I’m talking severely, frighteningly out of it, do they deserve to be punished?
Do you have a cite for this (i.e., the legislative issues)? I certainly was able to find some mortality rates on the web when my relative underwent ECT treatment. And, it is important to recognize that many of those who are fighting against undo restrictions on ECT are doing so also out of good intentions…because they have seen how it can make a dramatic difference for people when other things are not. The fact is that it remains the treatment with the highest success rate against severe depression…and this rate is particularly good when considering that it is often used as a last resort in patients who have been very resistant to other forms of treatment. That was certainly the case with my relative.
Read up on something called “tardive dyskenisia.” Many psych drugs have irreperably altered many brains for the worse, and has some recent scandals have shown research on negative long-term effects of more recently discovered psych drugs is also frequently lacking.
True, but what gets lost when we use words like “biological basis” is that the etiology is still unknown. Yes, some mental illnesses may correlate to changes in neurochemistry, but that doesn’t mean that the mental illnesses are caused by changes in neurochemistry, only that psychological symptoms correspond to physical changes in the brain.
Exactly. If the drugs don’t work at all, then how does one explain the relapses that somehow occur in some patients, shortly after going “off their meds”?
The people that is was referring too were already in the hopsital and had their diagnosis. After talking with them for a few minutes, it was pretty easy to figure out what they had and they usually confirmed it if you talked to them enough. They could do the same with me. There isn’t a lot to do in a psych ward except talk to other patients.
Most people read the list of symptoms of given mental illness in the DSM or elsewhere and think “that could be me”. The reality is a lot less subtle than that. You will never forget it if you see a person with the ashen look of profound depression or a bipolar patient with full-blown mania. They are far away from the normal end of the spectrum and yet patients with this seemingly unique and detrimental behavior show up again and again.
I had a full-blown manic episode that lasted three months. My wife got sick of it shortly after it started so I decided to go on a road-trip by myself. I traveled 11,000 miles in two months with absolutley no plan even from hour to hour. I traveled all over the eastern U.S. sometimes just dropping in and seeing people I hadn’t seen in 14 years. I scared the hell out of most people. My personality was completely confident, aggressive, and obnoxious and quite unlike the me people had always known. I stopped eating shortly after I left. I ate extremely little for over a month and I lost 20 pounds. I stopped sleeping on a regular schedule too. My new routine became to stay up for 3 days and then sleep most of the next one. I did a few things that were completley out of character and will die with me.
When I got back to Boston, my wife had me taken to McLean psychiatric hospital. During my intake interview, they paused to bring students from Harvard Medical School in to observe. It is somewhat rare for Bipolar people to be brought in during the manic stage of the disease and I was a textbook case. They started me on Lithium right away and it started to work within 5 days. Within 2 weeks, I was back to normal.
I completely support the decision to have me committed. It wasn’t like One Flew Over the Cukkoo’s Nest. Everyone treated me with respect. They just monitored my behavior while we did simple activities and such. After the medicine was demonstrated to work, they let me out. Simple and everything regarding that has been fine since. I understand that some people have had bad experiences but those aren’t the norm and the whole system shouldn’t be judged by a few bad doctors and hospitals.
Shagnasty, what point are you trying to make, exactly? Your psychiatric witnessing doesn’t seem relevant to the topic of this thread, unless you mean to suggest that your anecdotal evidence is an argument for the “chemical imbalance” myth.
Wow, you just brushed off decades of research based on a stubborn belief system and one little paper against thousands on the other side. We tend to use the word “witnessing” to refer to the supporters of an unconventional belief not supported by most physical evidence. Tom Cruise shares your belief and he bases that on religion. We will just shift the witnessing label back to you and AHunter3.
