Mental Disorders: The Facts Behind the Marketing Campaign
“Psychiatry makes unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin…This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naïve and perhaps delusional.” — Dr. David Kaiser, psychiatrist
“There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.” Allen Frances, Psychiatrist and former DSM-IV Task Force Chairman
Read more: Psychiatrists Admit Disorders Are Not Diseases
Introduction: 120 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with mental disorders and placed on psychiatric drugs as ‘treatment.’ And while people are led to believe a diagnosis of mental illness or having a mental disorder is based on medical evidence or tests that these disorders are legitimate medical conditions, the fact is they are simply based on checklists of behaviors. People are also convinced that the only solution for treating problems of emotion, mood or behavior for themselves or their child, is drug treatment. The purpose of the information presented on this page is to provide the public with information about psychiatric diagnosis, mental disorder tests, drug side effects and medical alternatives to drugs, so they can make informed, educated decisions.
1) There are no medical or scientific tests that can prove mental disorders are medical conditions. Psychiatric diagnosis is based solely on opinion. Unlike medical disease, where tests can verify the existence of a medical condition (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc) psychiatric diagnosis are based solely on checklists of behaviors, not any medical tests…
2) Yes people experience depression, anxiety and sadness, children do act out and/or misbehave, and yes, some people can become irrational and/or psychotic. This doesn’t make them ‘diseased’ and there is no evidence of physical/medical abnormality for any psychiatric disorder whether its Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD), Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or Schizophrenia . This doesn’t mean that there aren’t solutions for people experiencing difficulty, there are non harmful, medical alternatives. But they do not require a psychiatric “label” to treat them. There is no mental illness test that is scientifically/medically proven. This isn’t a matter of opinion, psychiatrists who are opposed to the labeling of behaviors as mental illness openly admit this, and even the American Psychiatric Association admits this in the fine print of their own manual of mental disorders…
3) Why safe effective medical treatments to mental difficulties are kept buried. The fact is, there are many medical conditions, that undetected and untreated, can appear as psychiatric ‘symptoms. There are non-harmful, non-drug solutions to treating problems of mood, attention, behavior that do not require a psychiatric diagnosis or psychiatric ‘treatment’ (drugs) but can be effectively treated with standard medical, not psychiatric, treatment.
4) The campaign to “Stop The Stigma of Mental Illness” is brought to you by…Big Pharma. You’ve probably seen the ads, to “Stop the Stigma” of mental illness but most likely weren’t informed that the industry sponsoring this campaign was the Pharmaceutical industry which makes $88 billion dollars a year on sales of psychiatric drugs…
5) What are psychiatric labels? Bi-Polar, Schizophrenia, ADHD, Social Anxiety Disorder, Depression – these are all psychiatric labels. People are being labeled based not on medical tests, but on psychiatric opinion. These labels are problematic for numerous reasons, the first of which is that these labels become part of their permanent medical record…
6) Psychiatric drugs are big business. The psychiatric pharmaceutical industry is making a killing—$84 Billion per year based on people being labeled with mental disorders that are not based on science or medicine, but on marketing campaigns…
7) Psychiatric drug side effects— there are 207 International Psychiatric Drug Regulatory Warnings, 221 Psychiatric Drug Studies and more than 470,000 adverse reactions to psychiatric drugs on file with the US FDA (only 1-10% are ever reported so these numbers represent only a fraction of the side effects being experienced by patients/consumers). CCHR has compiled all international drug regulatory warnings & studies about psychiatric drug risks into an easy to search psychiatric drug database.
1) THERE ARE NO TESTS IN EXISTENCE THAT CAN PROVE MENTAL “DISORDERS” ARE MEDICAL CONDITIONS. PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS IS BASED SOLELY ON OPINION.
There is no medical “mental illness test.” The psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars a year in order to convince the public, legislators and the press that psychiatric disorders such as Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD/ADHD), Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, etc., are medical diseases on par with verifiable medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. But unlike medical disease, there are no scientific tests to verify the medical existence of any psychiatric disorder. Despite decades of trying to prove mental disorders are biological brain conditions, due to chemical imbalances or genetic factors, psychiatry has failed to prove even one mental disorder is due to a faulty or “chemically imbalanced” brain. There are virtually no psychiatric disorders that can be verified medically as a physical abnormality/disease.
In fact the “brain scans” that have been pawned off as evidence that schizophrenia or depression are brain diseases, have been disproven as valid research. Most have not been done on drug naive patients, meaning someone who has not been on psychiatric drugs such as antipsychotic drugs, documented to cause brain atrophy (shrinkage). Other brain scans have shown the brains of smaller children to show smaller brains in comparison to larger/older children and then claimed children with ADHD have smaller brains. None have been conclusively proven to verify mental disorders as abnormalities of the brain.
If there were such verifiable brain scans, or in fact any medical/scientific test that could show a physical/medical abnormality for any psychiatric disorder, the public would be getting such tests prior to being administered psychiatric drugs.
This is fact: There are no genetic tests, no brain scans, blood tests, chemical imbalance tests or X-rays that can scientifically/medically prove that any psychiatric disorder is a medical condition. Whereas real diseases are discovered in labs, psychiatric disorders are invented by committee and voted into existence.
2. YES, PEOPLE CAN GET DEPRESSED, SAD, ANXIOUS AND EVEN ACT PSYCHOTIC. THAT DOESN’T MAKE THEM MENTALLY “DISEASED”
No one is saying that people don’t get depressed, sad, troubled, anxious, nervous or even sometimes act psychotic. The question then is simple—is this due to some mental “disease” that can be verified as one would verify cancer or a real medical condition? And the answer is No. For example, can soldiers returning from war experience extreme and often debilitating stress? Yes. It is something wrong with their brain? No. It’s the horrors of war. Can children become distracted and not pay attention? Since time immemorial, the answer is yes. But psychiatry has pathologized childhood behaviors into a “mental illness.” The same is true of mothers. Can a new mother become distraught after a joyous occasion such as the birth of a child? Yes. Is it a brain abnormality or mental disease? No. And is the most humane solution to put these people on drugs documented by international regulatory agencies to cause mania, psychosis, worsening depression, heart attack, stroke, sudden death? Or for new or nursing mothers to risk birth defects or damage to their infants from being prescribed such powerful drugs?
This is also true of people diagnosed “schizophrenic.” There is no medical test to verify someone has a brain abnormality or medical condition of schizophrenia. And while no one claims people can’t become psychotic, the fact remains there is no biological evidence to support schizophrenia as a brain disease or chemical abnormality. And consider this, if people do become psychotic, or irrational, is it in fact caused by some underlying medical (not psychiatric) problem? A 15-year multiple follow up study found that there was a 40% recovery rate for those diagnosed schizophrenic who did not take antipsychotics, versus a 5% rate for those who did? What happened to their supposed “brain disease?” Did it simply vanish? Moreover, if they could recover from such a mental state, do they deserve the “stigma” of “schizophrenia” still being part of their permanent medical record? For life? Think about it. Imagine you were extremely overweight—obese. You lose all the weight so you are no longer obese. Yet your medical records continue to say that you are.
Loren Mosher, the former Chief of Schizophrenia Research for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)openly stated that there is no biological condition of schizophrenia as a disease or brain malfunction. His 2-year-outcome studies proved that those diagnosed schizophrenic could recover without the use of drugs.
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3. WHY SAFE, EFFECTIVE TREATMENTS TO MENTAL DIFFICULTIES ARE KEPT BURIED
The larger problem is that the biological drug model (based on the bogus mental disorders are a disease marketing campaign) prevents governments from funding real medical solutions for people experiencing difficulty. There is a great deal of evidence that medical conditions can manifest as psychiatric symptoms, and that there are non-harmful medical treatments that do not receive government funding because the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry spends billions of dollars on advertising and lobbying efforts, including hundreds of their pharma funded “patient’s rights” groups to counter any medical modality that does not support their biological drug model of mental disorders as a disease. This even includes people diagnoses psychotic or schizophrenic – and there have been workable, non-drug programs such as Soteria House which have not received the recognition they should have been afforded considering their success rate when compared to patients treated with drugs. Why? Billions of dollars in revenue for the psycho/pharma industry would have been lost. This is an industry that time and again, has been proven to put profit above patients lives.
See non-drug solutions/alternatives to psychiatric drugs here:
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4. THE CAMPAIGN TO “STOP THE STIGMA OF MENTAL ILLNESS” IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY… BIG PHARMA
With a seemingly altruistic agenda, the fact is the campaign to end the “stigma” of mental illness is one driven and funded by those who benefit from more and more people being labeled mentally ill—pharma, psychiatry and pharmaceutical front groups such as NAMI and CHADD to name but a few. For example, take NAMI’s campaign to stop the “stigma” and “end discrimination” against the mentally ill—the “Founding Sponsors” were Abbott Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Pfizer, Novartis, SmithKline Beecham and Wyeth-Ayerst Labs. (For an in-depth look at what else Pharma funds and how this funding not only helps set mental health policies but campaigns such as this, read Pharmaceutical Industry Agenda Setting in Mental Health Policies at the bottom of this post)
The fact is that the “stigmatization ” is coming from those that benefit from people being labeled/stigmatized with mental disorders that have no medical/biological evidence. Case in point, if you are rebellious, you are “stigmatized” with the label “oppositional defiant disorder.” If your kid acts like a kid he is “stigmatized” with the label “ADHD.” If you are sad, unhappy (even temporarily) you are “stigmatized” with the label “depressive” or “bi-polar disorder.” If you are shy you are “stigmatized” with the label “social anxiety disorder.” Moreover, you or your child are now stigmatized for life as this label, which is based solely on opinion, is now part of your medical record, despite the fact there is no medical evidence to prove you are “mentally ill”.
5. WHY PSYCHIATRIC “LABELS” ARE THE PROBLEM
Increasing numbers of people realize that just because a child fidgets, or loses pencils or toys—criteria for an “ADHD” diagnoses, this doesn’t mean a child is mentally ill. In fact many now claim that children diagnosed “ADHD” are really suffering from lead toxicity, or allergies, or poor diet, or lack of reading skills, and not a mental “illness.” The problem is that they continue to use the psychiatric label, ADHD, which stigmatizes a child as “mentally ill.” If in fact a child suffers from lead toxicity, then why not call it lead toxicity? If he hasn’t been taught to read, why don’t we just say he hasn’t been taught to read? The same is true of all psychiatric diagnoses—every single psychiatric label stigmatizes the person being labeled. Psychiatric diagnoses are simply lists of behaviors that psychiatrists have compiled into little lists, given a name, added “disorder” on the end— then voted them into their billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as “legitimate.” This is big, big business, but it isn’t even close to legitimate diagnoses. Not in any medical or scientific context. But in a profit making context? Yes— coming up with new lists of behaviors and new “disorders” is the bedrock of the multi-billion dollar psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry. Its how they get paid. Remember, no psychiatric label, no billing insurance. No psychiatric label, no drug prescribed. So until we stop using these psychiatric labels, which mean nothing other than what some psychiatrists decided was a mental “illness, ” we will never stop the “stigma.” The psychiatric labels are backed by corporate interests—not medicine, and not science.
6. PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS ARE BIG BUSINESS—AND THE PSYCHIATRIC/PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY IS MAKING A KILLING—$84 BILLION PER YEAR.
The primary reason people take psychiatric drugs is because they’ve been taught to believe they have a medical condition called a psychiatric disorder, which then justifies taking drugs to treat it. This is a brilliant marketing campaign, but it is not science. Any drug changes behavior or mood, whether cocaine, alcohol, marijuana or heroin. This does not mean someone who acts or feels differently on cocaine does so because they had a cocaine imbalance which the cocaine then corrected. It means that drugs change mood, emotion and behavior. But while the illicit use of drugs is universally frowned upon, and considered a bad way for people to deal with their problems, psychiatric drugs are made out to be “good” drugs, despite the fact many are more addictive than cocaine or heroin, and have side effects that rival such hardcore street drugs as LSD, heroin and crack cocaine.
7. WHERE TO GET THE FACTS ABOUT PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS RISKS AND SIDE EFFECTS
Because the public has been so mislead by the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry on the dangers of psychiatric drugs, CCHR has created a one-of-a-kind, easy to search psychiatric drugs side effects database, containing all international studies and drug regulatory warnings that have been issued on both classes of drugs (antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-anxiety drugs, stimulants, etc) and brand names such as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Risperdal, Seroquel, Ritalin etc. These are provided by CCHR as a free public service to help people make educated decisions based on facts, not marketing campaigns.
For Summaries of all known risks on these categories of drugs, visit these pages
For Antidepressant Drug Side Effects
For Anti-Anxiety Drug Side Effects
For Antipsychotic Drug Side Effects
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In order to be paid, as with any other provider, mental health professionsls must include a diagnosis(s) when billing insurance companies (private and public). This is where labeling originated. Many mental health professionals treat symptoms rather than the diagnosis, and facilitate and promote patient centered treatment planning.
Thank you for this. This is something I have been trying to convince individuals of for a long time. I have been an Addictions Counselor for many years and I can’t buy into the Addiction is a Disease concept. Thank you.
While I want to agree with several points, the douche that wrote this is an angrgy dude, and I just can’t debate all of the douchbaggery that is not supported with evidence. Can’t get behind it. -1.
You’re so right.
“YES, PEOPLE CAN GET DEPRESSED, SAD, ANXIOUS AND EVEN ACT PSYCHOTIC. THAT DOESN’T MAKE THEM MENTALLY “DISEASED””
I’ve been trying to convince a few of my dear friends but some people badly get infected by such marketing campaigns. I’ve bookmarked this, thanks!
I believe complementary medicine is important. Medication is not some kind of silver bullet, but I do believe for those people who genuinely have a mental illness, medication can be very effective in mitigating symptoms that have a severe impact on a person’s life.
I have bipolar disorder, and I understand that many readers here do not believe that this is a “real” disease. I understand how diagnoses are made and I can understand people’s objections, however I can tell you from personal experience that my behavior, clarity of thinking, and overall mood stability has improved drastically since I have been consistently taking medication. I try to eat well and exercise, and while it does have a positive effect, it is not enough.
Yes, I think it’s true that people are being diagnosed with mental illnesses left and right, and perhaps the diagnostic criteria is too lax, particularly with regard to children. Not every squirmy kid had ADHD, but for those individuals who truly suffer from mental illness, medication is incredibly helpful as one piece of the puzzle toward recovery.
I have a really thick skin, but what bothers me most is this idea that “it’s just part of life.” I can tell you that it is nearly impossible to pick yourself up by the bootstraps when you don’t have any boots. You’re right, we’re still learning about mental illness and don’t have all the answers, but it seems like the only group of people it’s acceptable to say,”Just tough it out and you’ll be fine” are people with mental illness.
This article is written with such a charge. Though I agree with most of it and it makes excellent points it is truly unfair to those who suffer from real if only observable problems like autism.
This article does not take into consideration that no one or very few pull out of life long emotional disabilities or life long lack of certain brain connections…..Perhaps we just don’t have the technology yet to really find out..that does not mean it does not exist.
While i am fully a holistic person i do not take kindly to the lack of compassion with which this article is written.
Mental health problems are not diseases but behaviours and the vagueness of mental health diagnoses [just means that they don't like you] are used ruthlessly by psychiatrists and governments to damage, murder and ruin their patients by using dependency creating and inherently damaging and toxic treatments (when there are other alternatives or when one could do nothing) in order to control and manage “mental health” of general public.
There should never be involuntarily treatments or treatments without full informed consent. Psychiatry is not part of medicine but social control and pseudomedicine. If one really thinks there is something wrong in the brain one should go to see a neurologist.
Just like all of these “nonexistent” and “not present” disorders, just because a scan of someone’s brain is perfectly clean, doesn’t mean they aren’t an ignorant b*
Wow! I am so flabbergasted by this article, I don’t know where to begin. My daughter suffered for 5 years with an unknown mental disorder that caused horrible physical and emotional problems from age 9 to age 14. Yes, she was prescribed medications to help her anxiety, without them I hate to think what her life would have been like. However drugs alone are never a solution, in my opinion,so we continued to seek out a diagnosis that would help us to help her. After 5 years of medications, psychologists and psychiatrists, we finally got an accurate diagnosis and the appropriate cognitive behavior therapy for the OCD that she suffers from. So to say that a mental illness of a 9 year old does not exist or a label is forced on them at the encouragement of pharmaceutical companies is preposterous! I guess you would understand mental illness better and be more compassionate if you had to deal with your nine year old child saying “nobody knows what I have and no one can help me. I can’t live like this.” Prejudice does exist with regard to mental illness and this article is a glaring example of that!
I agree with you! I hope for the best for your daughter. I live with prejudices around me all of my life, before and after my diagnostics and medications. I also have more than one mental illnesses. It’s complicated for my doctors to explain everything, find all of my diagnostics, provide therapy and find the best combination of medications. I need my medication to be able to think clearly enough to understand that I’m sick. It is very serious mental illnesses and very much different from one person to another. I hope that one day people would be more educated about mental illnesses and accept people that have them.
Hello there fellow friends!
Do you have any advice as how to become free from imprisonment in psych wards? I have escaped many times but since I have somebody who takes all my money (the idea came from a psychiatrist) and only gives me a small portion, it is difficult to stay “at large” on the run!
I am currently being imprisoned in a psych ward here in Sweden. If you like to correspond with me through my e-mail, I would be very happy!
My address is: [email protected].
Love 4-ever, Göran Holm.
This is a very informative article. I am diagnosed and receiving treatment with psychotropic meds. Some of the side effects: Weight gain, sluggishness, etc., are more than a little annoying. In my mind there are no miracle cures and every medicine; be it pharmaceutical or from a health food store can cause harm. It’ s refreshing to see a website so full of passion to educate people about the taboo topic of mental health issues. Keep on fighting for what you believe in, but don’ t forget that life is full of compromises and can be a balancing act. Especially, don’t trash the psychiatrists, they are doing what they can with the resources at their fingertips. As a person who has weathered many emotional storms, I can guarantee you that the only thing worse than an imperfect solution ( traditional psych) is reading 500 articles about how things are all rotten without one practical solution that will help me in my daily life. Expose problems/ issues but throw out a workable solution to make it a useful website.
I was involuntarily admitted toa psych ward when I was 19 , exactly 1 year after a massive near death car accident. They said I was psychotic but I recently found out they actually diagnosed me with schizophrenia as soon as I got there. They just love to throw those labels around. Anywho, so now I’m 27, trying to come off the pills and in total it will take about 5 years to come off, its been 2.5 years already and I’m on less than half of what I was on originally. But was it all worth the 70kg weight gain , is it worth the fact that I’m constantly battling my jaw dislocating involuntarily, is it worthtge fact I’m pre diabetic , is it worth the fact that I have polycystic ovaries now?? Davepsych- is it??? Is it really????
These drugs have done nothing but ruin my life, I’m always tired and I feel like a robot!! I used to work 2 jobs, now I can barely volunteer once a week because I’m so tired. And no the tiredness is not due to a mental illness. I wish the people who prescribe these drugs would take them themselves so then they would actually know what they’re talking about. Do the drs seriously think the drugs are perfect and don’t make you tired. The moment you say something bad about their precious drugs, they automatically deny it. Like they’d know!!! In the end the truth will always come out.
I came across this article by accident while looking for information on removing mental illness from my medical record.
I was “diagnosed” with Depression when i was younger and i was told that it was “more than likely a chemical imbalance in my brain”.I took Prozac and found it did not help me at all and the slight increase in positivity was purely placebo taking effect. I have had a troubled life and i became a dad at a young age etc. I was more recently told i could have Bipolar (gathered from the fact i had moments when i felt slightly more hyper and moments i felt down)
What i have realised, now that i have “cured” myself from the supposed “illness” i had, is that the way i felt is more than likely to do with life and how much it is against my internal wishes for my life and also my personality. I am a single parent and i cherish my child but in all honesty i was never ready to be a dad. I had barely experienced what it is to be young and have friends, go out and have fun. I also realised that the way i felt at times was not always communicated or interpreted right. I feel that my down periods are boredom because i do not go out as much as i want too (on my own anyway) and barely have the money to do anything.I also find it frustrating that i cannot pursue the career i want due to past mental health issues on my medical record (Depression!!)
I used to be for the Psychiatric experts but i am thoroughly against them now i realise how much bearing this “diagnosis” can have on your life and i fear it will follow me til the day i die. For those of you who say i exaggerate, let me tell you, whenever i go to see my GP and i have had coughs, headache, felt tired…He always pins it on depression and does not even bother to check half of the time.
So i say that if i can cure myself then does this really exist and can we really call it “illness”? I believe it is nothing more than a frame of mind in terms of depression etc. MEdicine will do nothing and i think using the medical record and allowing it to be fully released for certain jobs is an invasion of my privacy and leaves me feeling powerless to prove i am cured.
It is so refreshing to be able to leave a comment on a web site that has so many people that have such strong feelings and know how to put them across without resorting to bad language and ill thought out comments. Freedom of speech is great when it flows without bitterness.
Herbal medicine is more effective and non habbit forming, but there is no fat profit in it for the drug co’.s The thing I hate the most is the animal experiments just to put such drugs on the market.
I would like to reccomend vervain – check spelling, you used to be able to get varlairn root, but not sure it is still available, both are excellent for sleeplesness and worry. Worrying is part of life and there just does not seem to be the facility to listen to a kids problems, npbody has time any more, folk would rather spend all thioer time driving round in cars, when walking helps dispell restlesness. Apologies for spelling errors, if any.
Yes I commented here a few months back and I would like to share some new pieces of info. Not too long after I made my first comment here, I received attacks through my old email inbox, because my partner was harassing me with bigotry, misinformation and lies… I totally blame psych. drugs for causing it. I used to put all the blame on his mother, but now I put most of the blame on the drugs he took. It’s no surprise when he told me his dosage of an antidepressant he was (or still is on, I don’t know… he’s also) was upped a couple years back, he acted funny towards me and then he ultimately decided I was a bad influence… we were on bad terms and we didn’t actually talk again until late 2011. I ceased contact with him for a while, because he was just breaking my heart. I actually tried to inform him that he’s not doing himself any good by sharing this website via email, but he ignored it all and I hope he comes around and realizes what happens. We’re no longer friends on a message board we both go on and I haven’t logged in to that board since his b-day. He actually turned 21 in case you might be wondering. I’m not sure what he’s up to, but hopefully he’s doing good and finally recognizes that psych. drugs have hurt him. I would love to get the guy I knew and loved back. No matter how long it takes for him to get better, I would love it to happen. Right now he’s got other issues to deal with like his studies and his well-being. I said the drugs permanently did damage, my intuition tells me no they have not and I feel there’s still hope for him. Any replies over this would be greatly appreciated. I’m surprised he hasn’t discovered my comment about him.
words O’ truth:
Mission Statement: The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit, non-political, non-religious mental health watchdog. Its mission to eradicate abuses committed under the guise of mental health and enact patient and consumer protections. CCHR has helped to enact more than 150 laws protecting individuals from abusive or coercive mental health practices and functions solely as a mental health watchdog, working alongside many medical professionals including doctors, scientists, nurses and those few psychiatrists who have taken a stance against the biological/drug model of “disease” that is continually promoted by the psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry as a way to sell drugs. CCHR’s Board of Advisers, called Commissioners, include doctors, scientists, psychologists, lawyers, legislators,educators, business professionals, artists and civil and human rights representatives. CCHR is a worldwide organization with over 250 chapters in 34 countries. Its international headquarters are based in Los Angeles, California.
They’re non-religious. Shows what you know. As for me i believe this site can save lives!
CORRECTION
Yes dementias can be identified through brain scans (biological evidence). The brain is dying (atrophy) or rotting if you will. Nothing can reverse this. Research has shown it can be slowed down but not cured. This is closer to an illness than that which cannot be identified through any scans, any tests etc. as for example depression, ADHD, anxiety.Psychiatrists offer up pills which makes them pill pushers and if not that the ‘talking cure’. That is not the practice of medicine and certainly psychiatry being on the lowest rung of the medical profession has not made the advances that real medical science and medical practice has.
@DavePsych, I remember meeting a clinical psychiatrist in practice for 20 yrs. on the net, he said “All day long I roll the stone up the hill, and by 4 pm. it’s rolled all the way back down”, talking about his 20 yr. results with patients. He admitted he only practices any more because “it pays the bills”. He also didn’t like being questioned by another commenter and self-righteously ‘prescribed’ him a nice big psychotropic drug to take of a certain dosage to ‘fix’ him for his bothersome posts. He also stated his summation of what 20 yrs of dealing in Psychiatry with the public had taught him about human beings, basically that ‘they have sex and kill each other” though all in profanity. Yeah, what a profession.
Medication has helped me a GREAT deal in my life.
I have chemical depression, I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and I have ADHD. These aren’t imaginary problems that just go away,they aren’t helped by just talking about them with others and they aren’t delightful little quirks I was born with that gave me individuality as a child. They ARE in-fact chemical imbalances in my brain that make me feel like crap for no real reason.
I was quite young when I was first put on medication. My parents and doctor were very supportive throughout the entire ordeal. I was told if the medication I was taking made me feel weird or not like myself I would be taken off immediately until we found something that worked, when I did, my life improved greatly. I was able to focus, I wasn’t afraid of every little thing and I wasn’t hit with bouts of intense depression that had no real cause. As I got older I learned to deal with things on my own, and I was able to slowly cut back on my medication, now I’m at the point where I barely need any at all, a few years down the line I may not need any at all.
I’m not saying it’s the be all end all answer, but it can be as useful a tool as any other method so long as it’s used with some thought, consideration and respect.
mental illness and adhd are two different things. though some mental illness is truly caused by a temporary situation(depression, post truamatic stress)most really is just an untreatable brain disorder. adhd on the other hand is how most teachers deal with a kid who doesnt pay attention. some kids are just a lot more rambunctious than others, should they be medicated? i think not. i have a child who is very high energy. we do good diet and extra athletic activities and it works well. its never just column ‘A’ or column ‘B’, but somewhere in between and its up to the parents to do the research on both sides to make an educated descision.