Cómo la psiquiatría es Medicating a la nación
Jueves 17 de abril de 2008El peluquero de Charles del autor discute las nociones poco realistas a americanos' sobre felicidad. Tenemos medicalized muchos de las ediciones de la vida que no son enfermedades mentales.
Mientras que hemos hecho acostumbrados ahora a la presa de los anuncios de la droga de la prescripción el el primero-tiempo TV, está sacudiendo para aprender que esto que anuncia es legal solamente en los Estados Unidos y Nueva Zelandia. La industria farmacéutica no los americanos justos de la blanco directamente, pero también pasa áspero $25.000 por médico por año. Con la ayuda de la información de las compañías de explotación minera de los datos, un representante farmacéutico sabe exactamente cuántas prescripciones para qué medicación ha escrito un doctor, permitiendo que la industria las apunte individualmente.
Cómo los americanos vinieron a esta relación cargada con la industria farmacéutica y sus drogas - particularmente antidepresivos - es el tema del libro nuevo del peluquero de Charles, Comfortablemente entumecido. Un veterano de los programas mentales de la salud en los abrigos sin hogar y un conferenciante en psiquiatría en la escuela de la universidad de Yale de la medicina, peluquero entrena a su ojo a la confluencia de la ciencia y de la cultura que han conducido a prescribir extenso de las medicaciones reservadas una vez para los casos más serios.
Mientras que el campo de la neurología continúa batiendo hacia fuera nuevos datos sobre la manera nuestro trabajo de cerebros, el peluquero es rápido recordarnos cuánto más debe todavía ser entendida. El peluquero habló recientemente con AlterNet sobre cómo los tratamientos menos atractivos como intervenciones y terapias sociales pueden ser justos como eficaces en cambiar el cerebro.
Onnesha Roychoudhuri: ¿Qué le condujo a escribir el libro?
Peluquero de Charles: Cuando comencé en el campo mental de la salud en los últimos años 80 no había realmente un nombre para lo que lo hice. Si hablé con la gente profesional, educada, ella no entendía diagnosis psiquiátricas o medicaciones. Entonces, 10 años más adelante, la gente estaba muy para arriba en diagnosis, ella era comprensiva a lo que hacía, y ahora había un nombre para el campo: salud mental. Muchos de ellos tomaban las mismas medicaciones que eran mis clientes. Había series de acontecimientos sobre los últimos años 80 y los años 90 tempranos que fijaron todo el encima de que. La cosa principal que es Prozac y sus primos Paxil y Zoloft, que llegaron a ser totalmente de corriente; the TV advertising of drugs in the mid-’90s, well-known figures going public with their clinical depression, and a lot of subsequent pop culture stuff: The Sopranos and A Beautiful Mind, for example. All of this brought psychiatry, particularly medications, into the fore.
OR: Can you talk about your involvement in the mental health field and what it has enabled you to observe?
CB: I fell into the field for a lot of different reasons. I worked in psychiatric homeless shelter programs for about 10 years in New York — Bellevue being the most well-known. So I was working with the really seriously mentally ill, many of whom had been in and out of prisons and state psychiatric facilities and homeless shelters. What I found was that psychiatry, at least for certain diagnoses, has confused the really serious forms of the illness with the far lesser forms. The best example is depression. Many of the folks that I worked with suffered from severe depression. I make the distinction in the book between big “D” depression and small “d” depression. In its severe forms, it’s an absolutely brutal, horrific and malevolent illness where people are at dire risk of hurting themselves.
It’s jarring to go to a cocktail party and hear people talking about being bummed out or hear that they’re going through a divorce, and their family doctor put them on an antidepressant. There has been a confusion and conflation of this diagnosis that confuses serious disorders with far lesser conditions or, in many cases, life problems. We’ve medicalized a lot of life issues that are not mental illnesses.
OR: Just to be clear, this book is not about medication as a “bad” thing.
CB: Absolutely not. I think I make clear in the book that for serious disorders, I’ve seen the medications work really, really well. However, there are often side effects that the field has overlooked and is becoming more aware of these days. And these medications still don’t work a good percentage of the time for people with serious disorders. My critique is that the further you get away from serious or moderate disorders, where you’re treating nondisorders or marginal disorders with medication, the risk/reward calculus of the medications becomes more iffy — particularly antidepressants.
When the SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft and Paxil first came out, they were considered pretty much side-effect-free, largely because the previous generation of antidepressants had a lot of side effects. But in the past few years, people have become more aware that they have more side effects. These effects are seen most when people are getting on and off the drugs.
OR: You write that, in 2002, more than 11 percent of American women and five percent of American men were taking antidepressants. I was struck by the high percentages, but also the fact that more than 1 in 10 women are on these medications.
See More:Health News USA NewsHave Your Say: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation
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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008at 9:48 pmand is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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