Comment la psychiatrie traite avec des médicaments une nation
Le coiffeur de Charles d'auteur des notions peu réalistes discute Américains' au sujet de bonheur. Nous avons medicalized beaucoup de questions de la vie qui ne sont pas des maladies mentales.
Tandis que nous nous sommes maintenant habitués au barrage des films publicitaires de drogue de prescription le principal-temps TV, il cogne pour apprendre que ce qui annonce est légal seulement les Etats-Unis et Nouvelle Zélande. L'industrie pharmaceutique pas les Américains simplement de cible dépense directement, mais également approximativement $25.000 par médecin par an. À l'aide de l'information des compagnies d'exploitation de données, un représentant pharmaceutique sait exactement combien de prescriptions pour quel médicament un docteur a écrit, permettant à l'industrie de les viser individuellement.
Comment les Américains sont venus à ce rapport chargé avec l'industrie pharmaceutique et ses drogues - en particulier antidépresseur - est le sujet livre du coiffeur de Charles du nouveau, Confortablement engourdi. Un vétéran des programmes mentaux de santé dans les abris sans foyer et un conférencier en psychiatrie à l'école d'université de Yale de la médecine, coiffeur forme son oeil au confluent de la science et de la culture qui ont mené à la prescription répandue des médicaments une fois réservés pour les cas les plus sérieux.
Tandis que le champ de la neurologie continue à battre dehors de nouvelles données au sujet de la manière notre travail de cerveaux, le coiffeur est rapide pour nous rappeler combien plus coûte être compris encore. Le coiffeur a récemment parlé avec AlterNet au sujet de la façon dont les traitements moins sexy comme des interventions et des thérapies sociales peuvent être justes comme efficaces en changeant le cerveau.
Onnesha Roychoudhuri : Que vous a mené à écrire le livre ?
Coiffeur de Charles : Quand j'ai commencé dans le domaine mental de santé vers la fin des années 80 il n'y avait pas vraiment un nom pour ce que je. Si je parlais aux personnes professionnelles et instruites, elles n'ont pas compris des diagnostics psychiatriques ou des médicaments. Puis, 10 ans après, les gens étaient très vers le haut sur des diagnostics, ils étaient bien disposés à ce que je faisais, et il y avait maintenant un nom pour le champ : santé mentale. Bon nombre d'entre eux prenaient les mêmes médicaments que mes clients étaient. Il y avait des séries d'événements au cours des années 80 en retard et du début des années 90 qui ont placé tout vers le haut dont. La chose principale étant Prozac et ses cousins Paxil et Zoloft, qui sont devenus totalement traditionnels ; 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, 2008 at 9:48 pm and 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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