Como o Psychiatry é Medicating um a nação
Quinta-feira, abril 17o, 2008O barbeiro de Charles do autor discute noções unrealistic dos americanos' sobre a felicidade. Nós temos medicalized muitos das edições da vida que não são doenças mentais.
Quando nós nos tornarmos agora accustomed ao barrage de comerciais da droga da prescrição na tevê do principal-tempo, está rangendo para aprender que esta que anuncia é legal somente nos Estados Unidos e na Nova Zelândia. A indústria pharmaceutical não americanos justos do alvo gasta diretamente, mas também aproximadamente $25.000 por o médico por o ano. Com o dae (dispositivo automático de entrada) da informação das companhias de mineração dos dados, um representante pharmaceutical sabe exatamente quantas prescrições para que medication um doutor escreveu, permitindo que a indústria as alveje individualmente.
Como os americanos vieram a este relacionamento fraught com a indústria pharmaceutical e suas drogas - particularmente antidepressivos - é o assunto do livro novo do barbeiro de Charles, Confortavelmente Numb. Um veteran de programas mentais da saúde nos abrigos desabrigados e um lecturer no psychiatry na escola da universidade de Yale da medicina, barbeiro treinam seu olho à afluência da ciência e da cultura que conduziram a prescrever difundido dos medications reservados uma vez para os casos os mais sérios.
Quando o campo do neuroscience continuar a churn para fora dados novos sobre a maneira nosso trabalho de cérebros, o barbeiro é rápido lembrar-nos quanto mais deve ser compreendida ainda. O barbeiro falou recentemente com o AlterNet sobre como os tratamentos mais menos sexy como intervenções e terapias sociais podem ser justos como eficazes em mudar o cérebro.
Onnesha Roychoudhuri: Que lhe conduziu escrever o livro?
Barbeiro de Charles: Quando eu comecei no campo mental da saúde nos 80's atrasados não havia realmente um nome para o que eu. Se eu falasse aos povos profissionais, educados, não compreenderam diagnósticos psychiatric ou medications. Então, 10 anos mais tarde, os povos estavam muito acima em diagnósticos, eram sympathetic a o que eu fazia, e havia agora um nome para o campo: saúde mental. Muitos deles faziam exame dos mesmos medications que meus clientes eram. Havia umas séries dos eventos sobre os 80's atrasados e os 90's adiantados que se ajustaram todo o de que acima. A coisa principal que é Prozac e seus primos Paxil e Zoloft, que se tornaram totalmente mainstream; 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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