quote:
AHunter3 (I'll come up with a cute contraction of yer name when I'm less exhausted), are you saying that my brain chemistry is not the cause of my problems? If that were the case why would some medications help me and others not?
Yes, that's what I'm saying. You don't suffer from a Thorazine deficiency disease (or any more modern analogue thereof).
If you pause and think on it, I'm sure you'll realize the logical fallacy of concluding that the field of psychiatry must be correct in their diagnostic and etiological theory because their pills help you out. [If X then Y. Given Y, is X true?]
Obviously, if you have found a medication that helps you cope, this is a good thing. You are having a need met.
But none of the existing psychiatric medications are clever little "magic bullet" pills that intervene in a specific and known brain or nerve process so as to alleviate a specific and known neurological disorder that constitutes a specifically isolated "mental illness". What they do instead is interrupt, on a pretty broad scale, what nerve cells do. Over the course of the last 50 years, there has been some progress, albeit limited, in devising pharmaceuticals that intervene more effectively with neural tissues that deal with thoughts and feelings and less effectively with motor and sensory neural tissues, but they are still pretty blunt and general in their neuroleptic activity. Of course, that assumes that you have been placed on an "antipsychotic". Other medications, such as SSRIs, have a different action, although often just as globally systemic in their effect on the body.
Minor differences exist between how your body and mind react to, say, a butyrophenone neuroleptic as opposed to a phenothiazine neuroleptic or a monoaminooxidase inhibitor. Different people react differently to different drugs. Your shrink, if you have a decent one, will try to find a chemical that reduces your unpleasant symptoms the best along with the fewest side effects.
Original SDMB thread - The Role of Culture in Mental Illness
See my next post on this same thread
See my previous post on this same thread