Psychotropic Drugs, According to their Users

The medicating of Americans for mental illness has continued to grow over the last decade.  And while that’s not exactly a news flash, I have seen no approach as fresh as the one taken by the folks at “CrazyMeds”.

They are not doctors.  They are presumably patients or potential patients, then, just as some doctors are or should be.  Their approach is so fresh that I am amazed to notice the grain of truth in it.  This is the same way I felt when I visited the “Psychiatry Kills” Museum in Los Angeles, operated by the Scientology folks.  They had a distorted view, but I saw where they were coming from.

Maybe too many people are getting psychiatric medications.  Surely, many more people are getting them than ever in history.  Whether you are interested in the original report from the Wall Street Journal or a delightful distillation from our friends at Fox News, it seems a reasonable conjecture that a bit much of this sort of thing is going on.  I think it has already been shown many times that drug companies are profit motivated and control research and its publications.  I have never seen as clear an antidote to this situation as the article cited above by “CrazyMeds.”  The basic idea is that if you can do the activities of basic living spelled out here, then you don’t need medications.  The activities cited, such as leaving your abode and getting to work, are things anybody would agree are part of a “normal” life.  There are friends and support groups and even psychotherapy that can help with various levels of discomfort with daily life – in other words, a lot of things and many of them free.  A perusal of the rest of the website suggests that the best drug for someone who needs one comes from choosing the best of a list of those available.  This is taken to mean the least horrible; or in other words, the one with the least side effects.

Not only do I have no argument with this, but I was actually taught this way back in the late eighties when I was taking training in psychiatry.  We were told to choose the least horrible alternative, to choose medicines by side effect profile, and to make the situation as “acceptable” as possible to the patient.  Kurt Vonnegut, the author, wrote about the psychiatrist who changed his life by treating his depression with a little bit of amphetamine.

Tricyclic antidepressants, an accidental discovery made by watching people on antituberculosis drugs get happy and start dancing, were given out only as people tolerated side effects.  Lots of my patients, when I was but a resident, decided just talk therapy would be fine, thank you very much.  Especially glamorous women who always liked anything that did not lead to weight gain, which most of this group of medications managed to do.

It is easy to see that these “psychological tests and quizzes“ that can be found online at PsychCentral — a site the CrazyMeds folk link to — has a different bias. These are basically the sort of things that drug companies give doctors free copies of to distribute to patients, or to have them do these in the waiting room.  And with delightful advances in technology, the patients can do them online, too.  The difference between the two approaches is like the difference between day and night.  You can look for mental illnesses at PsychCentral.  You can look for mental wellness at CrazyMeds.  People generally find what they are looking for.