Sunday, June 17, 2012

Psychiatric treatment today





A favourite way to treat psychiatric conditions today is to give patients Prozac or the like.
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Often these are referred to as SSRI's to give them their formal name.
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Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs) are a class of compounds typically used as anti depressants in the treatment of psychiatric conditions.
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Certainly giving someone a pill is easier and less time consuming than trying to find the underlying causes of illness.
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Takes less effort too.
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Makes more money for those involved in the chain.
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And it has the commercial advantage that once someone is on such drugs most will stay on them or others like them for long periods of time.
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Almost unnoticed doctors have medicalised psychiatric conditions. 
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They have done so by pretending that life and the world as we know it is just fine.
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Pretending that if you do not find this world today as being just fine then you are the one who has the problem.
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If living this good modern life renders you depressed.
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Or anxious.
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Or unable to concentrate.
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Or totally stressed out.
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Then, well, you've got an illness haven't you?
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They will say the problem isn't the world.
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And it isn't the life you have chosen.
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It is the chemistry of your brain.
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And by the way that can be adjusted.
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Just take these pills.
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One consequence of the killing of pain with pills.
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Whether physical or psychological, is that it makes a painful world more tolerable.
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Any society in which the intensity of discomforts and pains inflicted renders them culturally 'insufferable' could not but come to an end.
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If it were not for these pharmaceutical methods of controlling the psychological pain of living the modern life, society as we know it would quickly crumble.
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The same holds on the individual level: just as the medication of society allows it to exist at a much higher level of pain than it otherwise could.
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So does the suppression of symptoms in the individual allow life to go on as normal.
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People on SSRIs such as Prozac have told me that the medicine enables them to cope with life.
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And so it does.
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It allows life as usual to proceed.
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After a while though the side effects begin to manifest.
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Time to put you on another different pill is the standard answer.
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And for some maybe many this goes on and on, year after year.
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Functioning but never quite feeling the world.
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Always in a slight haze.
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For the lucky ones they get off pills altogether.
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And they will tell you that feeling the world with all its problems is much better than living in a haze.
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Look around you and notice how many are on pills.
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Oh you cannot see them?
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Pretty neat such a well kept secret.
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Actually it's millions and millions all around you.

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