The New York Times has an interesting article, Did Antidepressants Depress Japan? I especially like the experience of Mitake on the last page. After months of treatment, he attended a fasting retreat for a week and it “broke the cycle.”
The great problem with the pharmaceutical treatment of mental illness is that the complexity of the tools is not nearly up to the complexity of the system it is trying to treat. Try to fix your automobile with a stone hand-axe and see how far you get.
A lot of mental illness is undeniably biochemical in origin. Many of the kids here at work have histories of head wounds or the use of inhalants. They are on the low end of the IQ scale (though theoretically above a minimum of 70). At the same time, though, the relational side of mental illness is probably more important. Almost without exception the kids have had someone actively working to make them crazy.
Drugs can appear to have a positive effect, but we usually do not know enough about the brain to be able to say exactly what they are doing. Are they curing an imbalance or are they changing behavior by damaging some part of the brain? The later is probably true a good deal of the time. And while that may mask a problem, it can wind up causing results like this.
A treatment regime on the proper level of complexity would, in my opinion, first address things like diet and exercise. Good food, hard work, and lots of sun. (All usually inadequate in the institutional setting.) More important is establishing good relationships. Effective treatment would also consist of good friends and loving family – the human brain is the best tool for fixing the human brain. That is certainly impossible to provide by the medical community, but whatever approximation is possible needs to be attempted.
One important point, I think, is for doctors to let patients know that a lifestyle change may be the best and safest treatment. Instead, the patient often comes away with the impression that all their problems can be solved with a pill. One of our psychiatrists compares his arsenal of drugs to an electrician’s toolbox. All it takes is the right combination of tools and tinkering to solve the problem, he claims. That is rarely true.
Posted by Thrasymachus at 02:46 AM