I came on a little strong at the end of my response because, as someone who suffered from undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, untreated, and wrongly treated mental illnesses for most of my life — for over four decades — and who intimately knows people with such illnesses who refuse to seek or continue treatment, I am very sensitive when it comes to the topic of psychiatric medications. I am especially concerned about the claim that all mental conditions can or should be solely controlled with psychotherapy, lifestyle changes, and nutritional supplements. The latter are often falsely believed to be superior to pharmaceuticals simply because they are presumed to be “natural.”
This belief particularly irks me because the fact is our bodies could care less from where a substance originates. The important factor when ingesting anything — including food — is: Does it cause harm or good? Does it do what you want it to do or not? In too many instances this question is ignored or replaced with “Is it natural?” which is a meaningless concern from a purely biological standpoint when it comes to the chemical reactions a substance causes within an individual’s body.
From my vantage point as a mental health patient and someone who knows several people who should be one, far more mentally ill people are harmed by refusing to seek or continue treatment for their conditions because of the above views and mental illness stigma than are harmed due to being overly medicated. This is true simply because the majority of people with mental illnesses are not treated at all, let alone treated improperly.
So I urge caution when it comes to suggesting that mental health medications are over-prescribed. I don’t say that they can’t be. I know they are sometimes and that, even more often, mental health patients are given the wrong medication and their conditions are made worse because of it.
For the sake of brevity, I simply suggest you look into Dr. Daniel Amen. The Wikipedia article about him provides a good overview, including the fact the the conventional medical community looks unfavorably upon his practices. Given that, I strongly suggest you search for patient reviews. I suspect most of Amen’s patients are like me; we are people who suffered for years with our conditions and did not respond to conventional treatments.
Medical insurers don’t cover visits to one of Amen’s six clinics and the visits are cost prohibitive for most people. One reason the medical establishment looks down on Amen is that he makes a lot of money doing what he does — including selling nutritional products and popular books. Another reason is he won’t share his collection of hundreds of thousands of brain images. I’m not sure why he doesn’t, although I speculate it has to do with profit. I definitely think he should because it’s not in keeping with the fundamental purpose of his profession — to help and heal — to keep these images to himself.
However, regarding profit, the top hospitals in our country shamelessly make tons of money, as do insurance, pharmaceutical, and nutritional supplement companies, and, when it comes to the hospitals, no one claims they are harmful simply because of their fat bottom lines. No one says this even when these very same hospitals sometimes irrefutably harm patients— especially those of color or who are lower income and can’t afford teams of lawyers to take on gargantuan healthcare conglomerates. But I digress.
In summary, once again, I suggest you investigate Daniel Amen. Check out what his patients say about the results of his methods and consider the source when reading what conventional medical practitioners and researchers have to say about him.
I stand by my original statement: It should go without saying that psychiatrists should, at the very least, be authorities on the vital organ from which their patients’ illnesses originate — the human brain, the organ that controls all others and influences our thoughts and behaviors. The fact that the majority of psychiatrists do not know what the relationship between their patients’ brains and illnesses is is absurd, not the fact that Amen does.
Fortunately for me, most of the psychiatrists I’ve seen since my visit to the Amen clinic have been fresh out of medical school and, because they aren’t entrenched in old ways, have been intrigued by and receptive to Amen’s ideas. Because of their open-mindedness regarding novel medical approaches, I believe the future of their profession looks brighter than ever.
(Updated August 29, 2017 because I originally stated that Dr. Daniel Amen doesn’t share his research, which is false. -M. LaVora Perry)
