Thank you for posting this. It's much more useful to read things I disagree with. Though skeptical, I'm not completely closed off to the idea that some psychiatric patients would do better with a...
Thank you for posting this. It's much more useful to read things I disagree with.
Though skeptical, I'm not completely closed off to the idea that some psychiatric patients would do better with a more accepting therapy that teaches them to incorporate their hallucinations/delusions into their lives instead of treating it as a medical issue that must be excised.
However, I thought that a lot of the points the author made weakened his overall thesis. It's well-known that the mechanisms of many drugs are still up for debate, but that doesn't mean that they don't work. Similarly,
The idea that my dad’s experiences represented a coherent response to a childhood of abuse and neglect, or that they represented a window onto the dangerous reality of nuclear annihilation, or that they heralded a spiritual transformation – the sorts of ideas he was receptive to in the 1970s – was utterly foreign to psychiatry’s new medical view.
This is about a man who, unfortunately, believed that a tracking device had been inserted into his anus, that his wife was secretly a government agent spying on him, and that he was communicating telepathically with a french actress. That all of this might have "represented a window onto the dangerous reality of nuclear annihilation" instead of being a medical issue is far too much of a stretch for me.
Maybe someday I’ll do a bigger write up regarding this endlessly fascinating topic. It seems to me, like with all human belief systems, that one size does not fit all. As hearing voices is a...
Maybe someday I’ll do a bigger write up regarding this endlessly fascinating topic.
It seems to me, like with all human belief systems, that one size does not fit all. As hearing voices is a pretty hard symptom to treat, trying to deal with them in some way (finding meaning and distraction in other parts of life, give the voices themselves positive meaning) is an important part of recovery, from the medical viewpoint that is.
Don’t get me wrong, antipsychotics are one of the most effective medications in whole of medicine and ideally are a part of recovery. But there’s a group that will keep symptoms and/or is hard to motivate to keep taking antipsychotics.
Thank you for posting this. It's much more useful to read things I disagree with.
Though skeptical, I'm not completely closed off to the idea that some psychiatric patients would do better with a more accepting therapy that teaches them to incorporate their hallucinations/delusions into their lives instead of treating it as a medical issue that must be excised.
However, I thought that a lot of the points the author made weakened his overall thesis. It's well-known that the mechanisms of many drugs are still up for debate, but that doesn't mean that they don't work. Similarly,
This is about a man who, unfortunately, believed that a tracking device had been inserted into his anus, that his wife was secretly a government agent spying on him, and that he was communicating telepathically with a french actress. That all of this might have "represented a window onto the dangerous reality of nuclear annihilation" instead of being a medical issue is far too much of a stretch for me.
Maybe someday I’ll do a bigger write up regarding this endlessly fascinating topic.
It seems to me, like with all human belief systems, that one size does not fit all. As hearing voices is a pretty hard symptom to treat, trying to deal with them in some way (finding meaning and distraction in other parts of life, give the voices themselves positive meaning) is an important part of recovery, from the medical viewpoint that is.
Don’t get me wrong, antipsychotics are one of the most effective medications in whole of medicine and ideally are a part of recovery. But there’s a group that will keep symptoms and/or is hard to motivate to keep taking antipsychotics.