- I do think there is sometimes a place for conventional medication as a short-term measure in treating mental illness, although I see the long-term use of medication as problematic.
- Occasionally, a person in an impossible situation might need long-term psychiatric medication. But these situations of true need are much rarer than people are led to think.
- Likewise, I've personally seen some children get over an obstacle in learning to read, dealing with school, etc., via Ritalin and its like, and see a place for its temporary use when nothing else works. (Not that ADD or hyperactivity are mental illnesses, of course.)
But whether we’re talking short-term or long-term treatment:
- I think pills are generally over-prescribed and misused.
- I also think mental illness is often misdiagnosed and mistreated.
- Furthermore, many—if not most—medications have not been well-tested.
Therefore, I am very much in favor of trying other options first.
And the following explains why…
Introduction
The entire push to remove this stigma and shame stems from a sincere desire to ease the distress of the sufferers and their families by making it acceptable and even laudable to get the necessary help.
To this end, we keep hearing the same mantra:
Mental illness is NO DIFFERENT than physical illness!
To some extent, this is true.
But the problem is: Who actually treats mental illness like physical illness?
Hardly anyone treats mental illness like physical illness.
Yet if we actually treated them the same, things would be a lot better!
The procedure for mental illness usually goes like this:
- (1) A parent or teacher notices disruptive behavior (or behavior somewhat irritating to that parent or teacher) OR the sufferer feels overwhelmed with emotional suffering (despair, anxiety, or mania) and seeks relief.
- (2) That person is taken to a doctor.
- (3) The doctor asks a bunch of question, which usually includes a questionnaire for the involved parties to fill in.
- (4) The doctor prescribes whatever medication the doctor learned best suits the results of the questionnaire.
The thing is, this is NOT how we treat physical illness!
If conventional doctors treated physical illness that way, they would be considered very irresponsible doctors.
So let's look at how physical illness is treated and compare it to the treatment of mental illness.
Proper Diagnosis Techniques for Physical Illness
A) seem to stick around for too long
AND/OR
B) seem very severe or unusual
...what's the first thing you do?
You get a diagnosis.
This could mean going to a conventional doctor, who likely checks your:
- temperature
- heart rate
- lungs
- throat
- any other symptomatic body parts
- blood (via a blood test to check for anomalies or deficiencies)
Or it could mean going to a holistic practitioner who arrives at a diagnosis after checking:
- your tongue
- your pulse
- your iris
- anything else deemed diagnostic
In other words, they physically examine you for physical clues that could be causing your physical illness.
They check for physical clues despite how often emotional issues cause physical ailments (like stress-induced headaches or stomachaches).
Nonetheless, a responsible doctor still checks for physical causes.
But what if conventional doctors decided not to bother with, say, a stethoscope or blood tests?
What If We Treated Physical Illness like We Treat Mental Illness?
(After all, babies also rub their ears and kvetch when they’re tired.)
Or what if a doctor gave you a antibiotics for strep throat without even looking at your throat just because your mother verbally described the symptoms?
Or you got the antibiotics because your teacher thought it was probably strep and marked the right boxes in the strep questionnaire?
What if it's not strep at all and the medication is totally superfluous (in addition to messing with your good bacteria)?
Or what if it's something worse than strep, God forbid?
Personal story:
Last year, I rushed to the doctor, desperate for antibiotics to treat what I believed was strep throat. I'd suffered many strep infections throughout life, and this seemed an exact repeat (especially the pain when swallowing).
Yet upon actually looking at my throat, the doctor diagnosed mono, not strep. I couldn't believe it and due to the extreme pain, I insisted on antibiotics.
She reluctantly yet sympathetically typed out a prescription.
Two days later, I was back — still in enormous pain — realizing she was right because the antibiotics hadn't worked one whit.
Still sympathetic, she recommended pain relievers like paracetamol or ibuprofen (which ended up being the only thing that brought any relief) and reassured me the worst would pass within a week.
She was right.
But she achieved a correct diagnosis only after looking at my throat, and not based on my description of how I felt.
Likewise, some kind of test is also involved in confirming a pregnancy, even though that is not an illness and anyway becomes pretty obvious with time.
In general, blood tests are a prime source of information for doctors.
Yet when it comes to mental illness, patients are almost always diagnosed via questionnaires.
"Well," you might say, "isn't that because it's a MENTAL illness and so there isn't a PHYSICAL test?"
Not exactly.
Mental Health Issues Also Often Result from – Or At Least are Influenced by – Physical Causes
For example, mental illnesses like depression can result from lack of vitamins, especially vitamins B and D.
Furthermore, people with the MTHFR gene defect (around 40% suffer this) appear prone to a whole range of mental health issues: depression, bipolar, ADD, ADHD, brain fog, irritability, and much more.
This genetic defect means people cannot absorb the very commonly found forms of B-12 (cyanocobalamin) and folic acid (a synthetic form of the natural folate).
Instead, they need vitamin B-12 as methylcobalamin, not cyanocobalamin, and B-9 as natural folate, not the synthetic folic acid.
Many people (including myself) experienced an unexpected recovery from depressive symptoms only hours after taken vitamin B-12 (methylcobalamin) or natural folate (rather than the synthetic folic acid).
In fact, I sometimes even get giddy after 2 days of taking only 400 mg. of folate (also known as vitamin B-9). That's how effective it is and also how much your body needs it.
(Eating healthy and avoiding sugar helps so much with MTHFR too.)
So mental-health questionnaires remain the main tool of diagnosis even for issues which doctors claim to have a physical source, like ADHD ("It's a 'neurological glitch'!") or chronic depression ("It's a 'chemical imbalance'!") or Oppositional Defensive Disorder ("The frontal lobes simply haven't developed enough before the age of twenty").
NOTE: After decades of claiming low serotonin causes depression and handing out tens of millions of prescriptions based on this claim (70.9 million in 2018 alone), researchers at University College London published in Molecular Psychiatry their discovery of NO evidence that serotonin activity affects depression:
No evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin levels
These claims of physical causes are bandied about even though there is no actual test for these, and no way to see the alleged “glitch” or “imbalance.”
Furthermore, do doctors schedule brain scans to check a teenage patient's frontal lobes (or other signs of the alleged "teen brain") before they prescribe medication?
No.
So practitioners rely solely on questionnaires to diagnose what's often considered a long-term or even lifelong illness.
They do this even when physical tests exist! (As with testing for vitamin deficiencies or MTHFR.)
They rely solely on questionnaires to prescribe medication with potentially severe — even lethal — side effects.
This is a serious mistake for two reasons we'll explore in Part 2.
But for now, we've seen how despite repeating the mantra of "Mental illness should be treated just like physical illness!", hardly anyone actually does that.
Continue on to Part 2► |