2 Stages of Psychiatric "Advancement"

Stage 1: deny that the novel approach for treatment is damaging or dangerous, and ineffective.
Stage 2: about 10 years later, acknowledge problems with old technology from stage 1, but claim that a novel approach has just been discovered that is truly effective, not damaging or dangerous.

This is what has been happening for a long time - see the video referred to me by HaxX on another thread on this forum (I think everyone at psychforums - who is strong enough - should be encouraged to see it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvdBSSUviys

Here's just a few examples that they gave in that video:

- Drowning with resuscitation - many died but this eventually ended
- electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) - brought back later, but was replaced at one point
- Labotomy - over a million performed before this was found to be damaging and useless
- Thorazine - abnormal jerks often due to permanent brain damage
- mood stabilizers, etc. - based on the "chemical imbalance" myth, this is a current approach that's hitting younger people every decade.

My bet is prozac will go down soon... See for example the article at: (it's a great read btw)

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/inf ... 0050045#s4

Rest of the current "leading" approaches will be replaced by something less obviously wrong (most likely). All we know is that the two stages will continue for a while.

Its a business plan that works.

Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design is a policy of planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer functional after a certain period of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence



Estimates of planned obsolescence can influence a company's decisions about product engineering. Therefore, the company can use the least expensive components that satisfy product lifetime projections. Such decisions are part of a broader discipline known as value engineering.

Ian Reynir wrote:Thorazine

That doesn't mean that thorazine isn't used anymore, or that it's ineffective. I take it as needed and find it very helpful. I understand from where you were taking this as it was widely used at high doses as a "cure all" and without regard to the danger of tardive dyskinesia. I just thought I should put it out there that it is still used, and can be an effective drug if someone so chooses. They should definitely be aware of the risks however.

Prozac etc may well go down, due to studies about neurotoxicity and long term downregulation, but theres not really much to replace it TBH. Maybe dopamine based drugs. The newer serenic class of drugs is the frontier in anti-depressants, but it remains to be seen whether these are marketable or viable or not, i can imagine reasons why they might be contraversial in practice.

Of course the newer mood stabilisers all have pretty crazy side effects, as well as the newer anti-psychotics. And I am doubtful they will be replaced any time soon either.

In fact I wonder if this is where psychiatry will first fall over - and inability to keep ahead of future damning medical research. Say somebody studies for example, a completely controlled long term study on anti-epilipetics for bi-polar, or anti-psychotics for schizophrenia, and finds strong evidence of down-regulation.....once news and talk of such spread, its hard to imagine them just pushing a new drug, if they can even come up with one, and would seem more likely the whole model would need to change.

Of course, drug companies would never do such research. But eventually they will still get done.