My take on how psychiatry can be good and bad

As some of you who read my posts, you can guess that I'm not anti-psychiatry in general.
In fact, I'm quite pro-psychiatry. I just love that now I have medications, supplements and knowledge of the brain enough to... well... repair the damage other psychiatrists did (when I didn't even had a mental illness, so I feel your pain when it comes to psychiatric misconduct, negligence, abuse and incompetence). And honestly I see the enormous potential these drugs, supplements and our knowledge of how they affect us have to improve lives. Even if not of the mentally ill.

Just check [mod edit] for example. These are mostly healthy young men and women (who are in college, usually) seeking discussions to find supplements (and often meds, too) to improve their brain function (they mainly intelligence increasing supplements and drugs: nootropics). Many have mental illnesses as serious as schizophrenia, some are bipolar and they know how to make their own cocktails, to improve symptoms and desired functions in a balanced manner.

So, as you see, drugs do work. Psychiatry, big pharma, little pharma, natural pharma, asian medicine, etc., are hitting the nail when it comes to treating symptoms. Of course there are little alternatives to medications and supplements, but that's not psychiatry's fault.
It's mainly because serious, big laboratories and universities just don't receive funding enough to treat mental illnesses. You can google discoveries regarding brain or endocrinal system, or whatever, and when they're related to a mental illness, it's usually a coincidence. The aim is never to find the cure for [insert mental illness here]. People just don't want to invest in it.

If you have, say, pancreatic cancer, you're just hoping some billionaire or celebrity will get it too, so they can fund research for it. And that happens quite a lot. Now when it comes to mental illness, nobody wants to discuss it. Almost nobody wants to be seen having it. Mentally ill people are VERY, VERY stigmatized. In the US it seems that it's way less than it rest of the world... But believe me, down here all over south america, doesn't matter if you had 1 panic attack or you are tossing bricks at a church naked because the devil told you you are his son: you're crazy. Almost everyone will treat you differently and distrust you. You are a shame. You are weak. Period.

This stigma carries to the "proffessionals" who work on the mental health field. Hell, it does. I've seen it, I've suffered it. Mentally ill receive no respect. They receive no attention. They receive no empathy. People's emotional pain and ever-complex issues of the mind and life are just a day job, which they might hate. I've witnessed too how much some of them just absolutely can't STAND to be around mentally ill peple so much, taking in their problems and oddities.

I can't seem to find an article where a psychiatrist in a inward talks about how most of the staff there just refuses to be around the patients. They keep finding excuses. Lightning-fast appointments, endless meetings with each other, taking longer than it should to write paperwork, etc.. It was an american psychiatrist, and I actually witnessed those very same behaviors in a hospital here in my country. In his article, though, they want to avoid the patients desperately not only because of the job's stress, but because there's not much they can do for them there aside from meds and often people, specially those with personality disorders and schizophrenia. They're dellusioned (those who cared in the first place) with how inneffective their job is, since their patients rarely are actually well. But this has a reason: schizophrenia and personality disorders have crappy treatment available.

Now, read this:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/10/ ... .html#more

This is something psychiatrist are quite aware of. Big pharma is pushing meds too soon, and psychiatrists are accepting it too often. They know this. They have little to no alternative, though.

Psychiatrists nowadays are merely diagnosis vendors and pill dispensers. The counselling and life advice usually gets sent to the psychologists (which is a "science" that is often disproved in it's efficacy on it's own, and a lot of practicioners are the worst kind of con artist/whacko possible). Thing is, most psychologists don't even say what they can do and how much they can do.
Aka: Patient: "Doctor, I'm seeing harry potter's dementors flying around, I'm terribly depressed, I have so much anxiety and insomnia that I can't function outside of my house and all medication I've tried makes me fat, apathetic, with no cognitive ability to do my job as a accountant and sexually dysfunctional. I'm on the verge of homelessness due to this, and my narcisistical/borderline/histrionic/antisocial/psychopath of a mother doesn't let my family help me" Doctor: "Well, take this medication, it's a new one and reputed to be better than the ones you've taken. And see this guy here, he is a good therapist he can help you with your family and life by counselling."

What the doctor didn't mention, is: The medication is of the same type, similar mechanism of action, and since it's new it actually costs a whole lot of money more than the others. The reason it is reputed to be more side-effect free, is the fact that IT IS NEW. So the drug company hides many of the side effects from doctors, not enough patients have been screwed up by it (so doctors can be made aware of the damage or that patients can talk with each other about it on the internet about it). So it's the same thing, more expensive, just as innefective, just as dangerous.

And he also didn't mention that the therapist he advised likes to use a mix of some DBT, with CBT, and psychoanalysis, crystal healing, shamanistic power rays of soul reconstruction of the mind core, dynamic group primal scratching randomic kitten petting anal-focused nipple-fixated therapy and won't do much more than talk or weird crap such as this. Also, he sometimes rages at this patients for no good reason when he's not in the mood for his zen-persona.

How can this help this woman? It can't. It won't. It will take her time, it will take her money, it will cause a lot of damage on it's own even if the psychiatrist and the psychologist are perfectly well meaning and pleasant (which, a lot of the time, they're not).

This happened to me. Happened to my father's new wife. Happened to my mother. Happened to some friends. Happened to countless people on the internet I've met. Happened to a whole bunch of people all over the world who, I think, are not voicing enough the absolutely useless crap that the mental health CAN BE. And nobody is bothering to make us into a statistic often enough, it seems.

It's terrible, it's traumatizing, it drains resources, time and the life out of people who are already fragile.

Don't be totally anti-psychiatry, it can help.

But, it can also improve greatly.