isnt psichiatry meds like giving homosexuals hormones

Anicca108 wrote:This is a false equivalency.

You do have the right to not take medication, however.

Parador wrote:Homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness. Then it was voted out of existence as a mental illness by the shrinks who write the DSM. That's how they decide what is mental illness - by just voting on it. It's ridiculous.

The study's lead author concluded that such connections are troubling because pharmaceutical firms "have a vested interest in what mental disorders are included in the DSM." Critics of the manual have charged that some of its diagnoses, such as social anxiety disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, are pretexts for prescribing profitable drugs like Zoloft and Effexor. Their claims prompt a question: How do new ailments make it into the DSM, and who decides?

One of the leaders of modern psychiatry, Leon Eisenberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins and then Harvard Medical School, who was among the first to study the effects of stimulants on attention deficit disorder in children, wrote that American psychiatry in the late twentieth century moved from a state of “brainlessness” to one of “mindlessness.” By that he meant that before psychoactive drugs (drugs that affect the mental state) were introduced, the profession had little interest in neurotransmitters or any other aspect of the physical brain. Instead, it subscribed to the Freudian view that mental illness had its roots in unconscious conflicts, usually originating in childhood, that affected the mind as though it were separate from the brain.

But with the introduction of psychoactive drugs in the 1950s, and sharply accelerating in the 1980s, the focus shifted to the brain. Psychiatrists began to refer to themselves as psychopharmacologists, and they had less and less interest in exploring the life stories of their patients. Their main concern was to eliminate or reduce symptoms by treating sufferers with drugs that would alter brain function. An early advocate of this biological model of mental illness, Eisenberg in his later years became an outspoken critic of what he saw as the indiscriminate use of psychoactive drugs, driven largely by the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry.