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Mental Ill Health

Decent Essays

In most cases today, if a person becomes physically injured or ill, they seek out treatment and recovery with a number of medical professionals that specialize in the area, often have follow up appointments to ensure progress, and are seen to until they are fully recovered. One would think the same should go ill health of the the mental and psychological state, regrettably it rarely is handled in the same way with the same degree of care. In far too many facilities, patients are prescribed drugs that can actually cause more harm than help. Kohls (2010), argues that, “Patients will be taking their (FDA) drugs for years (despite no long-term trials proving safety and efficacy) as the only "treatment" for mental ill health. They know that their …show more content…

Scientifically speaking, this is more than a totally absurd way to “treat” patients, and needs crucially to be overseen by pharmacists, neurologists, psychiatrists, etc. The writer also claims that “The truth is that most, if not all, of psychotropic drugs are lethal at some dosage level, and therefore the drugs must be regarded as dangerous. The chronic use of these drugs is a major cause of cognitive disorders, brain damage, loss of creativity, loss of spirituality, loss of empathy, loss of energy, loss of strength, fatigue and tiredness, permanent disability and a multitude of metabolic adverse effects that can readily sicken the body...causing insomnia or somnolence, increased depression or anxiety, delusions, psychoses, paranoia, mania, etc”. This very quote, no more than three sentences puts common drugs used for treating mental illness in the light. These drugs are not only dangerous, but inhumane, causing patients to develop more problems than they originally were being treated for. Forever damming them to be put in the hands of people who have not but a clue the consequences their “treatment” options cause their patients, a lifetime of mental illness and increasingly so with each new medication, and an eternity searching for answers through the void of systematic institutionalized state mental care which they may never even …show more content…

But what happens when that is cross-examined? When people who are mentally ill are being thrown out of these establishments due to lack of funding resources or what have you, there is a word for it and it is called “deinstitutionalization”, and it has happened and will continue to at this rate. “Deinstitutionalization has two parts: the moving of the severely mentally ill out of the state institutions, and the closing of part or all of those institutions. The former affects people who are already mentally ill. The latter affects those who become ill after the policy has gone into effect and for the indefinite future because hospital beds have been permanently eliminated” (Torrey, 1997). Patients, or former patients in this case, often have severe disorders and are left either to their families or on their own to cope with illnesses which they could not possibly cope with on a day to day basis while lacking proper care. As a matter of fact, a study done reports that nearly 60% of deinstitutionalized patients had been afflicted with Schizophrenia, 15% with Alzheimers or other related brain diseases, and another 15% with depressive illness. Not even mentioning the other patients, who were reported to have even more threatening conditions including drug addiction with loss of brain function, Autism, retardation, so on and so forth. These helpless individuals not only were receiving shoddy

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