Age of Antidepressants Our world has come to a point in history where we rely heavily on pills and therapy and diagnosis and doctors and studies, just to tell us what’s wrong with our personalities and our brains – for what? So pills can be prescribed and therapy revived for the diagnosis doctors proclaimed, backed up by studies they never named, all so they can keep their jobs? There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the excessive diagnosis apart from the goal of expanding one’s practice. Clinical studies are often discovered to be biased, or data manipulated. Whether the focus is on teenage trauma or debilitating depression, professionals tend to overlook important factors of influence. An array of sources have taken to this subject including a psychiatrist based in Berkley, a featured neuroscientist on TedTalk, a cartoonist named Mike Baldwin, and an analysis by s.e. smith. Seemingly, the age …show more content…
It demonstrates what most people expect an antidepressant to do, when in reality, over a long period of months it only stabilizes serotonin levels. The irony in this cartoon is purposeful because although doctors list off side effects and tell individuals what the medication does, people go into the psychiatrist with a set idea of an immediate cure. When results do not occur within the span of a week, they often reject the drug as successful, and end up back in the waiting room. In this way Baldwin shares Elson’s ideology that Americans living in today’s society do not want to put in the effort needed to cure themselves, they want a drug to do it for them. With media increasingly portraying medication as a magical cure to everyone’s problems, doctors find it increasingly hard to decipher whether or not medication is actually working; furthermore, determining if the individual is depressed or just going through a rough patch
Humans who are being over diagnosed with disorders, causes the spending of too much money on drugs and medication that could be harmful and is not needed for them to take. The objective of this book is to let people become aware of what is going on around the world. The audience that this book aims towards is the public. The main objective of Dr. Frances is to alert the public, health care professionals and clinicians about the misinformed diagnosis of people and the misdirected treatment and medications that are prescribed to people who are “normal.” Everyday pains and suffering are being diagnosed as mental illnesses and disorders. Psychiatry has specified people with false labels. The first of many arguments is that people are very worried that when a new disorder is brought up, that they have this disorder or illness. Another argument in this book is the misdiagnosis between mental disorder and normality. Many people who experience completely normal grief could be mislabeled as having a psychiatric problem. The next argument is to separate the people who have diseases from normality. Allen Frances blames the internet and social networking for the over diagnosis of mental disorder. This book is also about the high percentage of people who are now diagnosed with a mental illness,
In the film, the mental health professionals acknowledged this irony, however they misdiagnosed three of the five participants with a mental illness. I valued the mental health professional’s credentials and felt their status would lead to a high percentage of proper diagnoses. The result of the professionals mislabeling two of the ten participants with a history of mental illness, made me aware that a certain amount of experience, education, or status does not prevent
Andrew Solomon is known to be a writer, lectures, and Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia. His experience includes writing about politics, culture and psychology, stated in TED. Throughout TED talks, “Depression, the secret we share”, Solomon argues that depression can be devoting causing a person to become weak, lose interest, which can lead to one feeling defeated. He puts forth his argument predominantly through the use of Pathos and Ethos.
Research Question: Are antidepressants being over prescribed, if so what other options do doctors have and what should they be considering?
Today, mental illness has been the scapegoat for most crimes today. From mass shootings to bombings, most people have blamed mental illness for the cause of these crimes. Moreover, even some defense attorneys have even had cases in which they claimed their client had a mental illness in order to receive a lesser sentence. However, in order to truly understand mental illness, we must first look at the history of people studying the brain. The history of the study of the brain, psychology, dates back to ancient Greece. By using the scientific reasoning, Hippocrates speculated that human temperament can vary by a person's physical qualities, such as yellow bile or too much blood (Smith). Many philosophers during this time period might have only
The pertinent findings will be explained, and their implications on future anti-depressants will be addressed.
This can make it difficult to tell precisely which drug is affecting an individual’s emotions. Doctors do, however, have a pretty good idea of what each narcotic can do due to research in individuals that have taken one drug at a time.
Eric G. Wilson was born in 1967, and attended Appalachian State University, Wake Forest University, and the City University of New York where he gained a Ph.D. Wilson is currently a professor at Wake Forest University who teaches courses on British and American Romanticism. He has written many books, and “The Miracle of Melancholia” was published in the Los Angeles Times. I have never really thought too much about the effects that sadness can have on people, especially the positive effects. After reading the first paragraph of this piece, I was a little skeptical but as I continued to read, the author’s argument further developed and I now agree that sadness can have positive effects.
It is sometimes argued that “the creators of DSM-III and DSM-IV sacrificed validity for the sake of reliability”(Wakefield, 1992, cited in Gray, 2002, p 614). This refers to greater emphasis being placed upon superficial symptoms and less upon underlying symptoms and possible cause which could have an important influence upon individuals (Gray, 2002). Since behavior always involve interaction between the individual and their environment, it can be difficult to assess whether the disorder is within the person or whether it is an environmental influence such as a traumatic experience or related to poverty (Gray, 2002, p.612). This can cause problems when diagnosing is extremely difficult to scientifically distinguish between people’s normal responses or whether it is something more (Gray, 2002).
By making depression seem ambiguous and less severe than it really is, the general population became more inclined to use the antidepressants. By depicting depression as kokoro no kaze, “it implied that [depression] was not the severe condition it was once thought to be and therefore should carry no social stigma…[and] suggested that the choice of taking a medication for depression should be as simple and worry-free as buying a cough syrup or an antihistamine” (Watters 524). The last message portrayed to the general public is the phrase “depression [is] ubiquitous” (Watters 525). By using the analogy to connect the common cold to depression, GlaxoSmithKline downplayed the severity of the mental illness and as a result, made the general population more open to acknowledging the possibility of having a mental illness and thus making depression a social and societal norm. “Depression was so broadly defined by the marketers that it clearly encompassed classic emotions and behaviors formerly attributed to the melancholic personality type” (Watters 525). Depression became “intentionally ambiguous and ill-defined, applicable to the widest possible population and to the widest possible range of discomforts…. The only feature that distinguishes depression as a ‘disease’ from an ordinary depressed mood seems to be the length of time…” (Watters
A debate rages in psychology. It is not one of the usual kind, dwelling on a specific aspect of the mind or a new drug, but a controversy dealing with the very foundations of psychology. The issue is determining how psychologists should treat patients and on what psychologists base their choices. Some feel that they must be empirically-supported treatments, treatments backed by hard data and scientifically supported. Others feel that this standard for treatments is much too confining for the complex field of psychology and that many good treatments cannot be backed by hard data. The American Psychological Association President Task Force on Evidence-Based Treatment came out with a plan for psychology that effectively maintains a high
This is an accurate representation of medication for depression. It does not make you want to live, it does not fix your thinking, it just makes you functional. It allows you to do things you wouldn’t usually be able to, and maybe after a while you will be able to function on your own.
This article, published by CNN, covers a topic that was thrown into the spotlight following the release of the fourth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM IV, and has been heavily discussed as the release date of DSM V approaches. The article, which is supported by anti-DSM experts, theorizes that the medical community is over diagnosing patients with mental illnesses at an unprecedented rate. Unfortunately, the experts provide an extensive amount of bias to the article, which is clear by examining the antithesis to their arguments. Three clear examples of bias are the statements of Dr. Carroll, Kelli Montgomery, and the articles overall focus on the DSM. The bias
Common types of medication include POM (prescription only medication) which can be obtained from a pharmacist only if prescribed by a doctor. These could include anti-depressants which are very common. Anti-depressants work by selecting receptors in the brain and controls levels of serotonin. They come under the group 'SSRIS' (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). Over the counter medicines (OTC) may include things like paracetamol or ibuprofen, which are everyday painkillers. Something like paracetamol inhibits the production of pain and inflammation-causing chemicals called prostaglandins.
That science has allowed us to live in great material comfort but failed to provide true peace of mind points to the incomplete truths of scientific “objectivity.” Dr. Habib Davanloo, psychiatrist in the psychoanalytic vein and referred to as “Freud on steroids,” admits the one-sidedness of his clinical interventions. In the doctor’s often-successful attempts to liberate patients to experience their feelings and impulses, the demand to use techniques that forego objective truth often arises. Arriving at a simpler, emotional truth, Dr. Davanloo means, sometimes requires ignoring the fact that the objective truth is never black and white, is never “pure” (Unlocking the Unconscious, 257).