Mental Illness

Congress debates what it is and what can be done about it. Specialists testify. Yet there seems to be no agreement about mental illness forthcoming. In the literature there are those who claim it is biochemical only; there are those who claim it is a social problem only; and there are those such as Dr. Szasz who claim that the DSM is bloated with attempts to diagnose and prescribe for every tic and terror known to mankind.

Nowadays the mentally ill are not warehoused in “snake pit” sanitariums. They are not sterilized or lobotomized. These ways of attacking the problem are gone. Yet, the beliefs that made such therapies possible still prevail. They are just sanitized.

One hears via news media of the woman who drowned her children in Texas and pleads the “insanity defense”. One hears of the youth who murdered his grandparents and blames Zoloft. One watches movies and t.v. shows that inevitably show how someone who is mentally ill committed the most heinous crimes.

Families in the USA, touched by mental illness, continue to see the problem as a private shame. Religious fanatics continue to exacerbate the family ignorance by telling them that the illness is due to demon possession or lack of faith in God. Government agencies, elected to consider the problem, face limited financial resources which curtails their help. Medicare, for example, finds mental illness only about half as worthy of financial assistance with doctor and prescription bills as physical illnesses are.

As one who suffers from mental illness, I’ve met most of the rational and irrational objections for dealing with the disease compassionately. I’ve been told that it amounts to laziness, lack of faith in God, attempts to find leverage for my wants, etc., etc., etc. This is the 21st century. Have we learned so little so far about mind/brain dysfunction?

Isn’t it delightful how the graduality of justice and progress is not about realizing idiocy and changing them. Instead it’s about realizing idiocy and slowly watering it down as people pile on pressure.

How was shock treatment, lobotomy, bleeding, burning EVER JUSTIFIED!? Even the followers of their insane inventors couldn’t have possibly thought this made any sense. They just wanted money.

Likewise- “insanity” can only be brought into play in cases of “cure me please - I’m not sure what’s wrong” or strange ciminality.

I’m starting to think we need a line of famous anti-philosophers throughout history. People that were enemies of thought and progress.

Gaia,
Thanks for your response. From the lack of other responses it seems that the matter of mental illness is irrelevant to psychology, at least, here, in a psychology forum.

Paul, Luther, the Spanish Inquisitiors, Bush.

I think that too much socially constructed mental illness is bad for society at large. It’s good for researchers and drug companies, but bad for families because it stigmatizes them. Another big problem is that it weakens our notions of personal accountability and provides (in some cases) justification for all sorts of unacceptable behavior. If you start telling a kid when they’re 12 that all the bad things they do are because they’re bi-polar, then what kind of adult are you going to end up with?
There is far too much coddling in our society. Nothing is anyone’s fault anymore. On top of that, these cases take away resources and general credibility (or at least alot of attention) from things like mental retardation and serious undeniable cases of real mental illness. Too many people don’t like their boss or their financial situation or the fact that they’re too lazy to do what it takes to have the life that they want and just start taking anti depressants and xanax. Once they make that move, they’ll never have the life they want in most cases and then they feel even worse about themselves because they’re already feeling stigmatized then they realize that the hope they had in medicine was false.

People aren’t compassionate for different reasons, but one is that they think that people abuse the insanity defense to escape from responsibility and another is people think that we’re too compassionate and that some people who are treated for mental illness needed to be treated more firmly.

I think most of the apprehention societally is the widespread ‘diagnosis’ of mental illness. With the widening of categories of mental illness have caused many people to have a ‘diagnosis’ of a mental illness. I meet the categories for anxiety problems and add; I have neither to any degree that requires treatment or therapy. This has lead to the general degredation of the cause of psychological disorders when compared next to some of the physical illnesses that can dabilitate people. When 10 people have ‘premenstral disphoric disorder’ the one who has schizophrenia doesn’t look as credible, they are ‘just another crazy’ to have some pills thrown at them and kicked out.

As for the religious reasons, I think the issue is relativly unique to the U.S. As for your question the answer for many of them is yes, they have learned that little or less about the brain because science is evil. It is a sad state of affairs that they are the policy makers in many areas.

Wait… did you just say Luther was against thought and progress? or Paul for that matter?

But good call on Bush. Although I don’t know if he is an enemy of thought, or just ignorant to it.

Your ideas, although valid to a point, confuse the situation and put undue burdens of those who actually suffer from mental ilness. Who is the determiner of what is real and what is fake? They sound more parental than prescriptive. Check out NAMI for the real status of mental illness in the US. Also, I’m dismayed by posts from those who seem to know what this is all about without having done any research or without having personal experience. If I wanted parental fascism, the church would do!

The problem is that there does need to be a certain level of “parental fascism” in this situation. The question is: to what end? From what I’ve read (and it has been relatively limited), most reasonable people recognize that the cause(s) of mental illness lie somewhere in the middle. I can’t imagine anyone seriously arguing that fetal alcohol syndrome is genetic (though, its penetrance may be) and I don’t think anyone would argue that 22q13 deletion syndrome, or Fanconi anemia are environmental disorders.

But those are some obvious ‘hard hitters’, and most mental illness in the US deals with far more subtle issues. A lot of these, more subtle issues, I think are more a problem because Big Pharma says they are more than they actually are a problem. Talk ADD, for instance. From what I’ve read, IF this disorder exists (and there are credible individuals who say it doesn’t), most researchers agree it should it something around 2-0.1% of the population, maybe less. So why it is perscriped at a rate of 3-12% for school aged children? Especially since this disease is supposed to be a life-long ailment.

The answer, of course, it pretty obvious. If you put a child with ADD on amphetamine, they will become more focused and well behaved. If you put a child without ADD on amphetamine, they will become more focused and well behaved. What parent doesn’t want their child to be smarter and more docile? Of course, I’ve argued before that promoting virtue by removal of vice is not a sustainable long-term strategy and I think that promoting good behavior through use of drugs is, likewise, not a sustainable strategy.

However, since our mind is a physical thing, it follows that problems of the mind can be fixed through drug use. The questions are: 1) who is defining these problems? 2) What are the implications of this for human dignity?

I think a lot of your answers could fall out of one simple realization: that people purchasing these drugs makes some people VERY rich.

Why is the prescription rate so high for children who could not all have this disorder? Because people are willing to spend any amount of money to assure their child’s ‘health’, people will take chances and carefully evaluate their own situation.

Who is defining these problems? Well, look at what GSK did to have the condition social anxiety disorder approved (which evidently I have), and what the #! treatment is for it: GSK’s own Paxil.

What are the implications of this for human dignity? Surely you jest? In today’s North American culture (as many people her will point out) you are no longer a person with dignity to preserve, but merely a consumer. At least from the perspective of the companies as long as you are buying drugs everything else be damned. As for what actually happens to human dignity, I think those days are long gone: we are now identified by what we are, not who we are. Doctors now commonly refer to patients by condition instead of name when not in their prescence.

Sad state of affairs to say the least.

I couldn’t agree more.

The problem isn’t we have learned so little about the human brain. The problem may be there is so much to learn about the human brain. It’s not right to call our knowledge of the mind lacking because if we didn’t know anything about it or the cause of mental illness we would still be sticking leaches to mentally ill patients to suck out the devil, or whatever. The fact is constant advances in the human mind and researching mental illness have led to a creation of many techniques to deal with the illnesses.

Do you think that people who are prescribed benzodiazapines and amphetamines are being dealt with properly? It seems like in alot of cases the answer is just to sedate the person or load them up with speed. I don’t think trading in anxiety or hyperactivity for some of the most addictive drugs in the world which are known to cause all sorts of chaos in the lives of many people is a very good deal. I’d rather be a little nervous than be forgetfull and lethargic and constantly sedated and unable to have meaningful relationships of even contemplate the real cause of my angst and addicted to a mind altering substance.

This is not to say that anti depressants and nerve pills don’t have their place. I just take issue with the fact that anyone with an insurance card who doesn 10 minutes of internet research can be in and out of a phychiatrist’s office in about 10 minutes with a bottle of pills which have a street value of hundreds of dollars. Addicts are crazy over xanax and adderal and ambien and alot of other things. That means something.

From another angle, let’s just say that those pills are good for people, and my friend has a prescription because they went to a doctor with their insurance card. Now let’s say that I spend every day with the person and it’s obvious to everyone that I suffer from an identical condition. If that person were to give me a few of those pills, and I were to be stopped and searched by the police, I get a felony drug charge that’s equivallent to a cocaine or heroin charge. Is this because I’m carrying a dangerous and harmful substance? Or because I didn’t have the necessary paperwork or the financial means to get away with being a drug user?

Mental illness is a complex phenomenon. There are many sub-categories in the basic nature-nuture controversy. Psychotropic drugs are often helpful to people. But in the U.S we often rely on them too much. We have “deinstitutionalized” the mentally ill. But a high percentage of our homeless folks are mentally ill. Our society is sick itself in many ways that contibute to or exacerbate mental illness. Remarkable instances of caring are more than counterbalenced by our society’s ignorance, neglect and denial. The boundaries of the phenomenon are poorly defined. Are we undergoing an epidemic of depression? Or has depression just become more visible because of decreased stigma, better treatment, and TV advertizing?

People in America are less socially engaged than ever before. Most people are working longer hours. We spend more time talking to voice mail systems, ATM machines, and online discussion boards than we do interacting face to face with people. People don’t know their neighbors in many places. Families are atomizing. Record high percentages of people live alone. Fewer people participate in local civic gatherings. The de-socialization of society can’t be good for mental health, can it?

There has been a constant “desocialization” as time progresses and technology allows people to operate more independently of one another. But what one person calls pulling people apart, another calls bringing them closer together. The desocialization will probably not have a large effect on mental illness because people are adjusting easier and easier to the changes.

Here here! An election for Bush as a permanent figure in the anti-thought movement! Let it survive the elementary school history books!

Gaia,
I agree about Bush. If he’s a Christian, I’m an archangel!
Others,
Good posts pro and con. Yet I seem to sense in them some consensus of religiosity or reversion to the Chauvinistic ideals of everyone pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, even when they don’t have feet. Perhaps this is because we all want to know where our tax money goes. It should not be frittered away on speculative problems, etc. I understand. ADD did not exist when I was a child. My parents used hickory switches or grounding to curb my excesses of enthusiasm. None of that really contributed to the sense of nothingness I was hit with at age 5, when I was loved and pampered. No medication since has alleviated the horror of realized oblivion. I’ve been on all of the most popular ones–Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Xanax, Effexor, Paxil, etc., etc. And yes, I’ve had so-called friends who stold my pills because they have some personal or street value. Beer works, but it goes fo my liver. Most religions run counter to my heartfelt beliefs in tolerance. Hence they do not offer a solution to my problem. The basic problem of dealing with mental illness, as it appears to me, is whether or not we can medicate or ameliorate genetic “flaws”. Mental illness travels though my blood through family generations. All I have ever asked of professionals or friends is not pity, but understanding. I hold myself responsible for every wrong I’ve done. I do not use my disease as a cop out. As for my tax money, I’d much rather it be used for alleviation of even doubtful human ailments than for the war machine. I’d rather err on the side of the heart than from the head.