It's not a situation in which drugs will assist, the best they can do is to make one feel less bad about going down the drain. I explained my situation to the GP, yet he didn't suggest speaking to a psychologist (I did that myself); he didn't suggest trying to resolve the problems so that the proximal cause was removed (it wouldn't have helped, the CSA was the problem and were not acting rationally); he didn't offer a voice of balance and reason at all, just a strong drug as first response.

I wonder how many people are taking such drugs merely because they're having trouble dealing with what seems like intolerable stress? I suspect it's a great number. I learnt a few weeks ago that my ex-wife is now on anti-depressants. She works for Qld Health as a Social Worker, so I guess it was inevitable.

When all one has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

...Antiseptic correctly takes the view that an ethical and primary response of people suffering from mental illness, is the need to take personal responsibility for the direction of their life. The book referred to in the article is, “The Myth of Mental Illness”, ISBN 978-06-177122-4 (Harper Perennial edition) published in 1974; author Thomas S Szasz.

...Szasz led the charge against the Liberal establishment view of dividing all personality disorders into categories of mental illness. (Ultimately a lost cause judging by todays expanded list).
He also devoted a sizeable proportion of his career attempting to explain human actions exposing as mental illness, to human natures propensity towards game playing for reward. He desired to contract the list of mental illness to categories containing objective physical causes and eliminate those that were premised on the subjective, such as those with psychosomatic roots; schizophrenia for example.

...A great book and well worth the read by those interested in the “rorts” associated with both sides (Professionals and patients) of the modern day mental illness “industry”.

It would unwise to dismiss mental illness - people do not suicide because they feel slightly down - they are clinically depressed or perhaps have other problem. Depression is not just fatigue or tiredness as some have seemd to suggest. This shows people who have never experienced someone with depression.

Mental illness is real...for instance many soldiers come back from combat with problems that never fully go away. This trauma may not have any obvious physicial brain represetnation, but nonetheless it is real and can be quite debilitating. I could go on..

Quite frankly, the idea that mental illness is a myth is laughable. I agree that people often over-diagnose mental illness - it seems there is always a new 'illness' (ie ADD, ADHD etc) - but lets not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The point I was making is that very often all that is needed is time and a bit of support, since a lot of what is labelled as illness is more like a temporary injury that will heal. We don't call people with bruises or broken bones ill, we call them injured and treat them very differently.

My own experience of the prescription-mad culture was some years ago, but I don't really think there's been any improvement in the way these matters are dealt with.

You also mentioned ADD/ADHD and I've previously recounted the experience I had when my boy was in grade 3. He had the misfortune to encounter a teacher who was really not very good and quite incapable of dealing with boys in any way constructively. She made a report that my son was a trouble-maker and should be assessed for ADHD. After much toing and froing it was decided that he did fit within the spectrum on behavioural grounds, but that he had some developmental inconsistencies that needed addressing. Hardly surprising when his parents divorced when he was about two. A very good teacher took him under his wing the next year and things improved out of sight. The other one took a redundancy package and retired from teaching.

Once again though, there was a clear bias toward prescription and it took some concerted opposition from both of his parents to make it happen otherwise.

There's a lot of ignorance akin to the Global Warming debate in this area i.m.o. and I hope that in a variety of ways that these discussions will continue to be thrashed out in the months and years to come.

..

In fact, as part of mandatory primary and high school training, I would include an ongoing study of things of a medical nature including but not limited too 1st Aid & "Mental Health Awareness."

..

In the first instance, and to use the example of so called schizophrenia with paranoid features, if people had any real inkling of what psychosis actual is, and how it presents to the conscious mind, along with hallucinations and all of the rest of it,

(and of course as it applies to any other "mental illness" as well)

then I wager that you would have far fewer people talking about the Devil, The Agency or their neighbors with Alien mind control technology.

..

C.ognitive B.ehavioural T.herapy - people MUST i.m.o. be made aware of the potential hazard of a mental illness, how to recognise it and what to do about it.

It is a very dangerous time when your mind goes into that altered state of consciousness which we call psychosis, where the brain indeed interprets things in a fundamentally different way from "normal," and one does not have "INSIGHT" which is more often the case than not.

..

Appropriate conventional psychiatry a.k.a. brain doping CAN be a fundamental corner stone for recovering from mental illness in my personal experience.

However, I would add, that one corner stone alone does not lead to a full recovery.

..

C.B.T. strategies

2 Neuroleptics
(CBD would be better)

Binaural Beats

Orgasm in the context of a Luving & Healthy relationship

A low stress financial security solution

Disney Land Effect

Magensium Citrate (L-Threonate would be better) & Iodine supplements

Healthy diet (heavy on the veg) + OMEGA3 + Active Daily Exercise

Flavenoids (BlueBerries, Red Wine(hmmm), Dark Chocolate(hmmm))

Bright (Blue) light
(Don't forget the sunnies)

Meditation pre-activity

Music & Language Training

Well I think this article is a very good demostration of why you should resist the temptation to publish anything until you are, say, over 26 years old.

It is very easy to read one book and be swayed by an argument which caresses your own epistemic leanings, and to suddenly conceive that you have all the answers. But as betrayed by this author's enthusiastic reproducing of the "usual suspects" - cynicism, differentiation, stigma etc etc - and the generally undergraduate tone of the writing, a balanced, reflexive understanding of the subject at hand remains elusive.

As it is the article fails to consider two fundamental questions:
- what if there *are* physical bases to the mental illnesses commonly observed in clinical practice - just that we don't have the science to identify them yet?

- even in the unlikely event that there are no physical bases to these conditions, aren't the facts that they impair the sufferer, and that they are difficult to recover from by oneself, (not to mention that the same patterns keep coming up over and over again), still enough to designate them as "illness"?

Examples like Antisceptic's are not particularly useful as in these cases you could just as easily say that "you were misdiagnosed because the doctor was incompetent and/or just wanted you to go away".

I do, needless to say, have my problems with some concepts in mental illness discourse. After all it is still a young discipline and there is much still to learn. But to dismiss mental illness as a social construction is disingenuous in the extreme, not least because it denies the reality of what millions of people suffer.