Doubting Didymus

Dear AtlanticCitySlave.

Please explain to us how people who have no "spiritual, social, family," problems, who come from a loving family and a wholesome moral background get the same depressive illnesses?

The idea that all mental illnesses are caused by bad experiences ignores a great many case studies where no social problems exist. (unless there is something wrong with the persons spirit, in which case please tell us why we should believe in a spirit in the first place.)

What makes a brain work? There is simply no such thing as a 'spirit', 'soul', or 'mind' that exists independantly of the physical, solid brain. Since all atomic matter is some 'chemical' or other (i.e on the big chemistry element chart), sooner or later we must be talking about chemicals to explain illnesses of the brain. (this is not because there can be no other cause, but because there is no other way brains work without going into the realm of the supernatural).

I am quite concerned about your references to rittalin, which is a drug for treating ADHD and my own illness, ADD (the non-hyperactive kind). For this purpose it works absolute wonders in most cases, just ask the countless mothers whose children can suddenly pay attention in school.

If severe depressives are being treated with rittalin, I think we have our culprit:
Misdiagnosis.

AtlanticCitySlave

“Please explain to us how people who have no "spiritual, social, family," problems, who come from a loving family and a wholesome moral background get the same depressive illnesses?”

-I never said there were people who didn’t come from “wholesome moral background”s who don’t get depressive illnesses. There are obviously many ways one can get depressed (it’s obviously estimated everyone will get depressed at some point in their life). I’m also not sure your contention holds up anyway. Where have you read of a schizophrenic coming from a loving, caring, nurturing family? Every report I’ve read concerning schizophrenics, those with mental illness, etc., come from families that were abusive, uncaring, unconcerned, broken, etc. The point is also not that there are no chemical imbalances, but rather that as of right now the only chemical imbalances that can be detected in the brain are the ones caused by the drugs themselves, since the brain reacts to the drugs as a toxic agent. People get depressed all the time for many different things. I simply don’t think throwing them on a drug is the best method for dealing with it.

“The idea that all mental illnesses are caused by bad experiences ignores a great many case studies where no social problems exist. (unless there is something wrong with the persons spirit, in which case please tell us why we should believe in a spirit in the first place.)”

-My use of the word “spirit” or “spiritual” does not constitute a religious, soul type meaning. By “spiritual” or “psychospiritual”, I mean those things pertaining to the personality, self (identity), meaning, etc., of a person, including his/her attempts to live a meaningful life. Many schizophrenics, if not all, express open metaphorical language (which is eventually blunted by drugs) concerning the meaning of life, their place in the world, past abuses, and basically why they are the way they are. I also do not know of what case studies you’re referring to. I also am not even sure that “mental illness” exists, which is why I put it in quotes all the time. It is obviously a very loaded term.
The rest of what you wrote doesn’t apply to me. I didn’t mention Ritalin, someone else did earlier. However, many drugs are being prescribed for many different things (prozac as an obvious example). The misdiagnosis is giving people drugs to handle their problems, rather than caring for them and helping them as human beings, not money-makers for companies.
As an aside, concerning Ritalin, the impact of the stimulant (Ritalin) on the brains of children is not understood currently. In case you haven’t noticed, the subjective experience of the child is pretty much ignored concerning Ritalin. Rather, controlling them is what is the main concern (blunting creativity).
Children also must take drugs involuntarily. They simply have no choice but to be altered by a drug their parents insist they take, schools insist they take, simply because these same parents and schools cannot find reasonable ways to raise their children and provide them with activities to express their creativity. Children, in rare interviews, have said that Ritalin makes them feel weird, out of touch, and basically blunts their feelings and subdues them. Interestingly, you show this by your comment of how the mothers view their children and how they behave in school, not how the children actually FEEL being on these drugs.
In addition, there is no known chemical imbalance in these children. It is also generally accepted Ritalin has the same effect on people, regardless of their diagnosis or behavior.
The best book (a classic in my view) that I could recommend, is The Limits of Biological Treatments for Psychological Distress: Comparisons with Psychotherapy and Placebo. While in the version I have it’s pro electro-convulsive therapy (which is obviously ridiculous), the majority of what it says has not changed.

echidna

FWIW, I have no love of Ritilin.

30 years ago its prescription was zero, today it varies between 4 – 6 %. Routinely I see kids classed as disabled, who 20 years ago would have simply been a normal active kid. In fact too often it’s the brighter ones which are misdiagnosed as having a “disorder”. The psychological effects of this process are many & varied, however they range from “there’s something wrong with me” to “oh there’s nothing I can do, it’s just my ADHD”. Either way it serves to remove the child’s responsibility over their own behaviour.

I do not deny the improvement which it can have on concentration levels, nor do I deny that children become easier to control.

But having frequently administered kids under my supervision with Ritilin, almost without exception I take it as a blessed relief when they are eased off the medication. Yes they become more active & challenging to control, and yet of maybe 40 Ritilin kids, only 2 would I ever class as being unable to interact socially as a result of their ADD.

I would far prefer the hard work of keeping young, active, wandering minds occupied than to dope them down. It is generally quite possible for these kids to learn to deal with their overactive minds as they go through their normal childhoods. I’ve seen many of my peers who today would have been dosed with Ritilin, grow into very healthy & productive members of the community, in fact often moreso.

Anecdotally I would also suggest that Ritilin is prescribed quite often to the sons of single mothers, and that the increasing lack of male presence in schools also has difficulty in controlling active boys. What was quite normal 20 years ago, today is medically classed as a psychological disorder. Contrary to popular belief, education was quite successful prior to Ritilin, and arguably more successful.

Today instead of learning to live with the normal process of growing up, the pharmaceutical and psychiatric professions have marketed for us “life in a pill”. No, I don’t consider it categorically healthy. And it concerns me that drug companies are releasing longer-acting Ritilin versions which will only serve to increase its usage.

echidna

In fact I’ve always found ADD to be an incredibly ironic acronym, in that many times, the deficit of attention is not the amount which the child can apply, so much as the lack of attention they receive.

A twice-daily pill is simply easier than the hours of exhausting attention which children require.

But whether this means ADD’s an intellectual disability / disorder or not, as it is classified, no, I’d say nine times out of ten that’s crap. Let’s be honest, let’s not blame the child’s neural physiology like they’re schizo, let’s say it’s generally a shortcoming in childcare.

echidna

<a href="http://www.hubin.org/news/column/lucc1_creativity/creativity_en.html" target="_blank">http://www.hubin.org/news/column/lucc1_creativity/creativity_en.html</a>

Philosoft, before we rush off and brand all non 50th percentile people as being “chemically imbalanced”, I’d suggest that such rigorous adherence to “normality” in itself is overly simplistic. Many such people are torn between self-respect, and that who they are, also includes such a psychiatric “abnormality”.

Countless schizophrenic and bipolar geniuses, how about a PC alternative, “chemically different”, but not automatically imbalanced.

uhcord

I agree with you echidna on the over-perscribtion of Ritalin.

I do not take it for being troublesome or uncontrolablity, but to help me organize my thoughts. Without it, my thoughts are constantly racing and hard to 'control'. (my thoughts still race and 'morph' - I just have more 'control' over them. Hard to describe) For instance, I could not keep an image of something I wanted to draw in my head long enough for me to draw it. Now I am able to imagine something, and draw it with great detail.

Though I believe all the medicine I take didn't bring me out of my depression. It was most likely the therapy (great therapist) and my 'conversion' to atheism (was a deist all my whole life). After finally becoming atheistic, I felt a change. It was sorta like a liberation of the mind ...

*shrug* Lets just not come to any hasty generalizations guys.

RogerLeeCooke

I take approximately the same point of view. In essence, moral statements are statements of one's own desires. They differ from other desires, in that their content concerns the kind of society one desires. The only place where I differ is this: I wouldn't be quite so reductionist as to say that the ultimate source is how an action makes me feel. I'm used to sacrificing the present to the future, working now so I can loaf later, to put it crudely, and moral principles often involve that. If one doesn't adhere to a consistent standard of behavior, society simply won't work. I depend on most other people to do this, and I keep faith with them, so that we can all benefit. That's called cooperation. Everyone knows what we do with uncooperative people: we avoid them, shun them, fine them, and, if they are TOO uncooperative (criminal), we lock them away and/or execute them.

JL

Going a little futher off topic from the original post:

Granted I speak primarily from my own experience, but I don't think attributing things like depression and anxiety disorders to a purely physical origin (chemical imbalances) is correct in most cases. I think the chemical imbalance is probably symptomatic rather than causitive. I was on Paxil for a while for social phobia and depression. While it curbed these problems, I also felt as if my general zeal for life and ambition for the future had been muffled as well.
I quite taking it. Through a lot of introspection and a good bit of reading on philosophy and psychology I've come to the conclusion that the things I struggle with are an integral part of who I am. Talking a pill to numb myself enough to tolerate life is a miserable existence. I've gradually come to understand and weed out many of the assumptions and preconceived notions I had about life and myself. That has the always been the source of my problems.

I think as a general rule drugs like Paxil and Prozac will someday go the way of the frontal labatomy for the most part. I hope at least. We should focus more on changing our social roles and expectations and the like rather than prescibing pills so we can bear them.

One of the last sane

Sorry, books and 'popular works' don't cut it as plausible evidence. If you don't have the time to back your sweeping allegations with references from the peer reviewed scientific literature, you don't have time to raise your credibility above zero.

I'm sorry you find my post amusing. I have manic depressives in my immediate family, among my work colleagues and among my close friends and I don't find it amusing at all to watch these brilliant, creative, fascinating people suffer. All the ones I know who are alive say they have tried quitting SSRI's, or in some cases lithium, and it just isn't worth it. The two who refused medication are both dead from suicide. Another starts threatening to kill himself and his wife whenever he tries to do without meds. I know two who despite being very talented and qualified, lost jobs because of their bipolar and in one case lost his wife. They have put their lives and careers back together and attribute their success wholly to their meds. They both say psychotherapy is useless. There is nothing amusing about uncontrolled manic depression.

dk

dk: - Most experts guess about 10% of the population (USA) suffers depression at any point in time. The diagnosis is clinical, not chemical.[*]If low levels of serotonin are the cause of depression then what is the normal range?[*]Where can I go to get my serotonin levels checked?
A normative model to quantitatively establish serotonin levels suffers from high rates of comorbidity that range across a wide spectrum of personality, mental and learning disorders. While its clear SSRIs are powerful drugs that medicate behavior, the long term affects and underlying explanation remains wanting. Many complain SSRIs are over-prescribed as a fix-all. The USA consumes 90%+ of the world’s SSRIs.
[*]"As our latest panacea, Prozac and its analogues [such as paxil, zoloft, luvox, effexor, serzone, anafranil & the diet pills - fenfluramine, fen-phen & redux] are being prescribed for everything from headaches and flu to acne and home sickness. Yet, according to FDA spokespersons, there have been more adverse reaction reports on Prozac than any other medical product. As of October, 1993, a total of 28,623 complaints of adverse side effects had been filed with the FDA, including 1,885 suicide attempts and 1,349 deaths. The FDA's general rule of thumb for estimating the true figures is that these reports represent only one to ten percent of the actual figures. This would indicate the staggering amount of 286,230 - 2,862,300 actual adverse reactions, 18,850 - 188,500 actual suicide attempts and 13,490 - 134,900 actual deaths attributed to Prozac by the end of 1993."
--- Source book: Prozac: Panacea or Pandora by Ann Blake Tracey, PHD. <a href="http://www.outlookcities.com/psych/" target="_blank"> Prozac: Panacea or Pandora </a>
I agree the numbers are best guess. But the crack follows from the upward trend in suicide and aggression of young people that take SSRIs, and there are no long term studies. That leaves the door open to discussion and Eli Lilly lobby with their pants down.
dk: – The drug companies were proven unreliable with Ritalin, uppers and downers so maybe they will hit a homerun with the all-arounders, but their batting average to date is pretty damn lousy.
-------------------------[*]Ritalin and Cocaine
JAMA, August 22/29, 2001-vol 286, no. 8. was the source of an article appearing in a recent edition of the AMA News entitled "Pay Attention: Ritalin Acts Much Like Cocaine"
"Advanced imaging research has answered a 40-year old question about methylphenidate (Ritalin) which is taken daily by 4 million to 6 million children in the United States: how does it work? The answer may unsettle some parents, because the drug acts much like cocaine, albeit cocaine dripped through molas-ses."
The effects of Ritalin were examined from a neurotransmitter perspective. Once a pleasurable sensation is transmitted, dopamine molecules recycle back to the neurons that produced them. In the process, autore-ceptors claim the molecules and return them in a vacuum cleaner-like function. Research has shown that cocaine blocks 50% of these receptors; it leaves the dopamine in the synapse and the cocaine rush is cre-ated.
This cycle was evaluated with respect to Ritalin. "We were surprised as hell…we didn't expect this" What was being referred to as "this" was the fact that Ritalin wasn't a less potent inhibitor of the autore-ceptors as had been thought, but it was more potent than cocaine in this regard. "The data clearly show that the notion that Ritalin is a weak stimulant is completely incorrect."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Prozac] "was associated with more hospitalizations, deaths, or other serious adverse reactions reported to the FDA than any other drug in America." Business Week 3/16/98 p. 14
Harris...had been under the influence of Luvox...
dk: - Comorbidity belays the point, many people take psychotropic drugs in combination.
dk: - Very good, and I agree. That’s the problem with mucking around with brain chemistry on a clinical diagnosis, especially when SSRIs impact brain development.
dk: - A psychopath is a personality disorder marked by antisocial thought and behavior. People that plan for months the murder of their schoolmates with guns & bombs and to commit suicide, then carry the plan out, are psychopaths whatever else they might be.
I haven’t rejected anything, I brought up depression because comorbidity renders ‘feel good morality’ nonsense. The idea of psychotropic therapy wags the dog, psychotherapy is unreliable and shock therapy is a still a viable last ditch effort. In the 1960s Dr. Tim Leary taught LSD 101 at Harvard; housewives were routinely strung out on prescriptions for valium & speed. I brought Ritalin up because it has been prescribed to children for over 40 years, and they are just now catching clue about how it works, and only because it works similar to cocaine and LSD. The FDA has received more complaints on Prozac than any drug in history. Clearly many people benefit from SSRIs, TCAs and other drugs, but the hit and miss clinical diagnosis has nothing to do with serotonin levels, and everything to do with drug company profits, social agendas in public schools and government smile faces.
I’m not sure what you mean by classic “folie a deux”, is there a neo, post or modern version of folie a deux; or just folie a trois, quatra, etc…up to mob rule.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: dk ]</p>