On Aug 5, 2:56Â pm, John Jones
aol.com> wrote:> Immortalist wrote:
>> "The 'couch,' or, more generally, long-term psychoanalytic
>> psychotherapy, was for so long a hallmark of the practice of
>> psychiatry. It no longer is," Mojtabai said.
>
>> Today's psychiatrists get reimbursed by insurance companies at a lower
>> rate for a 45-minute psychotherapy visit than for three 15-minute
>> medication visits, he explained.
>
>> ...the percentage of patients' visits to psychiatrists for
>> psychotherapy, or talk therapy, fell from 44 percent in 1996-97 to 29
>> percent in 2004-05. The percentage of psychiatrists using
>> psychotherapy with all their patients also dropped, from about 19
>> percent to 11 percent.
>
>> ...As talk therapy declined, TV ads contributed to an "aura of
>> invincibility" around drugs for depression and anxiety...
>
>> ...By contrast, there's almost no marketing for psychotherapy, which
>> has comparable if not better outcomes...
>
>> ...Psychotherapy uses verbal methods to get patients to explore their
>> emotional life, thoughts or behavior. The goal is to ease symptoms,
>> sometimes through getting the patient to change behavior or mental
>> habits.
>
>> Its benefits can be seen in brain imaging studies, said Dr. Eric
>> Plakun, who leads an American Psychiatric Association committee
>> working to restore interest in psychotherapy by psychiatrists.
>
>> ...other professionals are picking up the slack, ...Psychologists and
>> social workers provide counseling but most cannot prescribe drugs, so
>> it's possible that for patients who require both talk and pills, some
>> coordination in care may be lost, Mohr said.
>
>
> Nothing the psychiatrist did or does is of any value, as far as I'm
> concerned, whether its talking therapies or drugs. The discipline is
> entirely and irredeemably worthless, and succeeeds only where it steals
> from what is already the common knowledge of humanity.
>
> The problem is, even more so these days, is that whatever palliative
> these merchants promote it is only through the promotion of illness. A
> supreme quackery it is, that sells our feelings back to us as
> destructive physical processes, requiring - "needing" even, their
> strange mendicants.
>
> The damage inflicted on the human race, particularly on vunerable groups
> - the sensitive, the eccentric, the gullible, geriatrics, children, the
> disabled, is a tragedy of our age and I would gladly deliver these
> money-grubbing people over to the jailhouse for crimes against humanity.
In our western culture we pretty much live as small individual family
units with many people living alone or with a partner and with often
little contact with other possible family members.
If we can accept that the body can become ill and that includes the
brain then we generally consult external people from our family units
that have studied an accumulation of information that has been
generated over thousands of years.
In our culture the most cost effective method to treat an illness is
often by ingesting chemicals that have been clinically studied over
decades of time.
Smoking tobacco and marijuana, drinking alcohol or taking LSD to treat
a mental illness does not appear to the best type of chemical options
available. In fact they often appear to be counter productive. Your
attraction to these types of methods likely stems from your
connections to your peer (family type) groups.
They might make you feel good in the short term but in the long term
those peer groups will move away and at best you might be left with a
few close friends or perhaps just a lover. Couple that with the fact
that with some of those substances being illegal you're also
endangering your future physical safety.
It might be true to say that mental illness in *some* instances could
be better treated by employing purely environmental factors like
having a very supportive understanding family unit helping the person
to get through the illness but in many cases this has proven to have
been ineffective and often impossible.
Taking mind altering chemicals that appear to provide the user with a
better lifestyle under a controlled situation (like in going to a
doctor) within the structure of our western culture would seem to our
way of dealing with these situations.
Most of us are not prepared to pay for the needs of others to provide
the very best form of care. That's just plain and simple the facts of
our culture.
Non chemical types of interaction are generally extremely expensive
and often (likely in part due to our cultural conditioning) the
patient proves to be non-compliant.
We're all often pretty self destructive. People have trouble in just
even eating the right types foods in order to remain healthy as just
one example.
