>
> 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.
>