Addiction: now with less responsibility! And how!

[Jeff Kelly]

EDIT: One thing all this discussion has me wondering, in a general sense, is how much objection to the idea of mental illness having physical causes, and psychatric medication in general is rooted in people not wanting to believe that so much of their personalities is ultimately just the result of chemical interaction, and can be changed by changing those interactions. I mean, it really eats away at people's general notions of identity and even the soul and such. That's probably a Politics/Den line of discussion for sure, though.

My personal explanation is this: The vegetative part of your brain qorks faster and more efficient than the consciousness part. You'd probably asphyxiate if you had to consciously remember to breathe. You'd die if you had to remember to make your heart beat.

Consciousness helps us tackle the most difficult and complex tasks but that part of our brain is single-task and not very quick. Everything we need on a daily basis is pushed down to other parts of our brain.

This is what training does. When you learn reading, writing, math or a new language you start out by consciously and deliberately "thinking" about every small step. With time and repetition you "stop thinking about it". Your consciousness is free to do other things because part of your new capabilities are now controlled by other parts of your brain. Parts that you are now no longer in conscious control of.

Humans don't have a single brain or a single consciousness, it's layers and layers of specialized systems that are beyond the control of the conscious and that work together most of the time but also might work against each other some of the time.

What makes me angry is that we're not really debating the sources of addiction or mental illnesses in such threads. We're debating free will.

One side feels that "my brain made me do it" will be used as an excuse to justify everything from eating crap, to taking crap to killing stealing etc.. If they were in control of themselves they wouldn't take drugs or be depressed.

The other side feels marginalised because they had to realize just how little control the consciousness sometimes has over other parts of the brain.

90% of the things that keep anybody alive are controlled by parts of your brain that are NOT your consciousness. Every time you come back from groccery shopping with too much crap in your cart some psychologist working for retail took advantage of that.

[Jeff Kelly]

And I could point out studies that the number one disability for children in the United States is now mental disease and they are pushing ANTI-PSYCHOTIC drugs on these kids in order to turn them into zombies because its to difficult for overworked parents to actually parent so they would rather give their kid a pill.

And maybe you could understand that not everyone is going to agree with you on every point. But disagreement isnt "shitting up a thread" you sanctimonious prick, its simply a divergence of opinions.

If you feel that belittling others and calling them sanctimonious pricks while making fun of mental illnesses somehow helps your cause then there is not much that I can offer you.

I hope you can someday accept that no issue is black or white. That you can't just simply dismiss an argument completely just because some pressure group rides its coattails.

Is big pharma looking to make a profit from the next disease? Probably, hell, certainly! Does this mean that the ongoing paradigm shift with regard to mental illnesses or addiction is utter crap and only motivated to sell more pills? Hell no!

Look, most of the medications nebu or you listed are ancient. They are so old that most patents already expired decades ago and I can offer you a number of cheap generics for each one of them.

The big three are sustained by a handful of drugs that are still under patent protection. Pfizer for example will most probably go under when the patent for Viagra expires because they have failed to find another similar cash cow (they make billions per year just from that)

I'm so angry about your stance because that stance meant that it took me 15 years and tens of thousands of dollars in counseling - that didn't work at all - until I had the opportunity to even try medication. Because OMFG DRUGS!!!!!!!!

95% of the drugs you listed aren't even cleared for prescription in the EU yet. Adderall for example is the most effective AD(H)D drug with the least amount of side effects yet it isn't even cleared for use in the EU and probably won't for the next years because OMFG DRUGS!!! (sorry, I know it get's old)

Poeple take 30 year old 1st generation neuroleptica with horrendous side effects because 3rd generation drugs haven't been cleared yet because omfg drugs.

Also you could cite a rising prescription of drugs and treatments for any number of other diseases. 80 years ago people didn't know that cancer existed or what it caused. A lot of people that today die from cancer 80 years ago died of "natural causes". You could look back and argue exactly the same. There is a sharp increase in the number of cancer treatments prescribed. Medical businesses make a lot of money from treating people for cancer and billions of dollars have been poured into cancer research.

Does this mean cancer doesn't exist? That it is an invention of big pharma to make more profits? Only a madman would argue that it is. 150 years ago people wouldn't believe that small invisible "bacteria" lived on your body that caused all kinds of diseases. A gentleman's hands are always clean. Look at the life of Ignaz Semmelweis.

Does this mean that bacteria and virii don't exist, that they have been invented by big pharma to sell you penicillin or vaccinations? Only Jenny McCarthy  would believe that.

Is there an overprescription of drugs? Yes there is. Don't blame the physicians though. Actually finding out what ails you is not covered by your insurance.

Finding out what helps by blindly throwing drugs at you until one sticks is orders of magnitude cheaper than actually doing all of the tests necessary to find out what you really have. Especially since you have to pay for drugs yourself because most plans don't cover drugs for chronic illnesses.

A real AD(H)D diagnosis is a diagnosis by exclusion for example. The symptoms could be caused by a number of different diseases or conditions (hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, celiac disease, other diseases of the digestive systems and a number of other causes) so you'd have to test for all of them. If nothing else remains then it must be AD(H)D. That process would cost you a six figure amount of dollars that no insurance will cover.

A real treatment of depression without antidepressants or with different mediaction and counseling is the most effective treatment option. Behavioral therapy and mild to medium antidepressants help the best. Paying for several years of therapy is unfortunately significantly more expensive than prescribing you xanax (a heavy drug)

So they do the absolute minimum necessary to justify a certain treatment path and hope for the best.

Thats what profit orientation and "increasing efficiency" does to any business.

[edit: grammar and typos]

[ghost]

95% of the drugs you listed aren't even cleared for prescription in the EU yet. Adderall for example is the most effective AD(H)D drug with the least amount of side effects yet it isn't even cleared for use in the EU and probably won't for the next years because OMFG DRUGS!!!

This will probably be the statement that gets this one denned or put into Politics-  This is a problem with any state run health care system.  The newer medications take a long time to get put into play, and some may never make it there because of the costs of the medications.  This is often for good for some of these medications aren't quite all that is advertised.  Sometimes it is not good because you're missing out on something that, as you said, is much more effective with fewer side effects.  Much "fringe area" medical research that gets done to develop new drugs is specifically to be able to push them on the US market.  We're the testing ground for the rest of the world because drug companies know they can make money off of us.  If we had a universal health care system you might find a lot of the research money dries up.  It's a double edged sword. 

[Lantyssa]

Pills should be a last resort, but they're not inherently bad.  It's a matter of having professionals who have the time and experience to properly assess patients.

[Sand]

Jeff,

Please do be showing me where I "made fun" of people with mental illnesses?
I made fun of people who do shit and then want to blame it on a mental illness like drug addicts and people who cheat on their wives. I dont equate either of those groups with someone with say schizophrenia for example.

Secondly, Im sorry the EU doesnt have Adderall. Not sure how Im to blame for that put please continue to rage at me for it.

And I called you a sanctimonious prick, because you singled me out personally for shitting up the thread. So you deserved it. You can get as angry as you want about something. But you and I disagreeing on something, especially when I am trying to do so in a conversational manner and providing links and citing sources isnt "shitting up" a thread no matter how much you wish it to be true.

Have a good day.

PS- As for bacteria and anti-bacterial drugs, I suggest doing some reading. Wiki is your friend.

Bacteria were first observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, using a single-lens microscope of his own design.
Though it was known in the nineteenth century that bacteria are the cause of many diseases, no effective antibacterial treatments were available.[23] In 1910, Paul Ehrlich developed the first antibiotic, by changing dyes that selectively stained Treponema pallidum—the spirochaete that causes syphilis—into compounds that selectively killed the pathogen.

So just as I said the disease came first, then the cure. (Otherwise you have a cure (ie drug) in search of a disease, which is the problem with the modern profit based pharmacological industry)

[rattran]

Thanks to both of you for finalizing shitting up an interesting thread.