"If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Okay, so this isn't specifically about multiplicity, but it's relevant to the topic of psychology in general.

On the one hand, emerging evidence that for many people, cognitive therapy is as or more effective than antidepressants in the treatment of depression.

On the other hand, not ready to lose an opportunity to tighten their grip on modern psychiatry, the determinists 'find' yet another biological cause for a disorder previously assumed to be of psychodynamic origin. Apparently, anorexia is really the result of a brain dysfunction, flying in the face of decades of research about its emotional and social context, as well as its status as a culture-specific disorder.

So, of course, there's no need any more to treat people with anorexia as individual human beings, or try to understand the origins of a desire to starve oneself and how social pressures affect it. No need to do anything but shove pills down their throat.

Comments

[andeveryoneelse.livejournal.com]

*shrug* Antidepressants helped us a hell of a lot more than therapy did. Not that we had much therapy, but antidepressants- once we finally found the right one- really did do wonders.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Sure. I'm not saying they don't work for everybody-- some people do very well with a specific drug.

On the other hand, it also apparently depends on the type of therapy you're getting-- it was specifically cognitive therapy that was found to work in this study; either other styles of therapy weren't studied, or they were proven to be less effective than antidepressants for the patients in question.

[andeveryoneelse.livejournal.com]

What I wanted to say and didn't get a chance to type (had to run to a meeting for work) was that I believe that most mental/emotional disorders really do have a chemical basis, and that tossing out the concept of treating them with medication just because it makes it seem less personal seems a bit... well.. silly.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

What I wanted to say and didn't get a chance to type (had to run to a meeting for work) was that I believe that most mental/emotional disorders really do have a chemical basis, and that tossing out the concept of treating them with medication just because it makes it seem less personal seems a bit... well.. silly.

It's not solely about it being less personal. It's that for a lot of people, the drugs have undesirable side effects, and some people can never find a drug that works for them. My view on medication is that, if it's used, in many cases it should be used as an adjunct to some kind of talk therapy-- not a permanent fix. To me, saying 'you have to be on this medication for life or else you'll go crazy,' and not even letting the person find out whether they can learn to be okay without it, is questionable. We learned to get along without antidepressants after being told we needed to take them for the rest of our lives; so have other people we've known.

If it helps you, that's fine. I'm not suggesting tossing our medication as a treatment option. We've done well in the past on courses of specific medications, and I've talked to some people who said medication really was the only thing that helped them. I take them at face value. However, how can doctors know someone can't be helped by non-drug therapy if they're not even willing to consider it?

I don't have issues with the global concept that some emotional problems are caused by chemical imbalances. What I objected to in this specific case was trying to pinpoint anorexia as one, based on spurious conclusions, when there's so much research on its social context.

[changelyng14.livejournal.com]

Sooner or later, it's going to dawn on people that the brain is a physical organ, and that 'mental disorders' are every bit as physical as physical ones are.

every new idea, learned response, mental condition, memory, thought, new thing learned, and emotion are tied to the general growing and physical modification/adaptation of the brain, being it a newly grown synapse network or whatever.

the sociatel and professional connotation that issues, once proven to be in the domain of the brain, cause the individual to be less worthy than an individual which 'respectable' physical conditions is the issue, imo.

there is massive progress these days on 'brain mapping' and bit by bit, i predict, they will figure out the brain's physical modification as a result of various conditions, and findings like this will pop up. and, until the attitude changes, people will conclude, using their faulty premise, that something important has been figured out, and proceed to invalidate yet a new group of individuals.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

There seems to be a strong bias in modern psychology towards assuming that the neurology always come first. Theories are predicted from data, instead of the other way around-- the problem is that multiple (no pun intended) theories can predict the same data. A good example of this is the way diagnoses are often made in psychiatric hospitals-- the patient's diagnosis is determined based on what medication s/he seems to respond to. The problem, of course, is that most medications tend to produce a certain effect whether or not you have a certain problem. Lithium, for instance, makes many people feel emotionally 'dead'; however, the fact that someone responds that way doesn't mean they were manic-depressive to begin with.

[cirape.livejournal.com]

Thank you. You've just managed to give us the topic for our next English paper.

[judiff]

cognitive therpay can be very not personl too. If it's done badly it can be like telling people not to have feelings or that there feeling are like totally there own fault.
we think that good cognitive therpay can be like very helpful. But it should never be the only help people get. And people should be allowed to be upset or angry or sad if bad stuff has happened to them. And thinking that the world isn't perfect and wanting to make it more better shouldn't be like described as negative/unhelpful thinkng.