AHS Views

I receive emails from a group of people who support non-drug solutions for mental and emotional problems. They’ve recently gotten into the subject of drug addiction and have suggested that psychiatry can help this problem. I beg to differ - and I’ll tell you why.

During the years that psychiatry rose to power as the ‘expert’ in the field of mental health, although that reputation is very tarnished at this point, more and more conditions, previously thought of as just part of life, have been classified as mental diseases or disorders.

Some of these alleged disorders include kids not being able to do math as well as their classmates, feeling sad when your spouse of 50 years passes away (yes, we’re actually supposed to believe there’s something strange about that), to smoking cigarettes. (As one blogger pointed out prior to Obama swearing in “Does that mean we have a deranged President Elect who should seek treatment?”).

It’s pretty obvious to me that this practice of turning everything into a mental illness is merely a ploy to get money (and to do anything they can to salvage what’s left of this dying discipline.)

If these conditions are ‘officially’ disorders, insurance companies will pay for treatment. Which opens the door to millions more patients (and many more millions of dollars) who wouldn’t be able to afford it otherwise. In fact, these ‘patients’ probably wouldn’t even have sought treatment because they didn’t think anything was wrong with them until psychiatry ‘made it so’. And they were probably right.

The docs also make money researching and promoting bogus disorders.

This really puts their diagnostic skills, not to mention their integrity, into question.

Do you want your friends or family members in the hands of someone who thinks that being distraught about the loss of someone you’ve raised children with and loved and depended upon for 50 years is mental illness? I know I don’t.

The next point is that much of the treatment they offer is drugs. Why? Number one, they don’t have a great reputation for curing anyone and, two, they can see someone for 10 or 15 minutes to prescribe or renew a prescription for a drug and make more money than if they’d spent 45 minutes actually talking with the person and helping resolve the problems they’re having in life that cause him to feel less than wonderful.

Addiction help is intensive. It takes many, many hours - generally about three months - of working with the individual, getting down to the bottom of why they’re taking drugs, helping them sort those things out so they really can overcome them, teaching them the skills they need in life, finding out who’s influencing them, if anyone, and helping them overcome that influence, and working out a plan they can stick to that will help them stay drug free.

And drugging them is a big mistake. A person can’t even think clearly on drugs - not to mention all the other dangerous side effects, like antidepressants that make you want to kill yourself. How is that person going to figure out their lives and get better if they’re drugged?

If psychiatry was so adept at enabling people to figure out and change their lives, why does so much of their treatment come down to giving the person drugs?

No, your best bet for addiction help services is experienced rehab professionals who really know the ropes and have a good success rate. Call us, we can help you find something that works.

The purpose of this blog is to help people with drug problems, not to denigrate any profession. But to fail to make people aware of what doesn’t work could prevent them from getting real help. Hence, this post.