Indeed it seems clear to me that:
Her parents were just horrible people, who have serious misconceptions and live in outright denial of what true mental illness is and is not. Unfortunately these biases seem to have been passed to their daughter who more than once apparently believes that having “Asbergers” or “bipolar disorder” or any one of real, treatable mental conditions makes one “stupid”.
This bias then apparently fuels an irrational fear of medication, lumping any such prescriptions into a “big pharma” conspiracy.
Are medications over-prescribed in this country? They most certainly are. But more often than not, it’s because of parents who either want an easy fix for their kids, or because adults want such an easy fix for themselves not because of any “kickback” conspiracy hatched in theory on the Internet.
There are always two sides to a story. The way she tells it it sounds like she lived through a situation that would make Hannibal Lecter blush. It probably wasn’t as bad as she described. Not saying it wasn’t bad but again, there are always two sides.
What is probably reality is that she was a troubled teenager and her parents decided to over medicate her rather than deal with the root causes of her behavior (which was probably pretty bad at times, the “other side” I’m taking about). In other words rather than turn to God first they turned to the state and psychiatry first, and on top of that had an extremely biased negative view of mental illness in general. A more perfect storm could not have been conceived.
Without such a horribly negative opinion of mental illness, and with God in the picture, maybe with proper council in the family itself or outside if needed, without medicine used (unless absolutely necessary and even then only in moderation) if all of this proper perspective and moderation were in play she might not have suffered as much as she did, and maybe would have maintained relations with her family.
I wish her the best and will pray for her. This isn’t a “Democrat” or “liberal” problem though, as I know plenty of “Republicans” and/or “conservatives” who have behaved exactly as she described her family behaving. It’s what happens when people equate mental illness with being “retarded”, from both sides of the political spectrum.
It’s easy to fall back on a pill because it’s so easy to give. And we have pretty potent pills today. But that can’t be the only way to address a problem. A pill may be like a crutch. If you broke your leg you may need it, but the point should be to get the leg set and rehab the leg and eventually the crutch becomes unnecessary.