[gusopol3]

praecox dementia— the name for schizophrenia in the pre -drug era. Again the illnesses are serious and your attempts to minimize them are tragic and misguided.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

I didn’t realize that FR had become a Scientology haven. It might be useful to point out that before these drugs became available. the US was filled with mental hospitals filled with people under restraints. Now most of these people are functioning in society, and the mental hospital population is a fraction of what it was.

[bdeaner]

Again the side effects of these drugs are serious and your attempts to minimize them are tragic and misguided.

[bdeaner]

praecox dementia

By the way, your statement betrays a certain ignorance of the diagnostic issue on hand. The issue is one of drug treatment of PSYCHOSIS. Schizophrenia is only one of several mental disorders that include psychosis as a symptom. Bipolar Disorder, in its manic phase, often has psychotic features. There is a psychotic depression. There is psychosis secondary to drug use, including stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderal, not to mention anti-psychotic medication. Psychosis can be induced by a medical condition, such as a head injury or brain damage. There is brief psychotic episodes. Etc, etc.

The only disorder that has any historical link with the VERY outdated concept of dementia praecox is schizophrenia, and that description, from Kraplein, is of a particular kind of psychosis that is hebephrenic and progressively degenerative in nature -- unlike many other manifestations of symptoms in individuals diagnosed with schizoprenia, per DSM-IV criteria.

Do you claim to have any training in psychiatric diagnosis?

The problem we are faced with is that physicians seem to be FAR too quick to hand out the anti-psychotic medication, when a condition might be transiant, as in a brief psychotic episode, but dependency on anti-psychotics drugs can then set in, and within a few months, for those sensitive to its effects, it can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time -- the incidence of akithesia alone is remarkably high with the atypicals. And for what? Because someone had a brief psychotic break? That's shameful.

[Zevonismymuse]

Again the illnesses are serious and your attempts to minimize them are tragic and misguided.

I did not get the sense bdeaner was minimizing the seriousness of schizophrenia and other mental illness. I just think that our industrial approach to treating the disease is not working by any measure. bdeaner was providing some historical accounts of a more humane approach to treating the mentally ill. I worked in locked psych for a number of years and while the patients had very obvious psychotic symptoms these people were able to respond to behavioral therapies especially when the environment was peaceful. The character of the people working with the patients was also key but unfortunately there were some angry cruel people working on every ward. Sadly about a third of the patients in locked psych wards are so mentally ill that no therapy works and they must be chemically restrained for the safety of society, but this must be considered as an absolute last resort.