Posted on 12/03/2007 4:19:00 PM PST by neverdem
That itself is depressing.
Yes, it is. The inmates truly are running the asylum.
“Williams was there to confess that he suffered from painful and chronic shyness.”
Typical Oprah fare — a sports/showbiz figure goes on TV in front of a live audience, meeting an intimidating public figure, to tell everyone he’s painfully shy. :’) Thanks neverdem.
I'm enjoying and profiting from both of your comments, so I thought I'd bring us all together.
Please sit in a circle now and repeat after me:
Ommmmmmmmm
Rudder: The last I heard was that Substance abuse per centage of payability was about 20% Are there any new numbers? What prompted my conjecture about PDs being like substance abuse was the way (as it seemed to me) that SOME people who had been in AA for a decade or more seemed to be describing a rebuilding of their personalities, the slow and painstaking adoption of a new armamentarium of defense mechanisms, reactions, "tapes", and like that.
My very limited experience with Substance abusers was that compliance was pretty low there as well. The non-compliant, though, tend to drop out of sight and die, and drop from the data pool.
Could be I'm just being cynical. But, clergy being free and all, we get a lot of abusers and their codependents long after they quit with the medical help (or, more frustratingly to me, as a quick and dependent "fix" - in all senses - INSTEAD of the slow deliberate process of getting better.)
Germane here is the great Cheech and Chong line: I used to be all messed up on drugs, but now I'm all messed up on the Lord.
Durasell: Yeah, it seems to me a decent pastoral counselor can be a very useful adjunct from a medical POV to a good pshrink, just as a good pshrink can be mutatis mutandis.
Rudder, my hunch is you would agree with durasell that these drugs are WAY over prescribed.
Both of y'all: I'm not sure what to do with this thought but it seems to me in some intractable cases where the patient is reluctant to do the work of cure, meds are still appropriate for the sake of the family of the presenting person AND because, sometimes, little by little, if the presenting person isn't, say, depressed all the time, maybe some other family issues will rearrange themselves - benignly or not - around the "new" person.
Can you say "Stress junkie"?
One problem with my chaplaincy there was that these folks were omnicompetent -- just ask 'em -- and could take care of God just fine without some dorky former clergy-dude being imposed upon them.
I’ve known quite a few substance abusers. The thing that seems to help them most is some kind of mechanism — a lot of different elements coming together.
However, I do have a problem with the way the medical profession is handing out psych drugs like after dinner mints these days.
And earlier, including the 1970s suicide of one of the Eli Lily research chemists who developed the stuff, long before it was available as a prescription drug.
He went into Indiana's Hoosier National Forest, stripped naked, built a little bonfire with his driver's licence, company ID card and other wallet contents, and hanged himself on the spot.
I have no idea whether it was a result of the effects of the compound he was helping create, guiltr over what it would do when unleashed on an unsuspecting public, or both.
I think that this “happy pills” have become an easy out for far to many people. There are those who need them, but many doctors will prescribe them at the drop of a hat.
Many of the doctors prescribing them are not qualified to judge someone’s mental health, nor do they follow-up with the patients.
Durasell’s observation seems right to me. A lot of internists and so forth really are clueless about psychology - their own or anybody else’s. It seems to me bordering on malpractice for some of them to prescribe these drugs.
My dad died a few days before Christmas (nine years ago). He had been ill, but his passing was totally unexpected. I spent about two straight days at the hospital, then had to make the funeral arrangements, and still try and make a nice Christmas for my grieving children. From stress and lack of sleep, what started as a simple cold excelerated into pneumonia quickly. My husband had to take me to the doctor (I was too sick to drive). Our family doctor quickly prescribed an antibiotic; expectorant; wrote a script for a chest series, etc. This took about five minutes. The next 15 minutes or so were used to deal with my 'depression.' I had about 8 straight days of He%% I was recovering from, grieving over. I left the doc's office w/scripts for what I really needed (meds to clear my chest) but I had, in my possession samples of Paxil (to get me thru). I didn't take the Paxil, but I thought (at the time and still do) 'aren't we allowed to just grieve?' Why the rush to medicate. I trully know people who have had long term problems that SSRIs have helped, but I was taken aback by the quickness of handing the samples (unrequested) over to me.
The drug is a crutch — it gives the patient a little breathing room and time for treatment. For the vast majority of patients, the drug isn’t the end of the line as far as treatment is concerned.
I was in medicine BEFORE prozac, and even before the older anti depressants.
Suicide was a common problem during the recovery phase of depression, before these medicines were around. Indeed, the rates of suicide in teenagers has gone down since we docs started using them on depressed kids (of course, when the suicide occurs, often they are on prozac). Yet with the increase in societal disintegration (drugs, divorce, neglect) one should expect an increase in suicide for teens.
Prozac makes some people jittery/angry. When I found this in my patients, I usually referred them to a psychiatrist: Many were not “depressed” but bipolar (manic depression) or had a severe problem with anger turned inward (women who had been abused, homosexuals who hated the world’s rejection, men who had a problem with their father).
Mild depression responds well to counselling, but unless you have suffered from biochemical depression, you have no right to dismiss the use of prozac.
Borderlines - (((( shuddderrrr ))))!!!
Grieving is a normal reaction, and helps a person cope with their loss. Avoiding the grieving period can have bad repercussions down the road.
I'm not dismissing the use of prozac. Look at the links in comments one and nine. Between Serotonin syndrome and Serotonin (withdrawal or discontinuation) syndrome, I'm just saying that SSRIs have a potential for suicide and homicide that merit very close follow-up when they are started or the dose is changed.
This "threat" existed long before SSRI's.
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