p.s.
Obviously, if there’s some major problem then the meds are forever. But from my observations, there couldn’t possibly be as many major problems as there are people taking meds these days.
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.