Thank you so much for posting this. Some of the "advice" here for the young person is just shameful. I understand 100% where you are coming from. My father was manic depressive and was raised by people who hated the "establishment." He was taught to disregard out-of-hand any government agency, any educational institution, and any medical insitution, which naturally includes psychiatry. My baby brother nearly died because my father refused to take him to a doctor when he was sick for more than a week. One our way to school one day, my father rear-ended someone and my other brother hit his head on the windshield. He was bleeding from one of his ears, but my father sped off and dropped us off at school instead of going to the hospital. So you can see he was the real deal about all this "I don't believe in Western medicine" garbage. He self-medicated with alcohol. He wasn't a bad person-- he was sick and was in desperate need of treatment.
When my mom finally applied for a divorce, my father was only allowed to have supervised visits if he agreed to see a doctor, he refused even though not seeing us broke his heart. He was adamantly opposed to any therapy or pharmaceutical "poison." Within the month he blew half his face off in the living room. This was a terrible and lonely way to die, as I imagine any suicide is, and it could have been prevented were it not for his anti-intellectual beliefs.
So I think there is something very wrong with all the magical thinking I've seen so far in this thread. People with a mental illness history hurt themselves, so it's probably caused by their treatment? I hate seeing this kind of thing because this thinking pattern is truly a pattern--it shows up in pro-vape arguments as well, which is embarassing and hurting our collective cause. If you're not reasonable then you will be disregarded and perhaps laughed at.
Frankly, to see the paramedic's post with his "advanced education" was stomach-churning. Many people will read it and take it seriously. It's a joke. There is no "advanced" anything in emergency medical training. It's emergency and very general and basic. You can take it from someone who trained as a civilian as an EMT (5 months) and then trained in the Army as a combat medic (AIT less than 1 year). Any monkey can do it. I saw all kinds of big-headed ...... on the job and I never got used to it. Very little "Western medicine" is actually practiced by medics, compared to the bulk of the medical professions--and when you take this into account, his rejection of medical practices makes a little more sense. He doesn't see what exactly he is rejecting. ER nursing is something that comes closer to "advanced" training, a lil more difficult than general nursing, but it's still not even close to general physician training.
Part of the problem with psych treatment is the musical chairs with meds one must play when starting treatment. People have unreasonable and impossibly high expectations of psych drug regimens. At this juction we have no other choice if we are to treat people and advance our knowledge of the brain. Diagnosis is very difficult, drug treatment is very difficult. For example, say you have a patient with clear symptoms of depression. But which neurotransmitter abnormality is causing or contributing to the problem? Is it low serotonin? A serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Is it low dopamine? A DRI. Low norepinephrine? NRI. Is it a combo of low serotonin and norepinephrine? SNRI. Low dopamine/norepinephrine? DNRI. We know all of these things cause depression symptoms. but we don't typically know exactly what the neurotransmitter levels for each individual patient are, and right now it's impractical to test every patient before prescribing meds.
And what about anxiety? Low GABA is a common cause. But so is low dopamine and low serotonin. Worse, excessive dopamine and serotonin activity can cause symptoms that would be interpreted as anxiety. It could be excessive acetylcholine. Additionally, it could be low potassium or low magnesium, and hundreds of other things--but VERY difficult to pinpoint biochemical causes of symptoms and therefore that much more difficult to treat. Ergo, the musical chairs with medications. So psychiatry gets a bad rap from people who lean more toward intuitive thinking than analytical thinking.
It's an entirely survivable disease, with prompt and aggressive treatment, which my ex-husband received for the same disease here in ATL at Emory, and more than 30 yrs later, he's still [miserably!] alive.
