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Griff
Phoenix
Joined: Nov 17, 2006
Posts: 1615
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 Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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| Orwell wrote: | | No, psychiatry is not a legitimate field of medicine. This is even acknowledged by my introductory psychology textbook. |
Well...what do you suggest having done with schizophrenics? Hey, we could always go back to chaining them up in insane asylums, but I don't think that they'd like that very much.
| Quote: | | Most of psychiatry is bunk, and Neo-Freudians should not be able to prescribe drugs. |
Yeah. |
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zendell
Art of Zen
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Joined: Nov 11, 2007
Posts: 1174
Location: Austin, TX
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| Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 12:17 am Post subject: |
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Psychiatric drugs are used to raise levels of serotonin and other neurotransmitters. However, it's already known the serotonin is made in the body with the amino acid tryptophan. Depressed people who improve with anti-depressants probably have low levels of serotonin due to low levels of tryptophan and could probably raise serotonin and treat the depression simply to supplementing the amino acid tryptophan without any side effects. Why isn't tryptophan used to treat depression? Because drug companies can't put a patent on it and charge the insurance companies $10 a pill for it. People who visit conventional psychiatrists to treat depression are often given expensive, dangerous drugs, with numerous unpleasant side effects. Natural treatments for depression are cheaper, safer, and probably more effective. The problem with psychiatry is that it is designed to increase profits for the pharmaceutical companies instead of actually helping the patients.
http://www.antipsychiatry.org/ gives you all the reasons to oppose psychiatry |
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Griff
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Posts: 1615
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| Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 2:24 pm Post subject: |
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| zendell wrote: | | Psychiatric drugs are used to raise levels of serotonin and other neurotransmitters. |
Generalization. In fact, a particularly stupid generalization. Neuroleptics are usually/often dopamine blockers. Anticholinergics and opioid antagonists are also common in psychiatry, and many drugs, such as clonidine, simply act in place of the real thing. I honestly suggest that you learn the first thing about psychiatric medicine before attempting to lecture us on it.
| Quote: | | However, it's already known the serotonin is made in the body with the amino acid tryptophan. Depressed people who improve with anti-depressants probably have low levels of serotonin due to low levels of tryptophan |
Naive and possibly dangerous assumption. Reuptake blockers don't put more serotonin into the body. Furthermore, the most common genetic cause for depression, as far as I know, is a short-gene for some serotonin transporter. The same gene is also associated with obesity and OCD. This is a defective transporter gene, not a starting deficiency.
| Quote: | | Why isn't tryptophan used to treat depression? |
Because it's poison. It has plenty of problems of its own.
| Quote: | | Because drug companies can't put a patent on it and charge the insurance companies $10 a pill for it. |
Careful. Their spies are everywhere. Besides, most drugs used to treat serious disorders are old-fashioned neuroleptics. They're dirt cheap. The expensive thing is actually helping those who suffer from real problems. Real problems can't be treated with medication alone, and psychiatrists have always acknowledged that. In fact, many of them consider medication more a source of frustration than anything else. The trial-and-error approach is an outright acknowledgement that they're pretty clueless most of the time as to what these medications do. The reason you see so many reps from the pharmaceutical industry in their offices is that their dreadfully insufficient education forces them to count on these guys to help them understand what the medications actually do. It's not the pharmaceutical industry's fault, though. Not really. Although their primary motivation is to make money, they didn't ask to be entrusted with completing the half-assed education given to those who have the power to perscribe their products, and, in the end, they don't really even benefit from this dearth of understanding because they lose money every time a psychiatrist makes a mistake. Everytime someone has a bad reaction to medication, there's about a 50-50 chance this person will never trust medication again and just go with traditional therapy.
The problem stems from the fact that psychiatrists are insufficiently educated. Ask any single one of them, and they'll give you a two-hour lecture on how much this problem pisses them off. Unfortunately, there's really not a whole lot they can do about it because there's hardly anyone in the government willing to make a real, serious investment in improving matters.
My solution: stop voting for dumbass Christians to run your freaking country. They can't get anything right, and I'm about tired of you jackasses screwing everything up for the rest of us.
| Quote: | | People who visit conventional psychiatrists to treat depression are often given expensive, dangerous drugs, with numerous unpleasant side effects. |
I dunno. A friend of mine responds pretty well to Zoloft, and his whole family seems to benefit from this class of drugs. I'd say it's an almost certainly mendellian genetic issue. He doesn't call himself outright cured, but he's no longer trying to think of tactful ways to kill himself.
| Quote: | | Natural treatments for depression are cheaper, safer, and probably more effective. |
This remains to be seen.
| Quote: | | The problem with psychiatry is that it is designed to increase profits for the pharmaceutical companies instead of actually helping the patients. |
What if we listen to people like you? You haven't really thought about it, have you? If we were to listen to you clowns, you would be in the same position as the psychiatrists, putting money into someone else's pockets. When the weight of responsibility for helping treatment-resistant schizophrenics falls in your lap, you'll have a bunch of representitives from the corporations that produce these homeopathic remedies parked outside your own office door. The only difference would be that, unlike the guys from the pharmaceutical industries, these guys don't know anything at all. At least the clowns from the pharmaceutical industry are clued in as to what they're talking about. If I have to trust somebody, I'll trust them. I don't really want to trust anybody, but not trusting anybody at all just puts me straight up sh** creek. |
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merr
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Joined: Oct 23, 2007
Posts: 683
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| Posted: Sun Feb 24, 2008 8:47 pm Post subject: |
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It depends on the site of the damage and where in your brain you have been damaged. Frontal lobe and major brain damage is going to affect a person more substantially than minor brain damage. A person can change drastically without any brain damage being present. That is another phemenomenal fact about the brain; like the rest of the body it grows and dies yet unlike your kidneys you can change the way your brain works.
Your brain can malfunction such as having a stroke without you even being aware what is happening let alone it having a noticable effect on your thinking or behavior.
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Yes, I know. That is why I sad one of it's functions is "thinking (among others)". But since psychiatry and psychology mainly do with behavioral disorders, I used thinking and behavior as my example. |
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slowmutant
Phoenix
Joined: Feb 14, 2008
Age: 30
Posts: 11411
Location: Ontario, Canada
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| Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:23 pm Post subject: |
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Is anyone on this thread NOT a Scientologist?
The loons always hate the shrink. Never fails. |
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SilverProteus
The years, no doubt, have changed me.
Joined: Jul 21, 2007
Posts: 7154
Location: Fleet Street.
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| Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:29 pm Post subject: |
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| slowmutant wrote: | | The loons always hate the shrink. Never fails. |
Who's to say the shrink isn't a loon? 
Most people who seek a degree in this area have problems of their own. (Duh, who doesn't). But who's to say it isn't a subconscious attempt to understand oneself? (Don't get me started on the subconscious...). Do I believe in psychiatry? (No, I don't.).
Preciousssss...
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slowmutant
Phoenix
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Age: 30
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Location: Ontario, Canada
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| Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:37 pm Post subject: |
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| SilverProteus wrote: | | slowmutant wrote: | | The loons always hate the shrink. Never fails. |
Who's to say the shrink isn't a loon?
Most people who seek a degree in this area have problems of their own. (Duh, who doesn't). But who's to say it isn't a subconscious attempt to understand oneself? (Don't get me started on the subconscious...). Do I believe in psychiatry? (No, I don't.).
Preciousssss... |
That's like saying your oncologist has some wicked bad tumours. Or that your wedding-planner doesn't know jack about weddings, but takes clients all the same.
God I love these debates!!  |
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SilverProteus
The years, no doubt, have changed me.
Joined: Jul 21, 2007
Posts: 7154
Location: Fleet Street.
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| Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:41 pm Post subject: |
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| slowmutant wrote: | | SilverProteus wrote: | | slowmutant wrote: | | The loons always hate the shrink. Never fails. |
Who's to say the shrink isn't a loon?
Most people who seek a degree in this area have problems of their own. (Duh, who doesn't). But who's to say it isn't a subconscious attempt to understand oneself? (Don't get me started on the subconscious...). Do I believe in psychiatry? (No, I don't.).
Preciousssss... |
That's like saying your oncologist has some wicked bad tumours. Or that your wedding-planner doesn't know jack about weddings, but takes clients all the same.
God I love these debates!! |
Actually it's not. Tumours can be detected chemically and/or physically. Personality disorders (for instance) can't. If there were a blood test for these things, things would be so much easier.
Wedding planner?! Where did that come from?
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slowmutant
Phoenix
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Age: 30
Posts: 11411
Location: Ontario, Canada
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| Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:50 pm Post subject: |
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"If Doug is an oncologist, he MUST be riddled with cancer."
The above statement is example of the screwy logic I'm talking about. Being a member of the psychiatric profession does not automatically make you a loony. I would think insanity would make getting through med school very difficult. |
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SilverProteus
The years, no doubt, have changed me.
Joined: Jul 21, 2007
Posts: 7154
Location: Fleet Street.
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| Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 8:53 pm Post subject: |
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What's your definition of insanity? When does one become insane? After what point?
I said they had problems of their own, not that they're insane. "Problems" does not equate "insanity."
Edit: Some people just undergo a whole college course in order to try to understand themselves.
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ADoyle
Phoenix
Joined: Dec 17, 2005
Age: 34
Posts: 834
Location: Southern California, USA
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| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:58 pm Post subject: |
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I think one issue is that some psychiatrists are more interested in what they can get from the drug companies than how patients are doing, so they see people just long enough to write a prescription.
_________________
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason,
and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
- Galileo Galilei |
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Sophist
ENTIA NON SVNT MVLTIPLICANDA PRAETER NECESSITATEM
Joined: Apr 24, 2005
Posts: 6215
Location: Louisville, KY
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| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 6:21 pm Post subject: |
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The main difference between Psychiatry and Neurology are merely their beginnings (not to say that they are identical today, but the differences one sees today are rooted in the two fields' histories).
The insane asylums were always the domain of the psychiatrists, and since their inception, neurologists and psychiatrists have been fighting to try and treat the same people (it's a fame and money thing). Head psychiatrists used to be called "superintendents" in these asylums and they eventually formed an organization in 1844 called The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane. That organization is now known as the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which writes the DSM.
Instead, neurologists at that time were more involved in private practice and hospitals.
And since then, the two factions have been warring. For a period of time, those with obvious brain damage went to the neurologists, and those with idiopathic conditions (unknown causes) went to psychiatrists.
For awhile, with the rise of Psychoanalysis, psychiatry got swept up in its wake, especially because Freud and his followers were sometimes tackling the same conditions that psychiatrists were trying to treat. The Freudians and Neo-Freudians didn't dare approach neurology because the cause of "neurological" conditions was known and often due to trauma or physical illness, so how was Freud to say "Ah, you're brain tumor was caused by your sexual repression and that you desired your mother and wanted to kill your father"? That wasn't going to fly. But when it came to conditions like Schizophrenia and other psychoses, there was, then, no evidence to show that anything organic was occurring to cause these and so they were swept under the domain of psychoanalytic analysis. Therefore, psychiatrists became involved in using psychoanalysis as a form of treatment for their patients.
Since the late 50s, psychiatrists have been known more as being med-pushers because of their involvement in the asylums and it was there that the advent of psychotropic meds was most felt, what with thorazine, etc.
But in essence, I really do think there's no quantifiable difference between these two fields, except their divided histories which have caused them to be divided still today. The brain is the brain, whether you know a condition is caused by a tumor, a vascular disorder, blunt trauma, or has an as-yet unknown cause.
However, to answer the original question, no matter my UNENDING ill will towards most of the psychiatrists I've had the misfortune to meet in my lifetime: yes, psychiatry is considered a valid field by the medical and psychological establishments. Is it a necessary field which adds something to treatment neurology could not? I don't really think so. But it exists anyways... for now.
And even though psychiatry has now become associated with psychotropic meds, some med schools are starting to train their psychiatry students to do therapy, so as to offer something the neurologist cannot, as well as to compete against psychologists and licensed social workers and counselors.
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