infobong.com

Yeah, drug companies' control of research in any branch of medicine is a huge problem.

My understanding of the medical issue, though, is that psychotropic medications are tricky things and the same drug that helps in many instances can make matters worse in others. Sometimes people have to try several drugs at a number of dosages before they get it right. Good shrinks monitor their at-risk patients closely during that process. Adolescence can't make that job any easier.

"Just drugging people rather than help them solve their problems" is a gross oversimplification. The intent is that psychiatrists give people drugs in order to help them solve their problems. Sure the drug companies have an economic incentive to push meds. Old-guard practitioners of the talking cure had an economic incentive to resist pharmacological psychiatry, too. The studies I keep hearing about show that for most people in many categories of mental illness, a combination of medication and therapy beats either of them alone. And for all the horror stories, the impression I get is that the new generations of drugs have provided major relief to millions of people. The industry, despite the usual capitalist excesses, is demand-driven.

A couple of books, one I've read and one I haven't: Listening to Prozac by Peter Kramer, a very thoughtful psychiatrist who asks what the new drug treatments tell us about personality and identity; and Of Two Minds by T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist's look at the struggle within psychiatry between the psychotherapeutic and biological models.