HUZZAH! Banned from Rentech.com!
SimsHost:
Yeah, what Sandilou said. The other side of the coin is the number of doctors who profit from people's problems and the number of professionals who now provide the services that used to come from families.
The move toward reliance on drugs to alter normal human behavior really worries me, especially the tendency toward prescribing Ritalin for school children.
ZephyrZodiac:
Ritalin is not good! And hyperactivity in children is in my opinion excessive energy that needs to be directed, not suppressed!
However, I disagree with the notion that mental illness is a middle class disease! Bethlehem Hospital in London (Bedlam) was full of people from all walks of life who were considered mad, or in our terms, they were mentally ill!)
Renatus:
Mental illness as a whole isn't a middle-class problem, for certain; many working class or poorer folks end up having alcohol or drug addictions, abuse problems, or simply end up wandering the streets, homeless, because they can no longer function with day to day life at all. In the states at least, many of the homeless are quite mad, as due to a lack of funding people are turned out of mental institutions if the doctors think they won't be a danger to themselves or others.
However, sometimes people do go too far and try to make every behaviour that isn't complacent and compliant seen as pathological, usually in children. That makes me sick. It's not scientific or logical, it is selfish, and it may well cause future problems in the child if it is medicated unnecessarily. Furthermore, not every mental issue needs to be treated with drugs - oftentimes patience and behavioural therapy is what does the best job.
BTW ZZ, untreated schizophrenics can be very scary but are not necessarily dangerous. I had an apartment next to a woman in her 50's who was in the advanced stages... she did really bizarre things and would go off on scary tirades, but she never actually did anything threatening.
ZephyrZodiac:
I agree not all schizophrenics are dangerous, but unfortunately there are some who definitely are. We have had at least three massacres in the UK where the inquest on the perpetrator reached the conclusion that they were in the delusional stage of schizophrenia. We have the same problem over here, that mental institutions have been closed and people moved into the community - to save money, and to sell the valuable building land the hospitals were built on! - and unfortunately "care in the community" does not always work, there is no compulsion on a mentally ill person to stay in a community home or to take there meds. It's a lot easier too to look after people who are in one place than scattered throughout a city.
Another thing to consider is that the siting of most older mental hospitals was in suburban, quieter areas, they had huge grounds which were a source of peaceful relaxation to people who were stressed and ill. Living in a modern city with 24 hours a day traffic is not the best place for people to recover their hold on sanity!
SimsHost:
Quote
However, sometimes people do go too far and try to make every behaviour that isn't complacent and compliant seen as pathological, usually in children. That makes me sick. It's not scientific or logical, it is selfish, and it may well cause future problems in the child if it is medicated unnecessarily.
That is a very succinct and eloquent expression of my fears about Ritalin. It's one of my pet peeves, probably because it affected me personally. My son's school administrators demanded that we have him evaluated and get him a prescription for Ritalin, otherwise they would throw him out of school.
So, we had him evaluated. In this case, the doctors concluded that he was a perfectly normal 10-year-old boy. Personable, articulate, affable; no behavior indicating hyperactivity or any other sydrome like it. His only problem was that happened to perform so well on IQ tests that his teachers were afraid of him.
Our solution was to take him out of that madhouse and home-school him until he's ready for college. Let him learn at his own rate and try to teach him to cope with the boredom of sitting through classes. That was a skill I learned early in life, but I really don't know how to teach it to someone else. Darn.
In retrospect, we could have spared him all those visits with doctors and pshrinks; but he seemed to enjoy it so overall it was probably a positive experience for him.
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