Psychiatric Drugs for Healing?
I recommend watching this important exploration about the current wide-spread use of psychiatric drugs and the medicalisation of normal human distress. This 38 mins long video is really worth watching, if you are using or thinking about using psychiatric drugs for your recovery. In this interview, according to the world’s leading investigators of the long term effects of psychiatric drugs, Robert Whitaker, taking psychiatric drugs over long term are a lot less effective than our normal ability to recover without drugs. So, it should be used mainly for short term acute intervention to ease symptoms and to make more effective longer term interventions possible – like developing better support systems, developing better work/life balance and exploring the nature of our distress in some reflective way, like meditation, focusing, expressive mediums, therapy, etc.
Psychiatric drugs, like antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication, rarely provide all that we need for healing. Of course there are some severe mental health conditions that would be much more difficult and expensive to treat without the use of medication. But for most “normal” people, they can be more helpful as a kind-of short term “crutch” that can be helpful for some, before they can develop healthier ways to support, manage and process the inevitable emotional distress that is part and parcel of normal human life.
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