Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health • Hacker News Board

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#51

Post by cs02rm0 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 8:23 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #33

cs02rm0 wrote: post #17

I couldn't get a vitamin B12 injection, the materials cost of which is less than £1 with no negative side effects, more often than every 12 weeks from my doctor. Despite feeling awful at 8 weeks onwards, to the point of not being able to work, and better again every time I had the injection. I didn't care if it was placebo (although why it would be placebo at 8 weeks but deemed not a placebo at 12 weeks I struggle to…

Curious, why do you need an injection? I thought only vegans had issues with B12, and only if they weren't paying attention to what they ate.

I've heard it's possible due to poor diet, but I'm not vegan and even then it's very rare - AIUI your body stores some 2-5 years worth of what you need, so if you're low it's probably because your body isn't absorbing it. Which also means supplements aren't going to work for me.

Why it's not absorbed varies, I was tested for pernicious anaemia which is a relatively common cause but I don't have that. That seems to be the end of the line for investigations on the UK NHS, they pretty much just said you can't get it from your diet, it doesn't matter why, so we'll inject it.

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#52

Post by coffeemug » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 8:24 PM UTC

Alternatively: we can stop referring to these as medicines and treat them like iodized salt, fluoridated water, or cell phones. They seem to be completely safe in short and long term. They make people’s lives better. How do you tell articles like this apart from luddite stigma?

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#53

Post by ip26 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

cs02rm0 wrote: post #51

ip26 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, why do you need an injection? I thought only vegans had issues with B12, and only if they weren't paying attention to what they ate.

I've heard it's possible due to poor diet, but I'm not vegan and even then it's very rare - AIUI your body stores some 2-5 years worth of what you need, so if you're low it's probably because your body isn't absorbing it. Which also means supplements aren't going to work for me. Why it's not absorbed varies, I was tested for pernicious anaemia which is a relatively common cause but I don't have that. That seems to be…

It's still worth at least quickly evaluating your diet to check. You probably know already, but generally speaking B12 comes from fish, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy. Nothing else.

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#54

Post by dkarl » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

Does anyone feel like their scraped knees and head colds are "medicalized" because there's treatment available and medical terminology for talking about it? You can take your scraped knee to your family doctor or an urgent care clinic and get a bandage applied to it, but people rarely do, and having the option doesn't freak anyone out.

So why are people bothered by their anxiety or reoccurring blue moods being "medicalized?" As far as I can tell, it's just the stubborn lingering stigma associated with mental illness. The fact that a person's cold is a physical illness feels harmless to them, but the idea that they might be suffering from a "mental" illness, even a mild and common one, feels way more momentous and scary than it should.

Clearly I am not alone in my sense that we have already hit the boundaries of how far we can sensibly apply the paradigm of mental health as a means of understanding and addressing human misfortunes.

This is ridiculous. We certainly haven't gone far enough when people identify "mental health" with an inability to function without professional support. How ridiculous would it be if people denied having a physical injury when they had a scraped knee, because they felt denial was the only way to avoid seeing a doctor? How ridiculous would it be if people didn't brush their teeth because they didn't want to give up their precious self-reliance to "dental health" professionals? We reduce our reliance on professionals by applying knowledge from those professions, not by denying their relevance.

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#55

Post by YorkshireSeason » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

namirez wrote: post #50

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mark Fisher's entire work can be summarised without much loss by saying "It's all capitalism's fault!" How is this interesting? I met him personally a couple of times, I don't think he would have been able even to say what e.g. fractional reserve banking was, or the labour theory of value, not to mention Böhm-Bawerk's famous critique. Anyway, since I've just violated de mortuis nil nisi bonum , let me finish by sayin…

I just know that in our economic system, humans are capital and anything that compromises their economic productivity is pathologized. Who Fisher was or what he did is irrelevant to this discussion.

Soldiers, children and old-age pensioners are not productive, yet not pathologised.

Whole swathes of jobs are not truly productive, e.g. marketing and advertising, psychologists, priests, yoga-teachers.

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#56

Post by klodolph » Wed, Jun 26, 2019, 12:11 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #45

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you fix your sleep problem? And if they both disappeared at the same time, how can you be certain that your not the one mixing up cause and effect?

> if they both disappeared at the same time They didn't disappear at the same time. I was on antidepressants for a year and my time on antidepressants was pretty much independent of the degree to which my sleep problems were fixed. I probably was slightly less anxious while on the antidepressants, but this was far overwhelmed by the fact that I get/got anxious & depressed after the nights my sleep was poor and I don'…

> This happened at a far, far slower and more grinding pace than the counterfactual in which I had any competent doctors around me […]

I know the details are scarce, but why do you say that a competent doctor would have been able to diagnose and treat your condition quickly? Issues related to mental health and sleep are exceptionally difficult. Literally everyone I know, including myself, with mental health or sleep issues has gone through that same slow, grinding pace that you describe. Issues range from anxiety disorders, to bipolar disorder, or idiopathic hypersomnia (where “idiopathic” just means “we don’t know why”).

The etiology of these diseases ranges from completely unknown to “a mix of psychological, environmental, and biological factors”. These diseases are frequently not curable, and the best we can do is manage side effects. Going to a doctor as a legal impediment to getting prescription drugs is damn useful because the drugs carry risks of liver damage to chemical dependency and everything between.

Having been through this process myself, and witnessed close friends and family go through it, I can understand why anyone would be frustrated but it’s not clear what the alternative is. As a society we don’t have the medical knowledge to solve these issues quickly and effectively, and we only have so many brilliant minds to go around. In the meantime, therapy and/or prescription drugs make the difference between functioning member of society and being unable to work or even leave the house, at least for several people I know, including myself.

I wouldn’t be so quick to indict an entire profession, especially given your admitted use of anecdotes.

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#57

Post by wool_gather » Wed, Jun 26, 2019, 1:10 AM UTC

throwaway55254 wrote: post #16

wool_gather wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right to question. The rule of thumb I've heard, which seems sensible to me, is is the condition/symptom negatively affecting your ability to go about your day-to-day life . If not, then whatever you're experiencing is probably "normal enough". There's no great mass of people with completely by-the-book mental processes; everyone's a little "weird" in some way. On the other hand, I suppose you may not…

> is the condition/symptom negatively affecting your ability to go about your day-to-day life I wonder though, is this even too broad? Perhaps people need to overcome some of this adversity. Not everything is painless in life nor should it be.

I mean, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but you "overcome" it by getting treatment if it's bad enough.

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#58

Post by dragonsky67 » Wed, Jun 26, 2019, 5:10 AM UTC

throwaway55254 wrote: post #2

I wonder about this as well. I see lists of anxiety symptoms shared and I meet every one of them, but I don't consider myself to have anxiety. Isn't it normal to be anxious in stressful situations or to be depressed when things are going poorly. Then I do some reading about it and I wonder maybe its not normal, maybe I'm not supposed to feel this way. I'm sure there are people with mental health conditions that do ne…

The problem with continuous anxiety is that long term exposure can have a debilitating physical impact. This is not a joke and if you find that you are continually stressed or anxious you should take some active measures to get it under control.

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#59

Post by cs02rm0 » Wed, Jun 26, 2019, 6:25 AM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #53

cs02rm0 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it's possible due to poor diet, but I'm not vegan and even then it's very rare - AIUI your body stores some 2-5 years worth of what you need, so if you're low it's probably because your body isn't absorbing it. Which also means supplements aren't going to work for me. Why it's not absorbed varies, I was tested for pernicious anaemia which is a relatively common cause but I don't have that. That seems to be…

It's still worth at least quickly evaluating your diet to check. You probably know already, but generally speaking B12 comes from fish, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy. Nothing else.

Thanks, I think I'm in the clear there. I had milk on my cereal which happens to be fortified with B12, some chicken bite things for a snack, scrambled eggs for lunch and beef burgers for tea just yesterday. (With some fruit and veg). That's not an atypical day for me.

That my mother and siblings, and we all live apart, also have it and they don't seem short of dietary B12 either seems to add to the picture.

Re: Medicalising everyday life doesn't help anyone's mental health

#60

Post by wutbrodo » Wed, Jun 26, 2019, 11:20 AM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #47

wutbrodo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You hit the nail on the head with poor communication between generalists and specialists. This is why it looks like drugs are the first line of defense—because you went to the doctor first. If you had gone to a therapist first, the first line of defense would have been therapy. IMO and IME this is a really bad idea. My experience with specialists is that they're far, far more myopic than generalists: eg if you have…

> As I mentioned above, the problem didn't even end up being with anxiety, so going to a therapist would have been worse than useless for me. I wouldn't go that far. Therapy is a broadly-useful non-medical intervention that can increase across-the-board mental health. It bridges the gap between medical intervention, where specialists act as necessary gatekeepers to otherwise-dangerous courses of action, not that they…

Yea, I wasn't making a blanket indictment of therapy; I have plenty of friends who passionately describe it as something that anyone could benefit from, and I'm inclined to believe them. A combination of a familial mental health history and some childhood trauma due to same means that I'm sure I'm not a paragon of mental perfection (but again, no one is). But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the time and expense of a treatment that wasn't relevant wouldn't have been a good thing during an overwhelmingly pressing medical issue, at the very least to the extent that it was time spent not addressing or investigating the real problem, exacerbated by the fact that impaired executive function was one of the biggest challenges of addressing a sleeping disorder.