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Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

psyche.co

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Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#371

Post by s1artibartfast »

all_blue_chucks wrote: post #311
s1artibartfast wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Personally I would absolutely consider persistent misery, or experiencing extreme sadness over minor things, to be a clear proof that there is something wrong with my brain. Whether I treat that with therapy or medication, I think that is very much worth treating, and definitely not worth simply accepting. I think you are making the assumption that it is treatable, or that the treatment advantages outweigh the disad…

Not all cases of depression are effectively treated - some end in suicide - but every single case is worth treating. Resigning oneself to lifelong misery is the worst possible choice.

That depends on the side effects of the treatment and how bad the depression is

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#372

Post by johnchristopher »

thelittleone wrote: post #111
johnchristopher wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What parasites are we talking about and what's a 6 day liver cleans ? (I mean, the procedure). Do you mean to say you had depression for a few months (with anxiety on top) ?

I had ups and downs after the first anxiety attack occurred but if normalized it was certainly a gradual decline into depression. Anxiety would come and go and although i never considered suicide I did wonder if I would be better of dead. The liver flush I did involved a morning celery and lemon juice. 5 light meals. 1L of apple juice spread throughout the day. After dinner a glass of water with epsom salts (tastes l…

Thanks.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#373

Post by lwkl »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #366
minerjoe wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deadset against prescribing stimulant medication to children I've seen it first hand. Child is beautiful and active and happy and sad and angry and living and the Mother just can't handle it and BAM - drugs. Child grows up, becomes a teenager. Prescription drugs stop. Teenage moves to Methamphetamine, start cooking. Eventually is busted and jailed. The connection, for me, is clear. I feel very very lucky that I gre…

> and the Mother just can't handle it It's unfortunate that it's often the case that psychiatric help is only sought for "problem children", who negatively impact those around them. These are the kids that get "easily distracted and distracts others" on all their report cards. Well behaved children with ADHD (generally those with inattentive-type) tend to have their poor academic performance written off as laziness o…

Medication allows therapy to be effective. And it depends where on the spectrum you are. Just going to therapy and talking won‘t change anything. For me a main symptom is and was the inability to take action on existing knowledge. Therapy can’t fix that.

Treatment of ADHD without medication needs action accommodations from the school, teachers, friends, boy scouts and parents. And it‘s not possible for every parent and every school.

If you feel emotionally numb because of the stimulants your dose is probably too high and it should be adjusted.

But I agree with you. The treatment can‘t be just a pill. It needs at least to be a pill and education for the involved parties. And especially education for the patient. So they can adjust their treatment and lifestyle according to their needs.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#374

Post by squiggleblaz »

BurningFrog wrote: post #361
garbagetime wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depression as you mean it is a proper state for a person to be be in when his life and the world about him seem to be very wrong. To delete depression rather than addressing the root causes seems strange and inhuman.

The root causes are often unfixable. So you try to fix the other side of the equation. Often it means adjusting unrealistic expectations. Like if I'm sad because I'm not a famous movie star. You could either make me a movie star, or make me accept that this is very likely not going to happen, and that's OK. Nothing inhuman about that.

The root cause of that isn't that you're not a famous movie star. It's that you have so ordered your life that all happiness depends on being a famous movie star. There's parts of that equation that can be changed: teaching you how to have reasonable goals might be one of them.

Ignoring the fact that you're sad because you're not a famous movie star and giving you a happy pill is the inhuman step.

It's the old adage in spades: "Give someone a fish and they'll eat for a day; teach them to fish and they'll eat for the rest of their life."

Happiness in pill form is not happiness.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#375

Post by derangedHorse »

sandgiant wrote: post #274
dukha wrote: post #56

I've always been depressive and pessimistic person as far as I can remember. I've been looking at other people only to see how happy they are and how content they with their life. They feel motivated, want something from life and in generally think that being alive is alright, which I just couldn't internalize no matter how hard I tried. Essentially, I've come to the conclusion that there _must_ be something wrong wi…

I think you're on to something really important here. Some people (normal people if you will) just don't think too much about things. Even when they sometimes go on to make terrible choices for themselves, and others, they might regret it, they might have negative thoughts about it, but they don't become depressed. They are not inclined to ruminating hours on end about their mistakes, so the negative thoughts dissipa…

This comment assumes people can choose what they think about when most of the time there doesn't seem to be an off-switch to a certain topic or emotion. I've found that it's easier to re-apply one's thought process on something mentally demanding and important (so the mind will find it urgent enough to drop whatever it is currently thinking about) than to direct one's mind to stop thinking about a particular topic. With that being said, I know that I'm also trivializing the difficulty finding a replacement topic that sufficiently demanding and important.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#376

Post by kmmlng »

jac241 wrote: post #305
dpweb wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, what is the appropriate threshold where we call it mental illness. The article, Jenna's boyfriend cheated. She's seriously depressed. That ain't illness, it's normal. That doctor is a quack. I feel part of the problem is the expectation that humans are supposed to be happy. Happy is just a state of mind, not necessarily our default state. Depression and mental pain have their uses. They alert us, something is w…

That's textbook major depressive disorder. How long would you let Jenna suffer out of principle? One month was too short a time for you, so what a year, two? She's not attending classes, crying all the time, sleeping more than usual. Why would you let depression ruin her future when we have effective treatment with a favorable side effect profile (CBT + SSRIs)? It's not an either/or situation. Doctors definitely coun…

I think there is an argument to be made here that prescribing medication might be treating the symptoms but not the root causes, which will lead the patient to ignore the root causes, leading to worse outcomes in the long run while an improvement can be observed in the short term.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#377

Post by derangedHorse »

koheripbal wrote: post #90
Barrin92 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Chemical imbalance' as a causal explanation seems to me almost useless because every severe change in behaviour pretty much by definition corresponds to change in the brain. How else is it supposed to be manifest? Is there supposed to be drastic change in psychology without change in the brain? There can be a company pouring lead into a river, psychological hazard during a civil war, and it will always manifest in t…

"People in distress" is even more useless. "in distress" could mean anything from having fallen down the stairs, to running out of gas on the highway. I don't mind changing language, as long as we're become more precise, not less. If "chemical imbalance" is bad, suggest something better. I think a bigger problem is that people are fixated on word definitions and offending others instead of solving problems.

Problems can only be addressed once precisely defined.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#378

Post by derangedHorse »

Supermancho wrote: post #216
ditonal wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an apt descriptor at all because there's no test for a normal range of a chemical that depressed people are outside of.

> It's not an apt descriptor at all because there's no test for a normal range of a chemical that depressed people are outside of. As disconcerting as it may be, subjective feeling is a range (google "pain indicator charts") as well as professional (for some value of that) psychological analysis. I think your view is minority view.

> I think your view is minority view.

It may be a minority view but only because of people's blind faith in a medical authority's ability to distinguish a patient's mind as 'abnormal'. What Barrin92 said is logically sound, an empirical diagnosis of the behavior coming from an individual is not a very precise measure of any type of chemical imbalance. That's not to say individuals suspected to have of mental illness shouldn't get treated, but that medical professionals shouldn't jump to medications as a primary end-all treatment (which is what I believe is what the linked article was trying to say).

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#379

Post by bserge »

nastyfilthy wrote: post #247
bserge wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried other drugs? I am depressive and pessimistic by nature, too. I have accepted that. But I have to fix the extremes because otherwise I simply can't function. Different drugs can literally make you feel and think like a different person. The only problem is side effects and tolerance, you can't go on on drugs for very long. They can be invaluable for building different habits, though.

What other drugs are you referring to? Other types of antidepressants or acid.

Not only MDMA (which is probably not prescribed by anyone yet) like /u/weknowbetter said, but also other stuff that has shown promise in treating depression (and has actually worked for other people). Imipramine (not really good long term), CBD, low dose THC, ketamine, gabapentin, there's some others, too.

Gabapentin works really well for me, though I have to stop taking it for a week every month, so that's 2-3 days of insomnia and nightmares. Technically I'm not supposed to, but then I'd have to increase the dosage to what I consider unacceptable levels. Tapering off also works, though.

CBD/THC (only with a low dose of alcohol) also works well, but I don't like the side effects (lower mental acuity, plus my already bad attention goes rock bottom), so it's more of an occasional thing.

Doctors are really inflexible in what they can give me, so I have to make do. SSRI's just don't work on me, except for imipramine, but that's really temporary.

Re: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

#380

Post by nsl73 »

asveikau wrote: post #367
nsl73 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t consider my initial statement questioning a metaphor to mean that people that have suffered a psychotic episode or are likely to suffer a psychotic episode in the near future should avoid medication. The threshold for considering medication should be lower than a psychotic episode. My concern is the metaphor in which many people are viewing mental health, not in the treatments themselves.

Thanks for that. Sorry if my reply was too vicious. I think I was criticizing a variant of the described attitude rather than you or your specific comment.

My communications should have made that more clear. It’s probably a common and dangerous interpretation.
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