Two days ago there was a news item which said: Medication to treat mental health disorders is soaring among U.S. adults. 20% of all adults said they took at least one medication to treat a mental disorder. Among women, 25% said they took such medication and 20% said they were using an antidepressant.
The number of children under 10 taking antipsychotic medication, which is reserved for the most severe mental illnesses, doubled from 2001 to 2010.
In short, we are either getting crazier and sadder or the psychiatric and pharmaceutical companies are doing a great job convincing us that we are.
The crying shame is that the voice of psychologists like Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of “positive psychology” who was called “the Freud of the 21st century” by Newsweek, is drowned out by the doom peddlers. Seligman shocked the world of psychology by focusing on what makes people mentally healthy instead of what makes them mentally ill.
Forbes had an article last week about the upcoming DSM V with an intro that said, "The new manual of mental disorders coins bizarre new psychological disorders, lowers the threshold for diagnosing old ones, and has some critics pulling their hair out."
We are a generation that wants to be victims, that wants to be able to blame our parents, our environment, our genes, our so-called chemical imbalance, anything but ourselves, for our problems. If you as much as suggest that someone who has truly suffered at the hands of evil people can move past that and have a good life, you are vilified and accused of not understanding the depths of the person's trauma.
In their sincerity to help molestation victims, they push those hapless individuals down and seek to keep them down. I suspect it's because they believe that if the person goes on to lead a happy life, it demonstrates that what happened to them was not that egregious. That's like saying that a Holocaust victim who was stripped of his dignity, who was robbed and beaten, who was a hairsbreadth away from death thousands of times and who lost his parents, spouse, children, extended family and community, could not go on to marry and live a good life. But thousands did! And they are heroes of the spirit, particularly if they retained their faith and raised religious, upstanding children.
"Positive Psychology" may seem like an oxymoron but it doesn't have to be.
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Someone that I know takes in children from the foster care system and thought he could wean one of them from psychiatric drugs, since the drugs were making the child overweight and significantly upping his chances for type 2 diabetes. The child appeared to be making progress off medication but several weeks later, the child had a severe psychiatric episode and another youth in the house called the police. The child spent several weeks in a psychiatric ward and was discharged on medication. I would not want to say that no one needs medication because some people either really do need it or psychologists are not significantly skilled at other types of therapy.
ReplyDeleteI have a friend who spent years on drugs and her brother spent time in jail due to drugs. Their parents were Holocaust survivors who were very critical, judgmental, parents. Who knows if the Holocaust was to blame or maybe it was the same German childhood that turned others into Nazis but many children of Holocaust survivors felt that their upbringing lacked a certain loving bond that other families had.