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When I'm angry or emotional, I first draw angry pictures then meditate. It's not quite the same but it does the trick. mrgreen

While a lot of the problems associated with mental illness do stem from a harmful worldview and twisted reasoning, please do take a moment to consider the WHY of these things. Some mental illness can be worked through with meditation, with practice, with the support of friends and family... other kinds it is much more helpful to seek the aid of professionals and even (gasp!) MEDICATION. There are times when one can only get so far with the added burden of a chemical imbalance in one's brain.

I think you missed my point.

There are times when medications will help people think more clearly. Forcing anyone to take medication unless they're a serious danger to themselves or others is wrong, but I would encourage people who are having problems dealing with their illnesses on their own to get into some psychotherapy and potentially consider some medication. If you have something that you can take that will make your brain function normally or at least BETTER, that will drastically decrease your suffering, I don't see the point in not taking it.

For a while there was this idea that medication could fix anything like some sort of magic spell... there has been a violent swing away from that idea in recent years to the point of view that medication is a dangerous and almost amoral last resort of the weak of will. People seem to think that taking medication is just putting more money into the pockets of the government, the drug companies, and the doctors (that last is blatantly untrue... the docs don't get a cut of the profits on medications they prescribe).

If you had a serious infection, would you wait until it was close to killing you to get some antibiotics? By then it could be too late.

I'm not saying that meds are a silver bullet and they will instantly "cure" you or fix everything... but they can really help. I don't think that either point of view, the "magic cure" or the "amoral crutch" is correct. I believe that we should seek the middle way in this, and understand that medications can be a tool, a very useful one, but they can also be used to simply mask symptoms. When they're being used in that second way, they will not be effective for long and they won't be nearly as effective as medication taken in combination with therapy, which has been shown by studies to be far FAR more helpful.

...I doubt that anyone is going to read all of this, it's a bit longer than I originally intended to make it, but this is a point that I wish more people would understand.

They are free things that the drug companies' reps. give doctors when they are talking about their medications, which means that the docs don't have to spend quite as much of their their own money on pens and other office supplies. My mother is a doctor and I've been in that environment long enough to know that a few pens and a coffee mug aren't going to convince people to prescribe a product that they haven't found effective and helpful. Often times when a medication is new on the market, doctors like to have drug representatives come so they can talk to them about it, does this mean that they aren't going to use their own judgement on whether or not a medication is effective? Not in the least.

Regarding the advertisements, you see ads for medications in magazines, on tv, on the radio... does that convince you that you need to go and use them? Why should the fact that a product's name is on a flyer or a pen convince you any more than the multi-million dollar ad campaigns?

Schizophrenia and other major (nonaffective) mental illnesses are best handled with medication, but there are also meditative techniques etc that can be helpful, or so I've learned in talking with people dealing with these illnesses.