Psychiatric diagnoses are made based on the opinions of psychiatrists rather than with actual diagnostic technology

>Do you honestly think the #1 best selling pharmaceutical product ought to be an antipsychotic? Does that seem right to you?
That seems about right to me considering that it says right there in your wikipedia chart that Abilify is also used as an antidepressant. 0/10

Better prescribe him nine billion milligrams of chemically induced parkinson's disease to fix that chemical imbalance in his brain.

>When "the best you can" consistently leads to subpar outcomes and near objectively doesn't get results
Its still better than everything else

I am.
I'm bitter, disappointed, tired, disgusted, and annoyed. Bordering on enraged.

No matter where I go I start to feel tired before I've even begun.

Indication creep, you asinine gibberish spouting moron.

No. It is inferior.

The way we treat mental issues is pathetic and disingenuous given what we know.

So because a decision was made to take what was originally used only as an antipsychotic and expand it out to a much broader demographic of potential buyers by remarketing it as also OK for antidepressant use to the point where it's literally the best selling pharmaceutical (note that I'm not qualifying that as "psychiatric pharmaceutical," it's actually the best selling of any kind of pharmaceutical, psychiatric or otherwise), that makes you think there isn't a problem?

>Indication creep, you asinine gibberish spouting moron.
If people use it to combat clinical depression and it works for them, who the fuck do you think you are to tell them it's "indication creep" and that improvement in their symptoms is invalid?

Fuck off you stupid bitter faggot, you obviously have something personally against the field of psychiatry rather than basing your claims on anything scientific or objective. Get the fuck off my board.

>No. It is inferior.
To what? Propose and justify a better method

>you obviously have something personally against the field of psychiatry
Very insightful.

And no. Abilify will not meaningfully treat, unravel, nor reconcile someone's depression. You cannot teat mental issues as intrinsic mechanical failures that magically and implicitly "just are" and exist in a vacuum. That's inane and childish. The field of psychiatry's truths are disingenuous falsehoods, and parasitically feed on people's laziness, indoctrination, and stupidity. Worst, they support a society where people are forced to find a way to continue or drown, so they accept trash.

>who the fuck do you think you are to tell them it's "indication creep"

When an opinion based diagnosis system for a "chemical imbalance" problem (that admittedly doesn't exist and is just cited for marketing purposes) becomes the reason behind a pharmaceutical becoming the #1 best seller, bringing in billions of dollars each year, then it doesn't matter who calls it "indication creep" because of course that's the only thing it possibly could be. How much more ridiculous and blatant a standard are you looking for here exactly? The majority of medical conditions is not a "chemical imbalance" in the brain unless you're just using a lie to sell drugs, which is the case in the world today.

If you are sedentary a big side effect is constant fatigue.

Try getting into an exercise routine involving resistance training and light cardio.

>also used as an antidepressant
You know what works better than half as well as antidepressants? Sugar-pill placebos.

You know what works very nearly as well as antidepressants? Placebos with convincing physical side effects.

You know what's impossible to test to see whether it's as good as antidepressants? Placebos which can't be distinguished from the drug being tested by the fact of having a perceptible psychoactive effect.

You know what patients being able to perceive a difference between placebo and treatment means in a placebo-controlled, blinded study? It means it's not blinded, and presenting it as if it is, is fraud.

You know what consistently works better than antidepressants? Programs of good nutrition and regular, moderate physical activity.

Hardly anybody is forced to take medication, if it didnt offer some improvement or the side effects were too serious people would switch to a different medication or none at all

>Abilify will not meaningfully treat, unravel, nor reconcile someone's depression.
[Citation needed]

The literature resoundly disagrees with your statement, which makes this thread not science and based entirely on your own personal feelings and misgivings about psychiatry.

I recommend or

Sources for any of that please. And you still havent proposed an alternative, better method for psychiatric healthcare than the one we currently use

But there is

Machines actually outperform doctors at diagnosing

>You know what consistently works better than antidepressants? Programs of good nutrition and regular, moderate physical activity.
haha ok

you're one of those 'clinical depression isn't real' morons, I see.

it's real

it is caused by your shitty habits

change them

>Hardly anybody is forced to take medication

It's not that black and white. It's true hardly anyone is compelled by force of law to take medicine at gunpoint or on threat of incarceration. The reality is more subtle than that. Keep in mind a large portion of pharmaceutical recipients are children for example.

The brain is just chemistry. Different chemicals interact with the brain in different ways.

A chemical imbalance in the brain, whatever that may be, should then be treatable with some chemical.

The trick is to find a chemical that does this while also not being harmful to an acceptable degree.

That's the best we have right now.

>just man up
nice scientific opinion, too bad it's wrong and stupid

youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

Please educate yourself.

>man up

Protip: EATING PROPERLY AND EXERCISING ARE ACTUAL PHYSICAL THINGS THAT HAVE EFFECTS ON YOUR CHEMISTRY

The oldest one there is. Think of the bigger picture and unravel, mechanistically, why your psyche is working the way it is. It isn't easy, and it lacks instant gratification. Core change and self discovery takes effort. But if you're not functioning properly, then too fucking bad. Deal with it. Who you are, how you're trying to live, your environment and your place within it, and who you think you want to be, clearly isn't working. The first step is acknowledgement. The days of living with those delusions clearly must end. Look for triggers and understand the process, learn to ask honest questions and generate honest answers.

The other aspect is obviously the mechanical approach, figuring why the brain's machinery is fucking up the way it is. This process is inherently iterative and heuristic guided. You look for correlations until you find signals in the noise. Initial prescreening can rule out gut flora and intestinal issues, food allergies, marked dietary or nutrition deficits. Histamine's role as a modulatory neurotransmitter cannot be ignored. I can't stress that enough. I'd love to take a massive sampling of bipolar people and give them allergy tests. Test their DAO and histamine n-methyltransferase function.

Also might have to be willing to revisit your childhood.

And if they don't work? What then?

What do you think drugs do? They make your brain produce something. That something is also produced when you eat properly and exercise.

>scientologist detected

>Machines actually outperform doctors at diagnosing
Not psychiatric conditions, and if they are we should use them for that

Then their parents should be noticing a lack of improvement or serious side effects

And your scientific evidence that this actually works, and works better than the current method?

And I'm asking you what should happen if that amount produced or inhibited by diet and exercise is not enough to stop depressive symptoms.

Do you understand my question?

If they worked then you were depressed, you didnt have depression. Since the vast majority of depressed people dont have depression this is usually good advice though

Source please.

>you still havent proposed an alternative, better method for psychiatric healthcare than the one we currently use
Holy shit. Just stopping doing something that doesn't work is enough. The lie that psychiatrists help is incredibly destructive, especially when the drugs they push have serious, sometimes fatal physical side effects and dangerous withdrawal symptoms.

What you're pushing here is the logic of, "We have to do something! This is something, therefore we have to do it!"

No, we don't have to do something. Not doing anything is always an option. Sometimes it's the best one available.

And don't try and lump together locking up obvious lunatics with psychiatric treatment (psychiatrists aren't helpful for identifying them, and are pushing an alarming trend of having pseudomedical opinion replace due process, presumption of innocence, and right to a trial by a jury of one's peers), particularly with psychiatric treatment of people who have never needed to be locked up.

Nearly a quarter of Americans, and over a quarter of American women, are on psychiatric drugs. That's not a product of honest medicine.

>EATING PROPERLY AND EXERCISING ARE ACTUAL PHYSICAL THINGS THAT HAVE EFFECTS ON YOUR CHEMISTRY

What? No way. If you're not feeling good it's definitely a brain disease that for reasons we'll choose not to think about won't be treated by a neurologist.

>The lie that psychiatrists help is incredibly destructive
But they do help some people and plenty of people can attest to that. What, are they all paid shills or something?

You are obviously very bitter because you feel you were mistreated by a psychiatrist. This isn't science, it's a personal grudge. sage

Lots of people have depression, it's not surprising that an antidepressant is the most commonly prescribed drug. Depression is probably the most common condition around.

Every psychiatrist knows that antidepressants are not the whole answer.

I'm not sedentary or out of shape.

>[Citation needed]
Look around. There's your citation. Unless you've never actually known anyone on any of these medications and are simply arguing with me to support a core ideological disposition that makes you feel cozy and safe, or whatever.

>The literature resoundly disagrees with your statement
It doesn't. Refer to the specific wording of my last post.
>Abilify will not meaningfully treat, unravel, nor reconcile someone's depression.
>meaningfully unravel
>meaningfully treat
>meaningfully reconcile
>unravel, treat, reconcile
Hint. If you have to take pills to maintain, you didn't fix anything. This is very simple logic.

>Hardly anybody is forced to take medication
Try being so cripplingly depressed, anxious, manic, whatever, and functioning at work. Good luck with that. You don't have TIME for your psychological health, else good luck putting food on the table, fuckhead. If that's not indirect force for a lot of people, I don't know what is.

>A chemical imbalance in the brain
Is not how the brain and its feedback loops work. It's also vague and effectively meaningless. You really think your brain has a balance?

>That's the best we have right now.
Imagine going somewhere and having something shitty happen to you. You'll come back in a different mood! But HOW??!! You didn't take in chemicals, you were just exposed to a specific environmental context and it's almost like, WOW MAN, the machinery of your brain had its dynamics and state altered! LIKE. LIKE. LIKE.

IT'S ALMOST LIKE THAT'S HOW WE ADAPTIVELY RESPOND TO CONTEXT.

SUCH TTTRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIPPPPPPP. WE'RE NOT LIKE, A ROCK, OR SOMETHING MAN.

LIKE, FUCK YOU, MAN.
FUCK YOU.

>Look around. There's your citation

>Programs of good nutrition and regular, moderate physical activity.
LOL.

Exercise certainly helps, but all that clean eating shit is broscience.

>Holy shit. Just stopping doing something that doesn't work is enough
It clearly does work, to some extent, some of the time. When you have something that works more often and to a greater extent come on back

You have not provided any evidence other than your own clearly strong feelings about the issue. You have not provided data showing that medication has the same or worse outcomes than non-medication, or that this particular drug you have an issue with is harmful/useless

>And your scientific evidence that this actually works, and works better than the current method?
Personal experience, experience with other people, and the entirety of human knowledge of neuroscience and psychology.

If people weren't so goddamn stupid and actually used their brain for something, this would be readily apparent via their every day experience of themselves.

I gotta take a deep breath here. I've had a fucked up day and I'm ready to pound someone.

You seem really imbalanced and upset judging by your post.

Take your meds.

Most patients want a magic pill that will fix their problems immediately. We know that exercise and diet are important in every 'lifestyle' disease but patients are more interested in gastric banding operations, insulin etc than changing lifelong habits.

>Try being so cripplingly depressed, anxious, manic, whatever, and functioning at work
I am, go fuck yourself

So all you have is anecdote and anger. Humanity invented science precisely so people like you could have their opinions safely dismissed

M8, I understand what you're saying. The pharmaceutical approach to dealing with mental health is complex. But it's just one of many prongs. Of course good clinicians will try and resolve other problems in a person's life as well. I agree though that much more could be done. However frankly, at least here in Australia, the problem is due to a serious scarcity in resources thanks to the govt. For the record, I'm an assistant nurse at an acute mental health facility

I've been there user, and not only did I get by, I got up and gathered the spine to try to do and be something else. I changed.

You're historically relateable in a high level sense, and I can loosely put myself in your mindset, but get fucked you broken sad sappy stupid excuse for a wimp. Go sit in a dark room and practically drool on yourself for a while, attempting to generate thoughts that don't perversely loop back on themselves.

>I got up and gathered the spine to try to do and be something else. I changed.
Then you werent there. Once again, go fuck yourself, the week you spent sad because your girlfriend dumped bears no meaningful relation at all to my experience

Have a wank, champ. Sounds like you need to calm down

If taking pills allows you function and at least enjoy life, then yes, you actually did fix something for the time being. Your "simple logic" isn't logic at all.

Mechanistic approach. I don't avoid picking apart anecdote simply because it isn't part of a well controlled study. I reverse engineer it, weigh, and integrate what I find with the whole. When you're dealing with a black box, that's what you do. I also rationally take into account how the machine is known to work on a hard level.

If you'd done either of the above, you'd know quite well what potentiates, sustains, and spurs state changes. You'd also readily dismiss the chemical imbalance quackery (it's not even worthy of being called a hypothesis).

>all you have is anecdote

Meaning his credibility is roughly equivalent to "half of the historical studies our field is based on can't be reproduced" psychology.

science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716

>I'm asking you what should happen if that amount produced or inhibited by diet and exercise is not enough to stop depressive symptoms.
First of all, "depression" isn't an illness, it's a symptom. It's often a symptom of physical illness, which in many cases will need treatment particular to the condition.

So if you're "treating depression" rather than finding the cause of depression and dealing with that, you've already decided to deal in band-aid solutions.

Note that psychiatric medications DO NOT treat any physical illness which causes depression. They are all solely aimed at symptoms. They generally have harmful side effects, serious risks, and cause dependency. They have far from a 100% success rate, and people who start taking antidepressants almost always become severely depressed as a withdrawal symptom if they ever stop.

Before antidepressants were developed, psychological depression (with no identifiable physical cause) was considered a temporary condition. The treatment was to rally friends and family to be supportive and prevent self-harm, and just wait for it to pass, which it did in nearly every case.

People used to get depressed, it would last six months or a year or two years, then it would go away and they'd live normal lives. Now people get depressed, they start trying different treatments, and after six months or a year or two years, they say, "I finally got a good doctor and found the drug that works for me!" and carry on taking it for the rest of their function-impaired, shortened lives.

Absolutely not true. Depression is a clinical diagnosis. Someone can have it and then recover with no treatment. What treatment they've had or not had does not affect the diagnosis. It would be incredibly flawed if it did.

>Hint. If you have to take pills to maintain, you didn't fix anything. This is very simple logic.
That's because there is nothing to fix, only treat. You cant rewire a brain with drugs.

>Is not how the brain and its feedback loops work.
That's exactly how it works. Neurotransmitters, my friend.

>You really think your brain has a balance?
Yes, because if it didn't we'd all be psychotic and bipolar and have every other chemical imbalance disorder.

>Imagine going somewhere and having something shitty happen to you. You'll come back in a different mood!
Try laughter yoga then?

You're clearly manic right now. Rather than taking out your frustrations on this board, why not actively try to do something about your current issues? Talk to a psychologist, get a new psychiatrist, etc etc. Why be content with your situation and pass it off as someone else's fault/problem?

There's no point in arguing about this on sci when you dont have a sufficient background in biochemistry/pharmacy/neuroscience. It's all conjecture back and forth and nothing we say will make a difference anyways because you are too upset to accept that you might be the one who has the skewed outlook.

>
There's no point in arguing about this on sci when you dont have a sufficient background in biochemistry/pharmacy/neuroscience. It's all conjecture back and forth and nothing we say will make a difference anyways because you are too upset to accept that you might be the one who has the skewed outlook.

Amen. Fuck this guy and fuck this thread.

>Muh bootstraps
Fuck off arsehole you're not helping anyone. You weren't clinically depressed if you think it's as simple as that. Either that or you've got terrible memory.

>psychotic and bipolar and have every other chemical imbalance disorder.
The "chemical imbalance" theory of psychiatric disorders is considered pseudoscience even in mainstream psychiatric research now. Although you still hear practicing psychiatrists invoke it to convince patients and their family members that the medication is necessary. They've never been much bothered about pushing pseudoscience.

Psychology != Psychiatry

I don't know the chemical imbalance theory, just that it's plausible (at least to me) that mental disorders would stem from an over/under production of some chemical in the brain, to some degree. Which should make them treatable to some degree as well.

>Although you still hear practicing psychiatrists invoke it to convince patients and their family members that the medication is necessary.

Knowingly giving false information about how a drug (with possible serious side-effects and withdrawal symptoms) works is grossly unethical.

No it isn't, what the fuck are you talking about? Now you're just making shit up.

Try nearly a decade of my life, followed by the development of trigeminal neuralgia and health problems I doubt you can even imagine. I withered and rebuilt so many goddamn times I don't even want to think about it.

I've also never had a girlfriend, nor any close friends. Not only did I do it, in severe pain, but I did it alone. From the outside user, I can see pretty well what keeps people like you right where you are. Spare me the rest of your presumptuous horseshit.

I do. There's someone with chronic pain problems causing a... commotion, in the village I live in. I'm ambivalent at best and once the tribal feedback loops start, they cannot be stopped until it shakes out however it will. I don't like any of this, the guy is a bit of a dickhead but I know what's ticking in his mind. There's a bigger picture here, and yet all these goddamn selfish people just want him gone. I don't dislike them, but in this moment they look like vultures circling.

I don't like any of it. It's a shit situation and I'm fucking tired of it. I might have had a decent means with which to interface, but possibly blew it today. They're all calling the cops on him, and I'd rather see salvation than him get run out of town.

Yes, it is.

Drugs also have their place. But I'd argue pharmaceuticals, typically, are engineered to maximize profits and there are better approaches available. eg kava for anxiety and nerve root damage is far more effective than benzos and daily opioids. Phenibut is a surprisingly effective painkiller as well, as are cocoa beans.

Drugs should not be the first line, and if used, they must exist alongside meaningful attempts to discover and fix the core issues.

>Try nearly a decade of my life
Not even a decade? Pathetic

Nearly a decade until the peak of my health problems, the at least half a decade more. ;^)

Sounds like you should seek out a good psychologist. Not trolling/messing with you. I think it would help you a lot to have someone to talk to about all this.

My friend had a lot of trouble with bipolar disorder, and went around seeing a bunch of different psychiatrists who all prescribed different things. Some of it was good, most was bad. It took him a long time to find a good psychiatrist who prescribed a medication that worked well for him.

But during that time he sought out a psychologist and it really helped him deal with his issues. It changed his whole personality too for the better, and i could see it helped him tremendously.

Good luck.

I used to have scizoaffective-like symptoms throughout middle and high school. Mixed states and hypomania was part of this, along with panic attacks, hallucinations, and irrational fears / experiences.

Curiously, most of this readily receded when food allergies were identified and fixed. Before that it was handled by identifying triggers and learning to tell the discrete stages of the overall processes involved, and counterbalance them.

After I removed the more extrinsic mechanical aspect, that which was causing the immune system to go everywhere and probably weaken the BBB with chronic peroxide exposure, along with mast cells pumping out histamine chronically, the more psychological method of dealing became far easier and I made rapid progress.

>Drugs should not be the first line, and if used, they must exist alongside meaningful attempts to discover and fix the core issues.
I think most people would agree with this.

>it's plausible (at least to me) that mental disorders would stem from an over/under production of some chemical in the brain, to some degree
Oh psychiatric *symptoms* absolutely result from those kinds of problems. But they're not considered psychiatric disorders or mental illnesses, and they're not treated with psychiatric meds.

If you look at every psychiatric disorder, you'll see that one of the diagnostic criteria is "...and the symptoms can not be attributed to a physical health condition." Psychiatrists are not *brain* doctors, they are *mind* doctors. It would be malpractice for them to treat an identifiable brain condition.

When there is a genuine chemical imbalance in the brain, that's going to be something that can be detected and measured. It's going to be diagnosed and treated by a neurologist, endocrinologist, internist, or something along those lines, and they will be VERY concerned with determining, through objective physical diagnostics, the specific physical cause of the condition, because the treatment needs to be specific to the cause, not just to the symptoms.

Psychiatrists operate much more like homeopaths. Homeopaths look at symptoms, then they find a poison that causes the same symptom, then they dilute it a crazy amount as if they can dilute it until it's negative, all the way to having an opposite effect. Psychiatrists are slightly less ridiculous: they look at symptoms, then they look for a psychoactive drug which causes "opposite symptoms" in a healthy person. The rest is fumbling around in the dark, unable to even do proper blinded trials for trial-and-error progress because people don't even need their senses to notice the difference between psychoactive drugs and sugar pills.

Unfortunately not. It seems a radical and foreign idea, else I would not be bothering to post.

>Knowingly giving false information about how a drug (with possible serious side-effects and withdrawal symptoms) works is grossly unethical.
These are the people who pushed parents to pay for icepick lobotomies for their unruly teens. They haven't undergone any fundamental change of character, and twenty or fifty years from now, we're probably going to look back at today's use of psych meds with the same horror and vague sense of unreality that responsible authority figures would ever behave so irresponsibly.

scientologist please go

depression is a madeup desease

Icepick lobotomies are arguably less fucked up than inducing Parkinson's Disease symptoms through the use of chemicals that shut down the brain's dopamine system. I've seen these children who get stuck with these drugs in the course of some volunteer work I used to do and they end up horrifyingly obese and with completely wrecked endocrine systems so that even in their late teens the males have creepy high pitched child voices, which coupled with their antipsychotic induced tardive dyskinesia giving them facial tics and muscle spasms makes them destined to live in their parents' basement forever while their parents collect social security checks for them.

Also some of those antipsychotics are known to cause the formation of brain tumors called prolactinomas which will continue to pump hormones that will sabotage male patients even after they come off the drugs.

"people don't even need their senses to notice the difference between psychoactive drugs and sugar pills."

Why is the dose given always so fucking high? Surely one can figure out what a "threshhold" dose is, and then you can give people that or slightly less to avoid this problem in studies.

Wow. I thought it was already dark enough watching what they do to bipolar people with more traditional mood stabilizers.

Some I used to know took Abilify for a few weeks while he was in a psych ward. He, apparently, didn't feel too abilified. Had a series of mental breakdowns and "what have I done" cycles over the next few months. Said it stripped him of even base creativity and "nothing is working right and I don't know if I'll ever have it back."

Not sure if he ever internally felt he shifted back into a more pleasant, or familiar range. But he seems fine now.

Can only imagine what being abilified long term would do. Not going to even bother going into how retarded it is to counterbalance hallucinations with partial dopamine agonists, despite knowing for a decade+ that the dopamine mesolimbic pathway model is severely incomplete on its own and that it likely derives from a complex further upstream.

>Look up generic Abilify on Wiki:
>Aripiprazole displays linear kinetics and has an elimination half-life of approximately 75 hours

75 HOURS. Is this something taken DAILY?

>Is this something taken DAILY?

Yes.

Outcomes for patients who don't take psychiatric drugs are better than those who do take them. Source is Robert Whitaker's books.

People generally get sick, have a life crisis, and then put the pieces of their broken life together.

What psychiatry does is commit you to their program. People get cancer and recover, but you're telling me that nobody ever has schizophrenia that goes into remission?

Psychedelic drugs (ayahuasca, peyote, mushrooms, iboga, cannabis) are all useful in treating mental illness but because of their volatility they are labeled as forbidden. If you want to talk about unpredictable, how is it that the same doseage of an antipsychotic just stops working?

We are using a hammer and scapel to treat people. There is no finesse and certainly no compassion.

alternativementalhealth.com

As a person with schizoaffective disorder taking 30mg of zyprexa and 1800 mg of lithium a day, this thread increases my urge to kill myself (which is already sky high believe me).

Basically this. A plethora of ligands for the two big depression-linked serotonin GPCRs -- 5HT2A and 2C -- are illegal because they have "no medical benefits" and a "high potential for abuse".

I know nothing about pharmacokinetics: the post.

...

>Psychiatrists do the best they can

Psychiatry is a hack profession of snake oil salesmen who have more power than they should ever have.

The worst part is, psychiatrists are seeing an unprecedented amount of respect showered upon them as America searches for answers to the mass shooting epidemic.

>schizoaffective
Read my post above:

Dank memes friend

You had me on your side (logically) until you tipped the fedora with the >psyhology and psychiatry are not hard science.
(citation needed)

Hard and soft science is a legitimate and objectively useful definition. It's not meant as an insult.

See:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science

The average opinion in this thread is refreshing. It might be an unrepresentative anomaly, but the ratio seems to have changed since 5-6 years ago.

Now that the damage has reached a certain threshold, the world is starting to get it.

No really, that's true. That's been a discarded theory for decades. I read in the journal behaviour therapist a year ago that doctors admit to using the explanation even though they know there's no evidence for it other than that SSRIs affects chemicals in the brain. It's just convenience, I guess.

Agreed