Weiye Loh's Library tagged Psychiatry → View Popular, Search in Google

Jul

2011

Peer-led Group Therapy & Sense of Community Help Ease Schizophrenics’ Pain | The Utopianist - Think Bigger

Along with most other mental health issues — depression, bi-polar disorder and post traumatic stress disorder, for example — schizophrenia has fallen victim to stigma through society’s attempt to simplify what it doesn’t understand. Such stigma has improved over the years through education and awareness, but we still have a ways to go before scientists figure out exactly what’s going on up there.

utopianist.com/...-help-ease-schizophrenics-pain

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Stigma Mental Illness Psychiatry Drugs

perhaps letting schizophrenic patients comfort and help each other can give them something their doctors and therapists can’t — empathy and simple understanding. That’s what Gail Hornstein, a psychology professor at Mount Holyoke College, had in mind when she brought the Hearing Voices Network to the United States. The HVN is an international organization that gives people who hear voices a way to talk freely about their experiences with others who understand.
In an interview with The Sun magazine, Hornstein explained how these peer-led group sessions work:

“In psychiatric hospitals they’ve had cameras watching them or been viewed from behind one-way mirrors. When patients started their own groups, they decided that no one who isn’t a part of the group should attend. The last thing I wanted to do was violate their rules, so I agreed not to take notes, and to talk about my own experience just as other people in the group do. Though I don’t hear voices, I have certainly had experiences of vulnerability or isolation…I answer questions in the group, because I know a lot about psychology…but I am not an authority or leader. In HVN’s view each person is an expert on his or her own experience.”
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- study surprisingly revealed that schizophrenic patients in developed countries like the U.S. showed less improvement over time than patients in developing countries like Colombia, Nigeria and India. According to Hornstein, two possible explanations for these findings are that a) developing nations can’t afford to medicate their patients so the patients don’t become chronically disabled, and b) patients in developing countries are more likely to be cared for at home and out of isolation. Both of these hypotheses could explain why peer-led therapies are helpful.
- Psychiatric drugs work for only about one third of the people who take them, Hornstein said. Another third of the group say the drugs don’t work, and the last third report that the drugs affect them but not in the desired way (by just knocking them out, for example).

Jun

2011

The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell | The New York Review of Books

It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.

www.nybooks.com/...epidemic-mental-illness-why

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Mental Illness Foucault Drugs Capitalism Psychology Psychiatry

most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs.
after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants.
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- Is the prevalence of mental illness really that high and still climbing? Particularly if these disorders are biologically determined and not a result of environmental influences, is it plausible to suppose that such an increase is real? Or are we learning to recognize and diagnose mental disorders that were always there? On the other hand, are we simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one? And what about the drugs that are now the mainstay of treatment? Do they work? If they do, shouldn’t we expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising?