tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26666124.post8543024963225473656..comments2024-03-18T03:28:36.581-04:00Comments on Shrink Rap: The Interesting Thing About Reviews of Committed.....Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26666124.post-60463585345700624742017-07-10T13:49:15.905-04:002017-07-10T13:49:15.905-04:00It's interesting watching this fight. I had a ...It's interesting watching this fight. I had a friend (around 1974) who was very very sick. When he was functional, he was one of the smartest people I knew (a comp. sci. researcher at MIT), and he hated the side effects of the medications. So he'd stop taking them, function at full intellectual level for awhile, and then crash. He was unable to recognize the point where he needed the medications more than the side effects hurt him, so he essentially required full time psychiatric care from his friends, which he got for several years. (I was an overly energetic MIT undergrad at the time, and I ran into him walking down the stairs. One step at a very slow one step at a time. He saw my enthusiasm, and wasn't able to respond, knew that he couldn't, and the pain in his eyes was beyond tragic.) On the other hand, the Mad in America folks are spot on, too. The effectiveness of psychiatric medications is proportionally smaller for less severe disease, so the plus from the medication is minimal, but the side effects are full tilt. The US overprescribes these powerful medications something fierce to vast numbers of people for whom the side effects are way worse than the slight help they get. (The latest research shows Zoloft to be no better than placebo for elderly patients (my mother was prescribed it in her later years; oops), but, again, the side effects are just as nasty whomever the patient is.) Oh, yes. And it's hard to get off many of these drugs, so the patients really do have a valid complaint.<br /><br />So congratulations for successfully threading a course between these two extremes. (Given the insanity of the amount of opioids being prescribed in the US these days, I'm leaning to my Mad in America side, though. We need to move to a lower level of dependence on chemicals.)<br /><br />Now, I wonder if I can persuade my PCP to prescribe modafinil for my post-prandial torpor... (Yes, I'm talking about taking it as a nootrpoic for the fun of it.)<br /><br />David J. Littleboynoreply@blogger.com