Posted by chujoe on May 9, 2010, at 8:54:22
In reply to Re: Started Vyvanse today/FB » chujoe, posted by hrguru on May 9, 2010, at 3:18:46
Hi, hrguru! I'm glad you liked my ideas. It is just very important, I think, for people dx'd with "mental illness" to take control of their own lives and treatments, in collaboration of course with trustworthy health care providers. I'm fortunate that, even though I live in a rural area I have a very good NP who knows all about psych drugs; what I don't have since my old therapist retired is a decent psychological counselor. But now I have psycho babble, which is a remarkable resource. I'm amazed at how knowledgeable and wise people are around here.
Anyway, If I had to boil down my thinking about "mental illness," I'd say that it's a social construction. It isn't that the variations in brain chemistry don't exist and cause problems for some people -- they certainly do exist, but the way we express them varies from person to person and, interestingly, from culture to culture. For instance, I was just reading that in China, depression is much more expressed as bodily problems, i.e., it is somatized; whereas in the West, depression is often expressed affectively, as an emotional state. So, since both "patients" and doctors experience "mental illness" differently in different times and places, it suggests that it is not a single thing, but a cluster of tendencies. Even something as supposedly simple as depression turns out to be a complex cluster of symptoms arising from a person's brain state, environment, and experience -- it should not be treated like a diagnostic box in which to put the patient.
Well, now that I'm taking Ritalin, I seem to go on and on, so I'll turn the motor off for now!
poster:chujoe
thread:944334
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20100504/msgs/946857.html