Posted by Questionmark on July 13, 2010, at 2:01:30
In reply to Re: Progress of Psychiatry, posted by linkadge on July 12, 2010, at 19:36:50
> Hope shmope. I'm tired of mentally healthy people saying theres reason to hope.
>
> Don't friggen go on and on about how this drug or that drug is going to change the face of psychiatry. The proof is in the pudding.-Amen brother.
.. Btw Violette i'm pretty sure he wasn't directing that comment to you though. And that does seem like it could be an interesting interview.
But ...
One of the many problems with psychiatry is the same problem with modern "traditional" medicine in general. It is a business. And as a business, it requires a continuous pool of consumers (patients). So would psychiatry proper be interested in finding the underlying primary biological causes (if there are any per se) of depression, or worse yet cures? Many indiVIDual researchers and clinicians in psychiatry i'm sure are, but overall, unlikely this could ever happen even if it's possible. Do you realize how many millions (billions?) of dollars that pharm companies and physicians and hospitals, etc. would lose if we hypothetically found a cure for depression?
And forget cure, even a perfectly effective (i don't even know what this would look like but humor me) treatment, i.e. drug, would be disastrous for drug companies as well as psychiatry because once the patent expired they would not be able to make much money on that drug anymore or on new antidepressant drugs (because the perfect treatment would already exist for people). Ok this is all theoretical because i doubt there could be a single "perfect" antidepressant for everyone anyway. I don't want to sound hyper-conspiratorial. But i think this illustrates a point. Psychiatry is big money. Psychiatric pharmaceuticals are big money. So psychiatric and drug research, drug development, marketing, and prescribing are probably not going to correlate perfectly with the best interests of the patients. Oh and likewise for related legislative policies and scientific journal publications, which are of course deeply interconnected and influenced (financially and otherwise) by Big Pharma and Psychiatry.
So to the question of progress in psychiatry, with the vast numbers of mentally ill and mentally suffering, i think the progress of psychiatry-the-business will be great. In terms of treatment for the actual people who are mentally suffering and seeking treatment, i sincerely think progress will be slow. Steadily progressing, but very slow.
poster:Questionmark
thread:954237
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20100709/msgs/954291.html