Posted by Tomatheus on March 9, 2013, at 12:36:26
In reply to Re: Short and Sweet + some more » Tomatheus, posted by CamW on March 9, 2013, at 11:16:58
Cam,
I do think that I misunderstood what you were trying to convey with your use of the word "productive." And I do agree with some of what you wrote in your first post to this thread, especially what you wrote about there almost always being residual symptoms even with psychiatric medications, as well as what you wrote about the potential value of psychological treatments in helping to manage these symptoms. I guess that the point that I was trying to make was that medications, talk therapies, and other treatments for mental illnesses tend to go farther for some patients than they do for others, making productive living (however you may measure it) more attainable for some than for others. I agree that it's a good idea to employ various forms of counseling in combination with medications and possibly also other treatment modalities to try to minimize residual psychiatric symptoms to the furthest extent possible, but I basically don't think that doing this will always lead to the outcome of a relatively normal life. Of course, how often the outcome of a relatively normal life is achieved depends on how one defines "relatively normal," but even when one's definition leaves a lot of leeway, but I don't think that a combination of medications and talk therapy will guarantee that the outcome will be met. That doesn't mean that combining the two treatment modalities doesn't increase the odds of improvement and that talk therapies shouldn't be tried, though.
Tomatheus
Dx: schizoaffective disorder
Treatments: Abilify & Korean ginseng
tomatheus.blogspot.com
poster:Tomatheus
thread:1039909
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20130308/msgs/1039931.html