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Comment by DubiousPusher | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping for something insightful but really got more of the same antiestablishment alt-med ranting you'll find elsewhere on the web.

Dude even cites his anecdotal experience to claim psych meds don't work while at the same time claiming mental healthcare is full of psuedoscience and vaguely endorsing something that sounds an aweful lot like Freudian psychoanalysis. So that was pretty rich.

Well, if we're comparing anecdotes, my experience is that when a certain relative of mine was on lithium, she didn't try to stab me in the bathtub with a steak knife to keep the demons from getting me and when she wasn't on her lithium, she did.

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Psych meds for something like schizophrenia or acute psychosis are very different than for things like ADD, Depression, etc. Additionally, it is objectively true that these disorders are overdiagnosed (there are many studies backing this up).

Some psychiatric issues fit much more closely with the disease model of medicine (like psychosis), and others are in a huge gray area.

Most of psychiatric work is in that gray area and does a poor job of it.

Even a former DSM chair thinks so. I highly recommend reading "saving normal" for more info.

I wouldn't call experience handling hundreds of patients in in a major metro area such as NY City "anecdotal".

None of this smelled of alt-med ranting. It's the true accounts of a therapist who saw the deficiencies of the system from the inside.

It is exactly anecdotal evidence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

This person is using their one personal experience as a general indictment of the field rather than using any kind of controlled method to consider outcomes which is the only way to determine if a field of medicine is doing more good than harm or vice versa.

Well, if someone is only peaceful while on meds, I would not feel at peace at all with that person around. People forget their meds/choose not to take them. And then all that was supressed comes out. So does your anecdote sounds. So maybe if she would have had a real therapy which does not rely on meds so much, she would know how to handle her demons better when beeing without drugs.

The drugs do actually work. We have long acting forms (e.g. four injections per year) of some medications which help when people truely are dangerous to themselves or others.

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