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Comment by FollowingTheDao | Hacker News Reader

> The meds helped him but he didn't like the side effects so he stopped taking them.

This is frustrating to me as a long time psych med user. If the meds have intolerable side effects then the meds do not help. Period. I do better off my meds than anything they ever tried to give me.

The system failed your friend. Not his ability to tolerate these horrible side effects.

IF we actually cared about human life we would have done much more to help your friend, but we did not. We care about human life up to the point it starts diminishing our comfort, and I am afraid we are valuing our comfort more and more than we care about others who are suffering in the last thirty years.

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> The meds helped him but he didn't like the side effects so he stopped taking them.

They, their family, or guardian should have consulted their psychiatrist to tune the meds for less side effects or to switch them. That is what psychiatrists are there for.

Especially for schizophrenics, they should never have the option to get off meds, in fact there should be a long acting backup med to go with the normal treatment in case the patient were to skip a dose.

Those with experience with schizophrenia know this is the hardest part of dealing with this mental illness - getting the patient into treatment and onto meds. Sure it is easy to maintain meds, but on boarding is the biggest challenge - that once it is setup, working, and bringing the patient back to reality it needs to be maintained, otherwise the patient and family have another long, uphill battle getting the patient back under treatment.

> they should never have the option to get off meds

(I have Schizoaffective Disorder)

The meds do not work and they have horrible and even deadly side effects. To say I should never be allowed to stop them denies me of my agency and would force me to endure a life of misery. I am no longer on medications and better than I have ever been. I am rare. Even psychiatrists do not like this idea.

We could open up psychiatric institutions again like they were when my mother was in one. It was great for her. Now we have these prisons they call psychiatric hospitals run by fro profit companies. (Just google Holly Hill Hospital in Raleigh, NC for an example.)

What we need is better research that is not dominated by funding from Corporations. All funding should come from the Government.

> they.. should have

Believe me, "they" tried. Just finding him was hard and he moved to a remote location. Gave away all of his possessions, including cell phone. Lived in a temperate climate where it was easy to get "lost" in the vegetation and live off the land.

It appears there is more suffering and misery out there than any single concerted effort could solve.

I’m in NYC and just yesterday saw a homeless guy pick up a used needle from the street and check to see if it had any drugs left in it. The story that led him that state, and where that story goes from here, multiplied by thousands of people in a big city alone…it’s hard to imagine solving that.

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