'Medication' being, in this instance, the Official Euphemism for prescribed psychotropics: antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, and so on. Think of this as the shoutier, more obnoxious little brother of 'Beyond Anti-Psychiatry', down in the Head Shop.
This time it's personal...
Drugs, psychosis, angst and depression are, it would appear, favourite topics among the assembled Barbeloids. When we discuss those who prescribe and treat, however, it's probably not too much of an overgeneralisation to say we adopt a faintly anti-authoritarian tone. We don't like to be pigeon-holed, we resist labelling, we speculate darkly on the sociopolitical machinations of those who devise the diagnostic categories. Several of us are (quite reasonably) critical of individual prescribers or, more commonly, the "sick" system in which they operate.
A lightning dash through the board's current hot topics yields a sampling which I don't think is horribly unrepresentative...
Rage:
Personality disorders are bullshit.
Elijah D Blogfaker:
Drugs are fun, but drugs prescribed for being sad, that's just silly... if you want drugs for fun, more power to ya. If you NEED drugs for any reason, that's not healthy.
Shortfatdyke:
My main whinge against the mental health care system in this country (England) has always been the emphasis on drugs when talking would've done me amd others I know so much more good.
Abigail Blue agrees with SMatthewStolte that:
... folk can, and usually do, cure themselves. As he said, though, both he (and I) had systems to deal with what we were going through, and we had knowledge of those systems because of having done a lot of reading, and/or because of our privileged status as intelligent people.
She qualified this, saying that most people
... haven't been given these options, and they don't know where to start looking for them.
and elsewhere
... there aren't a whole lot of resources for people who don't want to be medicated or subjected to analysis.
The latter point, in particular, interests me. It sounds perfectly plausible - intuitive, even - that those without the academic or practical means to access 'alternative' support systems are more likely to seek 'traditional' medical treatment - complete with the (presumed) stigma of being labelled by the psychiatric orthodoxy. Conversely, those intelligent and educated enough to access the wide range of alternatives - meditation, yoga, pilates, chakra-balancing, cognitive reframing, Neuro-Linguistic-Programming, and so on - should be less likely to be seeing doctors and/or taking psychotropics.
Yes?
My anecdotal experience of fellow Barbeloids - both online and in Real Life - doesn't seem to bear this out. I'd hazard that everyone here is of at least 'average' intelligence, has at least nominal access to the Internet and, through this board alone, has been exposed to a dazzlingly eclectic array of different worldviews (in The Magic alone), all of which supply frameworks for making sense of our experiences.
Why, then, do I get the distinct impression that the average poster here is more likely than most to be (or have been) on psychotropic medication, or to have past or present contact with medical/psychiatric/psychology/counselling services?
Am I mistaken? Is there a particularly vocal minority? Are we more obsessively introspective than most, where mental illness is concerned?
Why, in an intelligent online community with vaguely anti-authoritarian leanings and relative freedom of access to many (much sexier) alternatives, are so many of us on medication? |
