| I would like to share a personal experience with you. My mother attempted suicide several (3) times over a five year period in the seventies. I didn’t understand it then nor do I understand it now, I only know how debilitating manic depression is.
Her early treatment was valium and therapy. Over the following years the drugs got better and those prescribing the drugs got better. The doctors would monitor and tweak the type and amount of drugs so she could function. There wasn’t much therapy because it was so expensive but what little she had improved over the years and let her come to terms with her illness in an informed rational way.
Gradually her medication was reduced to almost nothing and she had twenty more years of good life (that I could share with her). She told me that in the early days she never thought she could be happy ever again, and towards the end she would think back to those dark days and smile to think how happy she was now.
So yes there is benefit from these drugs. Not to say that they are perfect or that the drug companies are immune to greed or corruption, but real people have experienced real results. I know!
Care for mental illness has come a long way from its horrific early treatment using asylums and frontal lobotomies, so I give thanks for where we are now and hope to progress further. I think we have an epidemic of mental illness that goes untreated. Look in the prison system and homeless population and you will find many cases of untreated mental illness.  |