must......stop......typing......Superego! No id! No Superego! No id.....

another psychotropic drugs bashing thread..we need more of this..not.

the key is a holistic approach. Drugs without psychotherapy imho is a mistake. I view the drugs as a bridge...at some point you hope to get to the other side. The trick is figuring out when you've reached that point. But without *good* psychotherapy/psychoanalysis, the bridge might never end.

That "bridge" may be a permanent fixture if the problem is organic in nature. That is the truth, plain and simple. No single approach has the entire answer, and a multi-pronged approach is indeed desirable.

When I was in Grad school, I had to pass by the labs of two researchers in the psychology department. One believed in druge, the other in shock therapy. They had placed on each other's doors slogans from specific industries:

"Better things for better living through Chemistry" (I think at the time it was DuPont)

and

"Live better Electrically" this was General Electric IIRC)

For many people, this makes as much sense as recommending psychtherapy for a patient with diabetes. "Let's get in touch with your inner pancreas."

Psychotherapy may make you feel better, like a footrub for your personality, but traditional psychotherapy has been largely discredited. If you believe in the pathologic basis of disease you will eventually realize that most psychiatric disorders are poorly understood organic disorders of neurotransmission. Traditional psychiatrists have been dragging their feet to some degree in looking for causal associations, preferring to talk about your mother than your seratonin metabolism.

discredited? by the drug companies? By the traditional medical community? Yeah, they both never make mistakes...

Sorry, but I think there is more to it than serotonin metabolism. Yes, the chemistry is real, but there is more to it than that. You don't think that attitude affects your body? How is that purely chemical? Yes, you can trace the pathways, but what's driving them?

I think think anything with the mind is that simple...

Eric Kandel...Professor Psychariatry and Neuroscience Columbia University as well as Nobel Laureate and Author of "In search of Memory"

Says, "Psychothearpy is a learning experience therefore Anatomical changes in the brain take place."

Sorry I think U better rethink your position.

Absolutely! In fact we know the alpha brain waves enhance the immune response. It's measurable. I'm an empiricist. There are no good, controlled studies that suggest traditional psychotherapy cures any disorder (except the therapists poverty).

You want a holistic approach? Fine. We can discuss acupuncture, behavioral therapy, alternative medical therapy and many other modalities that work.

cognitive behavioral therapy is generally recognized as more successful in these instances, especially when paired with meds than traditional pyschotherapy. ask me how i know. it's kept me alive in spite of my best efforts..

Bollocks. Memorizing pages in the phone book will also cause "anatomical" changes in the brain. To suggest that these changes can cure depression, schizophrenia or even toe nail fungus is a different matter entirely.

This is true, AND the same may be said for drugs that work by offsetting an organic deficiency in the body.

As was posted earlier, this is a very complicated issue. Not everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Some folks suffer because they have mental disease, some suffer due to organic reasons, yet others suffer because they are too lazy to do the work necessary to get better. Sometimes medication is a temporary crutch. Othertimes it is a necessary replacement for a deficiency. Towit, my friends daughter suffers with Ataxic Cerebral Palsy , Developmental Deficiency and a Hyperactivity disorder. She MUST use medicine for the Hyperactivity. She does not have the emotional / intellectual wherewithal to alter her behavior voluntarily.

At least this thread has been an intellectual approach to a problem, even if it was initiated out of what could be misconstrued as morbid curiosity.

Don't U think that if you change the anatomical structure of the brain that it changes its chemistry..even slightly.

Of course it does. Memory, for example is stored in the brain as mRNA, not electrical charges as previously thought. Every thought, feeling or memory changes the brains microanatomy and it's chemistry. Demonstrating that the changes induced by psychoanalysis are more beneficial than, say, blowing ones nose is the issue.

It's causality that's missing.

I'm not so sure I'd agree with this straight away. Changing the brain structure shouldn't change the way the structure is utilized, ie the chemistry.

Todays science is tommorows witch doctory. What makes U think that todays subjective won't become tommorows objective. What makes U think that because U can't prove casuality that linkage doesn't exist between things. Especially when it comes to the subjective nature of Human Beings and their relationships.

WHen I say holistic, I mean anything that works for the individual. There is a ton of evidence that psychoanalysis/psychotherapy works for some individuals. Maybe you just have a narrow view (or I have a broader view), because often CBT is part of a psychotherapy program. We're down to semantics here, but for instance in my case, traditional psychotherapy transitioned to a particular branch of psychoanalysis focused on the unconscious and dream analysis. After a year of that, I'm off meds. Are there other factors? Of course. That is the problem with this stuff...clean empirical data is almost impossible to obtain.

And I do accupunture and tai chi as well ;)

Sometimes when it smells like a duck and quacks like a duck, experience tells U it is a duck.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. You might start thinking of it as wireless technology, U can't see the transmission of data through the air but it does take place.

I'm guessing it was the chai tea. ;)