frozenborderline
Senior Member
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I recently posted some thoughts on a thread in relation to an excellent article about mental illness and psychiatry and ideology.
I don't really have the energy to rephrase these thoughts entirely right now, but I think that they are still understandable with that context. I just had some epiphanies re: the reason CBT is pushed for CFS despite there being no evidence to support it.
(in response to this article https://xenogoth.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/the-meds-worked-for-me-but-nothing-else-did/)
"This is really important. Morton's tweet wasn't just ghoulish, it was responding to a total strawman. Mark understood that there was a complex relationship between neurochemistry/biology and social forces, and that the current psychiatric model was inadequate. To see this as a
denial of anybody's personal relationship with mental illness, or a denial that anybody has been helped by antidepressants, would be a wild misreading. But this pr campaign for antidepressants (that I assume mostly refers to SSRIs) has a number of undertones to it that are--well
--depressing. Not only is the exclusive focus on medication and CBT part of a neoliberal ontology that treats the patient as totally atomized individual who must be "normalized", a lot of the science behind it is wrong or unclear.
Once anyone starts to look harder at the science behind SSRIs (the first line treatment for depression these days), they would see that the science is not solid, which makes it seem clearer and clearer that the current psychiatric model is not rooted in science but more in
ideology and capital.
To say this is not to deny anybody's personal need to use any specific antidepressant. I had success with SSRIs in treating my OCD (which it turns out they have a higher success rate with than depression) but they had side effects that I didn't like.
There has been research that showed that excess serotonin is in fact likely to be associated with features of depression. That is the opposite of the pop science view that SSRIs would work by increasing serotonin. In fact, they may work, but it would be by a different mechanism
They may facilitate neurogenesis in the hippocampus directly
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unraveling-the-mystery-of-ssris-depression/ …
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-016-1173-2 …
Not only is CBT an exercise in repression, as you note in your piece, but the NHS wants to use it for physical illnesses that have bodies of evidence that suggest organic causation. I say this even though it is a tangent from your original point, because it shows how psychiatry is used as a method of control. Not only is CBT used in a way that represses mentally ill patients, it is now extended to use on physically ill patients, despite an overwhelming body of evidence against it. This suggest that the ruling ontology of psychiatry is not empirically based at all, but rather based in fantasies of a neoliberal body that is infinitely flexible/adaptable. The entrepreneurial fantasy. If we think good thoughts we can all succeed
I don't really have the energy to rephrase these thoughts entirely right now, but I think that they are still understandable with that context. I just had some epiphanies re: the reason CBT is pushed for CFS despite there being no evidence to support it.
(in response to this article https://xenogoth.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/the-meds-worked-for-me-but-nothing-else-did/)
"This is really important. Morton's tweet wasn't just ghoulish, it was responding to a total strawman. Mark understood that there was a complex relationship between neurochemistry/biology and social forces, and that the current psychiatric model was inadequate. To see this as a
denial of anybody's personal relationship with mental illness, or a denial that anybody has been helped by antidepressants, would be a wild misreading. But this pr campaign for antidepressants (that I assume mostly refers to SSRIs) has a number of undertones to it that are--well
--depressing. Not only is the exclusive focus on medication and CBT part of a neoliberal ontology that treats the patient as totally atomized individual who must be "normalized", a lot of the science behind it is wrong or unclear.
Once anyone starts to look harder at the science behind SSRIs (the first line treatment for depression these days), they would see that the science is not solid, which makes it seem clearer and clearer that the current psychiatric model is not rooted in science but more in
ideology and capital.
To say this is not to deny anybody's personal need to use any specific antidepressant. I had success with SSRIs in treating my OCD (which it turns out they have a higher success rate with than depression) but they had side effects that I didn't like.
There has been research that showed that excess serotonin is in fact likely to be associated with features of depression. That is the opposite of the pop science view that SSRIs would work by increasing serotonin. In fact, they may work, but it would be by a different mechanism
They may facilitate neurogenesis in the hippocampus directly
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unraveling-the-mystery-of-ssris-depression/ …
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-016-1173-2 …
Not only is CBT an exercise in repression, as you note in your piece, but the NHS wants to use it for physical illnesses that have bodies of evidence that suggest organic causation. I say this even though it is a tangent from your original point, because it shows how psychiatry is used as a method of control. Not only is CBT used in a way that represses mentally ill patients, it is now extended to use on physically ill patients, despite an overwhelming body of evidence against it. This suggest that the ruling ontology of psychiatry is not empirically based at all, but rather based in fantasies of a neoliberal body that is infinitely flexible/adaptable. The entrepreneurial fantasy. If we think good thoughts we can all succeed