Quote Originally Posted by alpinerabbit View Post
(Major snippage - about depression) Therefore, this is an example for a disease where only symptoms can be treated.
Depression isn't a disease. It's a process. It is, as you noted, multifactorial and includes developmental, emotional, environmental, and biological elements. The medical model of disease - alleopathic treatment (eg drugs or surgery) - cure doesn't fit because it isn't a disease.

As others have noted, taking the pill (whatever the flavor of the week happens to be) and then continuing to live in dysfunction isn't really helping anyone. If someone came into a doctor's office with a broken leg and he sent them home with morphine or oxycontin, it might reduce the pain of the broken leg, but the leg is STILL BROKEN. Or better yet, a bleeding wound. The patient may feel better, but he'll still bleed to death, even if happily, if you only treat the symptoms palliatively.

That's what is being done when people are given drugs for life-style/developmental issues like depression and anxiety. Not only that, but the research shows that drugs alone do not work as well as drugs plus therapy; and that drugs plus therapy does not work as well as therapy alone. The longer the followup time, the better therapy looks.

The people who have lasting effects are people who make lasting change in their lives, and drugs do not do that.

As for GPs and other non-specialists prescribing psychoactive meds, it should not be done. It IS done routinely, but it shouldn't be. The vast, VAST majority of cases of under, over, and mis-medication occur when a non psych MD hands out powerful psychotropics without the necessary evaluation, followup and monitoring. Anyone who thinks you can be fully trained to handle psychotropic medications in under 18 months to 2 years of full time study on just that subject alone is mistaken. Furthermore even most Psych MDs underestimate the importance of concurrent therapy or even therapy as a preferred treatment.

It's true that people tend to seek a solution in a capsule, but it's also true that the medical establishment by and large pushes pills, largely due to the history of the development of antibiotics. Penicillin was a wonder drug that could cure nearly anything that ailed you. It was a miracle back when people died of minor cuts and tooth aches with what we would now consider to be alarming frequency. Pills and surgery were miracles, and modern medicine has yet to move beyond the early flush of the success of mechanical intervention.

Drugs can have a dramatic effect on behavior and emotion; but take the drug away and the effect dissipates. Antibiotics "cure" because they kill off disease causing organisms; but depression and anxiety are not caused by killable critters. They are an outgrowth of the way we look at and interact with the world, and that doesn't come in a pill.