Posted by BekkaH on June 2, 2003, at 1:00:04
In reply to Does Med Education Correlate With tx Resistence?, posted by MB on June 1, 2003, at 18:57:07
MB,
Your post seems to be a rather circuitous way of blaming yourself for your illness. Blaming yourself is punishing yourself. Punishing yourself is a symptom of depression, and it certainly won't make you feel any better.
I think the term "treatment resistant" is another way of blaming the patient for psychiatry's and psychiatrists' failures. I've come across a number of psychiatrists who have very little insight into themselves, and rather than acknowledge their inability to help the patient, rather than admit how little they know and how primitive psychopharmacology is compared with pharmacology in other specialties, they take out their frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on the patient. They blame the patient, and come up with all kinds of useless diagnostic labels and terms that serve only to further distance themselves from the patient and from their own painful truths. Collaborating with them in the blame game will not help you.
Psychopharmacology is way behind pharmacology in other fields. Although there are a few promising medicines currently being researched, most of the money is going into those good-for-nothing Prozac wannabee's -- more ssri's and ssri/snri combos that are, at best, band-aid jobs. The approval of truly novel antidepressants is still a long way off. In addition, I believe that nearly all psychotropic drugs, if taken long enough, will eventually "poop-out" or create "tolerance." Perhaps there is some homeostatic basis for this.
The FDA, the greedy pharmaceutical companies, and the psychiatrists who are in bed with those companies are at fault; not you. I have seen first-hand and read about numerous instances of drug companies handsomely remunerating psychiatrists to manipulate statistics and massage the data from clinical studies, to make the results of the studies appear better than they really are. So, you see, you can't possibly compare yourself with those patients who responded so well in the clinical studies because the data are seriously flawed. The first and most important thing to do when reading a clinical study of a drug is to look at who paid for the research. If it was paid for and sponsored by the pharmaceutical company that makes the drug, you can take most of the information with a grain of salt. I see I'm going off on a tangent here, but the point I'm trying to make is that the patient should not be blamed for the sorry state of psychiatry.
poster:BekkaH
thread:230644
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030530/msgs/230711.html