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nice job

Didn't realize I had been invoked to opine about pharmaceuticals and psychiatry (definitely not my specialty - thankfully).

Basically, FB, deToqueville observed this about us many moons ago....we are an extremely impatient people. Why is this relevant? Well, when it comes to psychiatric patients it really does require long term treatment with numerous types of "therapy". Meaning, people with PTSD can receive various therapy including EMDR which works fairly quickly but doesn't obviate possible need for long term treatment. The problem is two fold. First, the stigma of mental illness and the lack of its treatment as a genuine "medical" issue. Second, (and consequent to #1), an unwillingness to fund patient treatment. So, what happens is you have insurance that reimburses only 3-4 therapy sessions when the patient really needs something on the order of 35 sessions or more. Fallout from this is the rise of numerous psychotherapeutic drugs. Numerous research has documented that patients really do better when therapy and medical therapy are combined. We just want to do it on the cheap, quickly, and make sure big pharma gets paid. How do you do that? A pill. Pharmaceuticals get paid but therapists don't. So, we are skimping on care.

Despite not knowing about psychiatric illnesses per se, you do have to know alot about peoples' psyche. You meet them, have to gain their trust in minutes, and then do something terribly invasive with a scalpel or needle. So, helping them manage fear is a big part of most physicians' jobs with respect to treatment.

I hate to say this next part since it may sound trite, but I think the amount of stress on people has truly become overwhelming. You have to worry about your job which has now infiltrated every aspect of your life courtesy of blackberry, email, cellphones, etc. People are constantly asked to do more work with less assistance or time. This shit is cumulative. There are also these ideals that people are expected to meet. In the past, the less capable were partly compensated by the support of extended family who helped to keep people fed, housed etc. Now, its every man, woman and child for themselves. Its as if sociobiology (social Darwinism) has just found human growth hormones and anabolic steriods at the same time. The fallout is what one author, Norman Bella (sp?), refers to as the managerial therapeutic ethos. Meaning, all of our "therapy" is now directed at normalizing human behavior to CURRENT societal norms. There are plenty of people who would argue that things were better back in the day. Things that point to that are redemonstrated every day whenever I talk to a customer service rep.

With regards to random school shootings, one of my colleagues' children was shot in the VT fiasco. Her daughter survived and is really messed up as a result. There is a class action law suit that is moving forward over the issue of the delay in warning students on campus. Comparatively, the VT students weren't alerted 2.5 hours after the first set of murders. The NIU students were alerted 7 minutes after the first shots were fired. Anyway, that was tangential, the point I was making was about her telling me how there was an incident similar to VT in the past that provoked a class action suit (I think it is called the Cleary Law) that NOW mandates disclosure of any campus shootings. In the past, universities/schools would frequently try to cover these things up. The cleary incident I believe was precipitated (as I understand) by a serial rapist that had murdered this young woman. She was his 38th victim (and one of the few to be killed). So, the overall frequency of such events as NIU is not much different over many years. VT was remarkable in the number of victims. She had shared numerous statistics that I had no idea about. Talk about terrible.

Fallout from this is the rise of numerous psychotherapeutic drugs. Numerous research has documented that patients really do better when therapy and medical therapy are combined. We just want to do it on the cheap, quickly, and make sure big pharma gets paid. How do you do that? A pill. Pharmaceuticals get paid but therapists don't. So, we are skimping on care.

I think this is what I was getting at, albeit in a roundabout way with my "weird generalizations" about "all these meds". My impression was that it seems like the fallout from this imbalance of therapy vs. meds has become increasing violent. It could be these types of incidents were commonplace in the past, just not widely disseminated due to the communications/media network bringing them to you every morning. I just wondered if this was obviously the case, or maybe there were other elements involved; perhaps (wild speculation warning!) the new meds being produced are becoming increasingly stronger causing stronger reactions to them, or new meds aren't being clinically tested as thoroughly or long enough (say for interactions with other meds) for the sake of cost management.

You basically verified my general feeling that there seems to be an overeliance on these medications however. Just wanted to hear it from a "wildly qualified" source.
You should always seek a second opinion, especially when dealing on the Level.

Another interesting thread ruined by internet tough guys...

it wasn't my fault, i was basically double-teamed by lenny and lodi...

The whole premise of the internet message board is for wildly unqualified people to speculate at random about things that they know nothing about.

The dogma of KB.

NTFF as well sarge

getting back to the point, this kid had been commited to a phych hospital once, and since has never really been stable, so how much fault is there with the parents / system, that this guy was allowed to end up shooting up a college campus? I am a hunter and for the most part against "anti gun laws", but I know in NJ at least there is a fairly comprehensive background check that allows a judge to decide if you can buy guns, and even though its a pain in the ass, it seems like it would keep alot of kids like this from getting guns easily.... with the way things are today I wiah politicians could meet in the middle to make it hard for these fuckups to get weapons.

I wiah politicians could meet in the middle to make it hard for these fuckups to get weapons.

We at the NRA, will never give up the fight for your right as written in the Constitution to hunt with semi-automatic assault rifles, street sweepers and bazookas

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