Quote:
Originally Posted by ganstaman
I haven't quite thought of it this way, but it seems true at least for many mental health professionals and many patients.
I work primarily with kids and do try to find ways to get their parents to get them doing more -- going outside, exercising (either in some structured activity or freely), and engaging with peers. We know that these things improve depression, anxiety, and even ADHD symptoms.
However, getting parents to take control enough to take away the iPad and get the kid out the door is hard and often requires a level of therapeutic support that just isn't accessible to many. So not infrequently, I'm left with the choice between wanting the ideal but achieving nothing vs providing a medication that might reduce symptom intensity with the hope that it can make it easier to push towards real behavior change. In this way, I do view psychiatric medications generally as agents for symptomatic relief instead of as correctors of some underlying brain pathology.
thanks again for the thoughtful reply.
I don't want to sound like a broken record on this but again I believe 'the Left' generally focuses so much on compassion and empathy and wanting to be supportive, as the highest virtues to aspire to, that they often do not see, or are more willing to accept, more cases we would define as 'failures' , rather then providing anything resembling 'tough medicine', that could lead to more successes but make the 'fewer' failures feel badly.
Time and again I feel I can point to this approach, as well meaning as it is, seeming to result in a worsening of the problem (from suicide to obesity, etc, etc) . And the left counters with endless compassion and sympathy for the growing cohort of 'failures', but has no way to actually improve the outcomes.
Compassion while always nice, is not always the best tool in the box. You can ruin a school with the Self Esteem movement, even if you manage to help a few kids on the margin who are failing out.
It is my view (only) that there was this shift in people (and psychiatrist generally) towards compassion as first principle and that is often at the expense of results which sometimes require something different, often more stern.