Can We Agree to Disagree?

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses – primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.
What a great essay done by Dr. Smith. Well presented and organized. I do agree with what Dr. Smith has. Empathetic relationships with patients are more helpful than the medicated relationship that a lot of psychiatrists impose on their patients. When one goes to see a psychiatrist, it is thought that they are just going to talk about their problems and get aid in finding a solution. The problem arises when the psychiatrists are no longer listening they are just prescribing. How can one be progressive if there is no progress?
Dr. Smith pointed out that psychiatrists listen to their patients looking for symptoms to make a diagnosis and prescribe them medicine immediately. During that process the doctors asks numerous questions to figure out which medicine you should be taking. Questions such as “How long have you been depressed?” or “What antidepressants have you tried in the past?” are what a psychiatrist used to narrow down their decisions. The patient may think that this is for them pin point the “thing” that is making them depressed, but it’s just a way to make the appointment go faster. But he shows that the empathetic-relationship model is clearly the best.
What is the medical model? The term ‘medical model’ is frequently used in psychiatry with denigration, suggesting that its methods are paternalistic, inhumane and reductionist. This view has influenced mental health organizations, which in certain areas advocate a departure from the medical model, and contributes to the difficulties in leadership being played out between politicians, professionals and patients. The view has some support from within psychiatry (with some psychiatrists being apologists), from the 1960s’ anti-psychiatry movement, as well as from some in the recovery movement. Although diversity is healthy, it may fuel unproductive rivalry to be recognized as the therapeutic agent between divergent therapies and agencies.
The steps to the empathy model are as follows:
1. Affective sharing between the self and the other, based on the automatic perception-action coupling and resulting shared representations.
2. Self-awareness. Even when there is some temporary identification between the observer and its target, there is no confusion between self and other.
3. Mental flexibility to adopt the subjective perspective of the other.
4. Regulatory processes that modulate the subjective feelings associated with emotion.
Biological psychiatry or biopsychiatry is an approach to psychiatry that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of the biological function of the nervous system. It is interdisciplinary in its approach and draws on sciences such as neuroscience, psychopharmacology, biochemistry, genetics, epigenetics and physiology to investigate the biological bases of behavior and psychopathology. Biopsychiatry is that branch / specialty of medicine which deals with the study of biological function of the nervous system in mental disorders. While there is some overlap between biological psychiatry and neurology, the latter generally focuses on disorders where gross or visible pathology of the nervous system is apparent, such as epilepsy, cerebral palsy, encephalitis, neuritis, Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis. There is