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I would have to say that I too stand on the middle ground. I don't believe that just taking meds is going to really help, but it can help increase the benefits of another treatment. For example, when I was going to therapy the meds helped put me in a better mind set to really understand and get the full benefits out of therapy. Just doing one is not as good as both. That's just my opinion.

I believe it depends on the illness. Schizophrenia, for example is a biologically-based illness that is often treated successfully with medication alone. Therapy may not help Schizophrenics at all. In fact, insight-oriented psychotherapy has been proven to actually be harmful to Schizophrenics!

Interesting! That's very interesting.

Well I think with the issue of medication it really does vary person by person. So my opinion in the greater scheme of things for people are that they must seek advice from others such as family, friends, of any medical professional, then they must also take their own feelings into consideration.

I think sometimes people will just take medication because someone else says so, people need to consider their own feelings and thoughts, their gut instinct so to speak.

I do agree and love the opinion that if you use medication try and use some sort of therapy also. Human support and interaction cannot be places in a pill afterall wink

These comments piss me up the wall. Not because they are right/wrong in saying that medications do not work, but the way it was said. Such ignorance of neuroscience... which can't be helped, I guess razz This person here needs to correct his views rather than telling us to!

First - the good old giving chemicals crap. A lot of what the body does is chemistry. It's not as simple as adding chemical A to chemical B. It's like this long chain reaction of events. The magnitude of one reaction will release something, and this will react with something to produce a something... it goes on. The whole body is chemistry like this, including the brain. You give insulin to a diabetic. I don't really hear people saying "How is chemicals going to fix their problem?". It does. Something was broken in this chain reaction of um, reactions, and the broken link in the chain is fixed. Medication and drugs can and will change our thinking and behaviour. Have you ever watched someone pissed off their face? Or high on drugs?

My problem with medication is that we don't know exactly what chemical is missing from the brain in vairous disorders. Say in depression, they say that there is a relationship between low serotonin and high depression. But is the low serotonin causing the high depression? Or is the high depression causing the low serotonin? Probably the first, as anti deps seem to replenish serotonin, blah blah. But it works as soon as the drugs hit the brain, but a depression patient only feels better a month or so later, if the drug works. So, it has something to do with serotonin, but not serotonin alone.

Getting the serotonin in the brain is another hard part. You can't just eat serotonin. The drug has to cross the blood brain barrier. So you have to make something that will alter something in the brain, that will alter the production of serotonin (in the case of SSRI, the drug will inhibit an enzyme that will take the serotonin out of its receptor). Heck, depression can be caused by different things! In the future, I can see depression being split up into different disorders. Like anemia is.

The point is that we don't know much about mental illness, and the brain all together. So we are just guessing, hence meds don't always work. But they do somethimes.

I personally just don't like the idea of putting things in my body that also make me feel ill, really...for the first two weeks or so of my meds, I felt really sick to my stomach constantly, only with a temporary cure by constantly eating (which ended up making me feel sick as well sad )

What is 5HTP?