Counsellors and therapists

Ah Martin - the voice of reason . Nice seeing you back here.

Kathleen

You know what annoys me? People will accept that a heart, appendix, gall bladder, liver or other organs can malfunction and cause illness. So why do some people find it so hard to accept that a brain can also malfunction and cause mental illness? Saying that changing your thinking will change your _________________ (fill in blank with mental illness of choice) is like saying that changing your thinking will cure your cancer.

No it's not because we barely have the first idea how the brain functions. We've only scratched the surface of understanding how this organ works. Come back in a hundred years (if we're still around) and we'll probably have a bettter understanding of how it works. You simply cannot make a comparison between a brain and a heart. If you can't see the distiction then.......I don't know, it's obviously a waste of time trying to have a reasonable discussion.

Another issue is the fact that our counciousness, our active thought processes, effect how this organ functions; that is not the case for any other organ. If you have heart disease or liver cancer what you think will have no effect on the disease itself, although your thinking can/may play a part in your recovery. If you have an illness of your mind such as depression, your thoughts most certainly do have an enourmous impact on the illness, they are infact the origional cause of it.

Then you have other issue which determine one's personality but aren't fully understood, or known to what extent to determine that persons personality, such as genetics and young childhood experiences etc.

We have ads running on our local radio saying pretty much just that. And saying not to be ashamed...and that we should look after our mind just as much as our body.

something like...if you had a broken arm you wouldn't ignore...so if your feeling depressed/blue don't ignore it!

I thought it was quite a clever approach, because mental illness has quite a stigma attached and it kinda blows that away. I think Christmas is an especially hard time for sufferers too.

thats really good to hear. i think a lot of people avoid dealing with issues like this because of the stigma (real or imagined). the thing about depression in particular is a lot of times people dont actually know they are depressed untill someone else maybe picks up on it. as with most things the sooner you start to do something about it the better.

In that case explain why there are VERIFIED cases of dissociative identity disorder where one alternate is diabetic and one alternate is not. Fact. I did a research project on DID and that was one of the most mind boggling aspects. Brain/body interaction can not be simplified. Maybe some people have chemical imbalances first that lead to depression or whatever disorder. Maybe some people have thoughts that affect their chemical balance, but you're guessing the cause either way. If those imbalances are like dementia you can't pinpoint how long they've been there without an autopsy, so at that point the chicken/egg debate is worthless. You have to treat the person with what they need when they need it.

I have heard of those cases and although I wouldn't go jumping to any conclusions without serious scientific investigation, it is an example of how powerful the mind is and how little we understand of how the brain functions. I suspect cases like this are very much related to the placebo effect, and falsities abound regarding the placebo effect, for instance the notion that the plcebo works on about 30% of people (untrue: they work in one way or another on pretty much all of us). The placebo effect has been shown to work only in conjunction with certain conditions (cancer is not one of them). Placebos tend only to work when interrupting the "acute phase respone" or inflammation. I would imagine it's the same with the case you cited. Instead of a person recieving what she believes falsly to be medication, she creates another reality in her mind and causes the same sort of placebo effect.

Here's an interesting little bit of info about anti-depressants and the placebo. There hve been many double-blinds tests done on the effectivness, or lack thereof, of AD's. In one of the cases, and this is pretty much par for the course, subjects taking real AD's showed a lowly 33% improvement over those taking a placebo, and the placebo group showed a 200% improvement over a third group recieving no treatment at all. Looked at another way, 25% of the improvements shown by people takings AD's is due to spontaneous remission, 50% to the placebo and only a measly 25% to the anti-depressant itself.

Not at all, it can be proven scientifically that our thoughts effect our brain chemistry. I have seen no reliable scientific data that suggests, for something like depression at least, that people randomly develop chemical imbalances. There's a cause for the effect.


I agree, that's why I said in the most extreme case, such as a person on the brink of suicide because they are depressed, medication probably should be used, but with medication you're treating the symptoms of depression, not the cause. Likewise, they should be used in moderation with paranoid schizophrenics even though they do seriously deminish the effectiveness of therapy. For other psychiatric illnesses like dementia, that you mentioned, or psychotic disorders, mediction should of course be used.

You're missing some research if you think that there's none to suggest that chemical imbalances are there first. That research was out there 10 years ago when I was in college, so it is still out there if you want to find it.

Think about a brain infection like encephalitis that might alter the way your brain is working. Think about strokes and the way they can alter a person's personality. Brain tumors. Hypothyroidism. Migraines.

There are medical causes that lead to mental disorders like depression. It's very irresponsible IMO to tell people they can get over depression or whatever if they merely change the way they think. Some people have a true medical basis for what they experience mentally.

amen becky! that's what i've learned from my times at the psychiatry- when you go there you'd think that those guys are just stupid and can't handle their life. but when you leave then you know that those ppl are really ill.

to that psychopharma debate: you don't treat the symptoms- you treat the cause! there's a bunch of mediators ("mediatoren" in german don't wanna look it up now, so i have invented "mediators" and hope that this word exist) like 5-HT (Serotonin), Dopamine, Noradrenaline....which are significantly lowered in patients with certain diseases- if you supply those things the disease will get better- you can talk how much you want to but from talking your 5-HT level won't raise. this thing goes vice versa: if you give medication which loweres those transmittors a person which had not had the certain disease prior to the treatment will get a this certain disease (like the antihypertensive Reserpin lowering 5-HT --> "Reserpin-depression");

so what do i wanna say with this: every disease has biological, psychical and social aspect in the pathogenesis. if you wanna cure a certain disease you have to know the impacts of these 3 categories and treat every single one.