Yes and no. It’s incredibly useful for certain subsets of people. For others, it seems to be an added cost for little to no utility. In many cases, the effect is not too significantly different from placebo.

I have taken various types of psych meds, and I was actually disappointed that I didn’t feel dramatic reactions like some people claimed. With antidepressants in particular, a lot of people talk about feeling “emotionally blunted” on them. As someone who was suffering with emotional intensity, it was a side effect that I actually desired and was disappointed when I didn’t get it. I never felt controlled or altered in much of any way outside of some initial fatigue.

So I think a lot of the negative effects of these meds might also have some basis in placebo. The meds are not all bad.

After a while of trying different meds over a year, I’ve “settled” on one particular med and been very stable since. Is the med helping? I still have no idea. But it isn’t doing anything negative that I can tell and you cannot deny the objective reality of my improvement. My improvement is no doubt multifactorial, but if it’s doing good for me, then why not just continue? I still feel like me. I am just happy and functioning.

I’m generally anti-psychiatry. Diagnosis not really based in hard science, and often used to subdue whose voice we don’t want to hear. There’s better ways of maintaining and regaining one’s mental health, I believe.

It’s strange that the average leftie can be anti-establishment, anti-police, anti-capitalism, anti-machismo … but mention anti-psychiatry to them and get downvoted to hell. Never made much sense to me.

Psychiatry has absolutely been used as a tool of oppression by the capitalist class, but psychiatry can be a liberatory tool if practiced with consent, dignity, and good science. Psychiatry has done wonders for my mental health. It would be better to eliminate capitalism and all the other hierarchies that exacerbate mental health disorders if only one or the other must be chosen, but in the short term, they’re not going anywhere. And I reject the notion that we cannot do both. Even then, I am skeptical that eliminating hierarchical oppression would completely eliminate the need for psychiatry; put simply, life is fucking hard, and some people need chemical help, myself very much included.

I do not recommend psychiatry for absolutely everyone, but the option needs to be available. I respect if you do not want to use this tool, but please understand that for some of us, getting rid of psychiatry would eliminate our most effective means of battling our demons.

I’m not anti-psychiatry. It seems to have been helpful for far too many people to be against it or ignore it all together.

It’s just too much of a guesswork at the current price and time allocation it takes from finding a suitable therapist, to finding the problem and whatever it even can be fixed or just learning to live with it, without any actual fixing.
Kinda just like a shot in the dark in rough direction of some sound.

Hopefully in the far future it becomes cheaper, more accurate and more accessible. Maybe a brain scan or machine algorithm based initial diagnosis.

Reminds me of a cartoon. Yes psychiatry dehumanizes people and the problems they are going through.