I was thinking about psych medications early this morning, and came up with some thoughts that help me organize my thinking about them. For a long time I have felt confused on the subject, particularly since I have been given a lot of those medications and not one of them has been more than a slight help to me. Anyway, here are my thoughts:

If you get something like a bacterial infection, you can take antibiotic medications that will kill the bacteria, or keep them from growing. That kind of medication can actually lead to a cure of the disease, which is caused by the bacteria.

On the other hand, suppose you have cancer, and are in great pain. You can take some pain killers, which may greatly reduce the pain -- but that does not cure the cancer. In fact, if you treat only the pain you may be tempted to ignore the actual cause -- until it is too late.

I think psych medications are much more like the pain killer in the case of cancer than they are like antibiotics. They treat symptoms, but not the things that are causing the symptoms. Of course, some pharmaceutical companies advertise their products as though they were cures. And some people, even some so-called professionals, say that things such as depression are caused by "chemical imbalances in the brain" or are due to genetic defects of the person who has the depression. Once you decide that "chemical imbalance" (never found, by the way) is the cause, you fail to ask what causes the chemical imbalance!

I think that psych drugs can be used judiciously. For instance anti-anxiety drugs could be used to reduce anxiety that would otherwise be so overwhelming that a person had to pay attention full time to the anxiety, and could not concentrate on anything that might help them solve problems that were causing anxiety. So the drug might be used to make psychotherapy more possible -- medication in conjunction with therapy. But using them as though they were solutions themselves instead of symptom-controllers is, as I see it, deceptive and leads to ignoring actual causes. If you don't treat the causes, but only treat symptoms, you will never approach anything like a "cure" and in fact "symptom relief only" may interfere with treating the actual cause.

Well, those are my words of the day...