i think part of the problem is that psychiatric drugs are mostly borrowed from other parts of medicine (let's call those other specialties "real medicine," lol...).

thorazine was (and is) a sedating antihistamine. it was used in preoperative cocktails. the doctors noticed an affect on the patients. somebody told the shrinks. first, it was considered a tranquilizer, then a neuroleptic, then some genius decided to call it an "antipsychotic." Thorazine is still used for nausea, as a sleeping pill, etc. Vets use some of the older tranquilizers to make wayward animals tame for a while.

the mood stabilizers these days are mostly drugs used in seizure disorders. again, i guess somebody figured the shrinks could use these drugs, so they do, extensively. lithium is now heralded as some sort of "breakthrough," but really it was just some doctor who used a lot of it to sedate agitated rabbits.

antidepressants? please. tofranil was developed out of thorazine. they thought they were making a "me-too" antipsychotic, and then it made the "schizophrenic" patients worse and elevated the depressed patients' spirits. the first maoi was for TB. apparently, some people who were treated turned manic, so it was used for depression.

on and on it goes. opiates have long been used for mental anguish. now, there's $$$ in it, so using various opiates for "psychiatric indications" is becoming "cutting edge" or something. I read that some "experts" are even pushing to bring back use of LSD and other hallucinogens.

point is... no one can spot our problems on a brain scan. no blood work, either. go to 2 doctors, get 5 opinions. sometimes the drugs help, sometimes they don't, and they do create problems for a lot of people, too.

not to sound cynical, but i often think shrinks wouldn't actually "fix" or "cure" most of us, even if they could. power, control, profit, etc...there's actually more incentive to keep a lot of us "sick" and "in treatment" than to get us up and running and out of the system.

((end of rant))