Abatta500

I appreciate this measured response. Thank you for being thoughtful and kind. :)

To sort of second a point another commenter made, it feels like there's an entirely other half of this equation you're not really reconciling with. For a lot of us with lived experience as both patients and caregivers, this stuff is "undermedicalized." You can unite people around treating people humanely without making blanket statements that don't comport with the lived reality of a huge number of people.

Nobody wants to take psych meds if they don't have to, and it isn't helpful to pathologize normal variations in human behavior and emotion. It also isn't helpful to conflate situational distress with an "illness," which seems to happen a lot with diagnoses of anxiety and depressive disorders. But there are many people who suffer from severe anxiety, depression, and psychotic symptoms that are idiopathic (for lack of a better word) and for which the medical model is the best there is.

I'm glad you're around and didn't take your own life, even without taking medication. For a lot of severely depressed people though, psychiatric medication is life-saving. Ketamine can totally reverse suicidality within like an hour for some people. It can be hard to find a medication that works, and the side effects can be considerable, but sometimes medication is necessary to live a high quality of life.

Of course, this reality doesn't justify treating people cruelly or forcibly hospitalizing people unnecessarily. And it doesn't mean everyone needs psychiatric meds or will benefit from them.

I can't speak to the psychotic people but I can say that for suicidal people the reason forced hospitalization doesn't work is probably because they can't hold them long enough. 3 days is enough to traumatize them but not enough to stabilize them with treatment unless they are given something fast acting like electric shock or ketamine. I would think that in the case of someone with a severe eating disorder, being hospitalized until they were a healthy weight and responding to treatment would be in their best interest.