Psychiatric Drugs Function Using the Placebo Effect
Your recurrence when stopping them comes from withdrawal effects from addiction.
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It would be ideal if we could all solve our psychiatric problems using talk therapy, reframe our thoughts, and not rely on a chemical agent that the brain's natural state must combat daily. Most psychiatric illnesses arise from shaking the foundation of what makes us fundamentally human, our fears, broken hopes, and desires, if only in our imagination.
We are exposed to such extreme views and experiences that it’s easy to end up with false yet convincing limiting beliefs that drastically affect our bodies and minds. Drug companies falsely advertise to medical students, patients, and psychiatric practitioners a flawed description of how the mind works as a biological process of chemical imbalances.
Many of us are placed on medications that we develop a chemical dependency on. Our conditions are prone to recur upon withdrawal since the underlying cause of our illnesses is not solved or recovered while using pharmaceuticals as a crutch. Having reached this insight early on, I vowed not to remain on a crutch and ride my bike without training wheels once I was ready. I wanted to cure myself of my mental illness.
Today, I am on a very low-maintenance dose of one psychiatric medication to treat bipolar I disorder with psychotic symptoms. This is not trivial; much negotiation and psychiatrist-hopping went into it. When a patient who has bipolar talks about titrating off medication, it’s considered a symptom of their illness. Often enough, the doses are forcibly increased on prescriptions you rely on your doctor to provide. Otherwise, the patient is involuntarily hospitalized. This might be extreme, but if a patient decides to lower dosages themselves and then experiences withdrawal effects that mimic a recurrence of the illness, visible signs of mania are enough to hospitalize the patient.
It’s unclear whether there is an underlying illness that’s been kept at bay and not allowed to resolve or be cured or that bipolar is an incurable structural condition of a developed brain that the sufferer and those close to them must endure the effects of. In any case, my studies into the spiritual nature of things make me…
