Casual cocaine user here. And as Charlotte noted above, I’m actually more worried about the stigma of being labeled a “cokehead” than becoming addicted.

I think adherence to the AA/NA line on drug use as THE truth about drug taking/addiction is pretty much confined to North America and to drug treatment workers in the UK.

That’s certainly not my experience Andrew.

I’ve run across several drug treatment workers around Sydney who are doctrinaire NA folk (I’ve worked with NUAA and the Hep C Council, so I’ve met quite a few in that line of work).

Then about fifteen years ago I needed help with my own major depression. When I told the nurse at the Ashfield Community Health Centre I had been a heroin user who had cleaned himself up about twenty years earlier she insisted on marking me down as ‘dual-diagnosis’ and refused to refer me to depression counselling until I’d completed an NA twelve step program. Ultimately I had to overcome my own depression just as I had overcome my own heroin addiction in the early 80s because I couldn’t get into any non-cultist rehab programs.

The black dog came closer to killing me than the dragon ever did too.

I’m not sure if you’re responding to my comments or those of others? Anyway, in the mad movement, we’re kinda agnostic about what mental illness is. We totally respect those who feel the biomedical model works for them, and those who don’t. I’m sorry if anything I’ve said implied otherwise. I don’t like the insulin/diabetes model used for EVERYONE, as someone who was diagnosed with a shitload of pejorative diagnoses (bipolar, boderline personality disorder) when I was a teenager, force medicated, and psychiatrically incarcerated, I also get to say what my “mental illness” is or isn’t. But by saying that I’m not trying to deny you the right to interpret yours in a different manner, or saying I know what it’s like to live in your body, and I’m very sorry if anything I wrote implied otherwise. I’m NOT with people who want to convert everyone to one discourse about what mental illness is, whether that discourse is the biomedical model or an irresponsible Adbusters DAMN THE MAN DON’T TAKE YR MEDS NOTHING’S WRONG WITH YOU WHAT ARE YOU COMPLAINING ABOUT approach.

AGREED Caty, right on. And as you know I’ve been forcibly injected around this stuff. It’s not about what’s good for the “patient” – it’s about society’s comfort level.

Neuroscience absolutely does not know very much about how the brain works, this is so freaking true. At the point at which you are talking about individual neurotransmitters, you are basically at the point of discovering the electron (1897), and acting like you can describe the functioning of a computer (note that the human brain is considerably more complicated though), on the level of the functioning and mechanisms/algorithms performed by the software. At the point that you are looking at pretty pictures of electrical activity in the brain, you’re looking maybe at a general level at the read-write patterns on the disk (or SSD). You can see how both of these are “missing the point” in a huge way. The reason, IMO, is that neuroscience hasn’t really had any significant breakthroughs yet, not on the level of patterns of communication among neurons giving rise to functions of the brain. Until it does, most of the experiments that are performed are more or less trivial. Kind of like the experiments done by working ecologists – trivial, foreseeable results – and if you disagree, think about how scifi shows depict people being able to come in and alter ecological systems in ways that will FIX them. Imagine if we could do that!!

That was mostly a response to Kitty, actually, at #comment-11809. I probably should have been clearer.

And, sure, the psychiatric drugs – insulin comparison isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty damn accurate. Not everyone with diabetes needs insulin, but for those who do need it, it’s not just a placebo, and not taking it can have devastating effects. The reason the comparison is used is because it helps legitimize mental illness as a real disability, not because mental illness is always biochemical in cause like diabetes.

I also don’t agree that the biochemical + medical models of mental illness apply to everyone, and I know firsthand that psychiatry is massively flawed and fucked-up. But that doesn’t make them totally illegitimate, especially for those of us for whom they do work. Kitty’s comment implied that they don’t work at all, except because we ‘believe’ they work, but that just isn’t true.

I am truly sorry that I tried to tell you how to run your own wellness and your body. That wasn’t my intent, but intent is for the birds, if you heard it that way. Your body and your own way of managing your mental health are just that, yours.

I just still have a problem with the universal comparison between psychiatric drugs and insulin. I do feel those suffering from mental illness are disabled, I just don’t agree with the standard definition of mental illness.

I really didn’t want to have this conversation (like, at all, but especially in this thread), but I’m shocked at how much ableism is coming out here. You don’t have to agree with or ‘believe in’ psychiatry or science as a whole (and as someone who’s been mentally ill nearly my entire life and is capable of critical thinking, I have entertained the same ideas as you, believe it or not, and come to different conclusions), but you don’t get to decide what mental illness is and isn’t for everyone else. Mental illness is a physical illness for me, in that it is based in part in my biology and affects my physical functioning. It literally affects my ability to move my body (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomotor_retardation).

I use ‘legitimate’ physical illness as a comparison point because explaining my experiences with mental illness to everyone all the time gets tiresome, and they’re dismissed anyway, and people seem to have an easier time accepting that diabetes isn’t an idea you need to get over or a motivation issue or a character flaw. My mental illness is like diabetes in that going without my medication nearly killed me, I have to take my medication regularly in order not to have a crisis, and my medication fixes a chemical imbalance I have. That could kill me. So, you know, in the big ways it is very much similar, and I dare you to try to tell me that I don’t know my own body well enough to know that this isn’t some hype I bought into. And if more people thought of mental illness as being like diabetes, I wouldn’t have had my basic human rights taken away half a dozen times in institutionalized settings.

You can argue all you want that mental illness in general is just a bad thought pattern or a social construct or thetans, but you don’t know my body and my life better than I do (does this sound familiar?), so you don’t get to tell me what MY mental illness is. My life and experiences are not unproven. I am examining my own experiences, my own body, the research I’ve participated in, and all the research I’ve read about and telling you that you are wrong. I do not ‘feel’ helped by meds; I am helped. And I’m shocked that I have to have this conversation here of all fucking places.

Finally, Erving Goffman’s Asylums should be read by anyone who wants to have this discussion, despite how outdated it is:
http://www.amazon.com/Asylums-Essays-Situation-Patients-Inmates/dp/0385000162/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379785103&sr=1-1&keywords=goffman+asylums