From KevinMD.com: Doctors often fail to recognize that their patients’ symptoms are side effects of medication.
“Cognitive dissonance, a universal human phenomenon, is based on the assumption that people want consistency between their expectations and reality, and twist their thinking into knots to make that happen. In the case of drug reactions, to preserve the notion that our efforts help rather than hurt, our impulse is to attribute the harm to something other than our intervention.”
Perhaps we should phrase it this way:
We need to pay attention to the “MAIN EFFECTS” of psychiatric drugs (not medications) which are overwhelming NEGATIVE and HARMFUL to people tasking the drugs as prescribed.
The few examples of people reporting positive benefits from psychiatric drugs are either due to the “placebo effect” or examples of rare and unusual “SIDE EFFECTS”.
Richard
Yes, we should simply say “The effects” instead of pretending these are accidental or unexpected somehow.
A better description would be “drug reaction”. If the doctors and the pharmaceutical insert said these are drug reactions that you may or will experience. The downside with psychiatric drugs is as we well know psychiatriy thinks WE are becoming more mental ill. I could go on and on about this because I lived it.
Correction: We Need To Stop Drugging People.
Drugs, pain killers and psych-drugs, are not medicine. They should not be treated as such. The result of doing so is death and injury.
Yes, we (if we be medical professionals) need to stop offering people drug cocktails. If you are going to inebriate people, it is much better to err on the side of moderation than it is on the side of excess. Otherwise, expect the tragic.
We (the medical profession) have a huge iatrogenic death and injury problem on our (now bloody) hands. The sooner we start acknowledging it, the better.
