Part 2 of the book discusses depression and the types of treatments that are prescribed by psychiatrists to treat it, and why the way the profession, as a whole, choses to treat patients is ineffective, dangerous, and incredibly cruel.
The first chapter in this section explains what depression is and how we can recognize it. Recognizing depression is generally very easy, and being able to identify an event that occurred in the individual’s life that could have caused the onset of depression is also usually simple. But there are times when a professional cannot determine the cause of depression, and this is because of a lack of understanding on their part, not because there is some unusual or obscure cause. A mental health professional, psychiatrists not included, realize this, and work with the patient to try to determine the cause of the turmoil. A psychiatrist would just pump the patient full of drugs without bothering to have any meaningful conversation with them.
The next chapter goes into the biology of depression. Early theories guessed that having too little norepinephrine or serotonin were behind depression, but there was never enough evidence to prove this. There is a relationship between certain hormonal disorders and depression, but there is no way to tell if the disorder causes depression, or if depression causes the disorder. The biggest takeaway from this chapter, for me, was that we cannot understand the biology of depression until we understand a normal, healthy human brain, which we do not and are far from doing so.
Tricyclics are the star of chapter 8, or as they are more commonly known, antipsychotics. Some generalizations about tricyclics, drugs such as Prozac, are that they can be extremely lethal if taken in an overdose, they have a sedative effect, cause sexual dysfunction, cause severe withdrawal symptoms, they dull the mind, and taking one is not much better than taking a placebo as seen in studies. Basically, there is not so much evidence for them being useful, but there is a ton of evidence showing them to be extremely harmful. Antidepressants are the drug you most often see being used by an individual in suicide attempts. This makes you question, why do psychiatrists prescribe such dangerous drugs to people who are the most at risk for trying to end their own lives? If you want to read more about the ‘miracle’ drug Prozac, as well as lithium, you should consider reading this.
The final chapter in part 2 was the most disturbing one I have read in this book so far. What medical procedure causes effects similar to a head injury, requires the patient to be paralyzed before treatment, can cause the breaking of bones during treatment, and after multiple sessions can lead to subhuman functioning? Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), or electroshock, is a procedure still practiced in the field of psychiatry today. There is too much detestable information in this chapter to go into. A summary of the topics the chapter goes into includes, elder abuse, the immediate side effects of each session of ECT, erasing memories and reprogramming, the threat of ECT from psychiatrists as punishment for ‘bad’ behavior in institutions, the FDA, and the power high that turns some psychiatrists into sadists.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 