The debate rages on

You know how I wonder all the time about meds, but now there's a debate raging in the academic world.

"Why do we, as a society, believe that these drugs fix chemical imbalances?” Why do we believe new drugs are better than older ones?"

There's a new book about meds from Robert Whitaker called "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Durgs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America." It's pretty controversial right now, and I haven't read it yet, but from this article one person said: "Whitaker’s message seemed clear and convincing: psychiatric drugs do seem to have a purpose for specific cases, but the current practice of 'long-term treatment' may have consequences that do significant harm to the patient."

You always hear about the good that meds do, but in the mental health community (i.e., those of us who take the drugs) you hear a lot about the side effects, too. My favorite site, Crazymeds.us, has a lot of information on all the weird side effects you will and won't get that have been reported from psychiatric medications. And many of them are doozies. There are flesh-eating rashes and kidney failure, blood toxicity and all sorts of sexual problems.

I wonder all the time what 16 years of medicating my illness has done to my body. How do those internal organs look? Has it made my body stop producing it's own helpful chemicals because it knows it can rely on pharma? Will I ever be able to have children or is my body so toxic that they'll end up having no serotonin for themselves? Science doesn't know. In the decades since psychiatric medications took hold, they still don't know how they work, why they work, or what they're really doing to the body. Sure makes me a little paranoid.

So are they doing more harm than good? Does taking a medication for life make the illness a long-term problem? Could we just take meds for acute episodes instead of constantly? One day maybe we'll know. I know I would donate my body to science if weren't an organ donor, first (if they'll take me). I want to know these answers. I want to know if it's worth saturating my body with chemicals in the name of "normalcy." And what is normal? I suppose not feeling like this is normal.