Mental Health Madness

    Imagine if every single day when you wake up, you are involuntarily thrown into a constant battle; not with work, not with your friends and family, but with yourself. Daily tasks as simple as eating breakfast and going to the gym become the most stressful activities of your day, because the fear of being “too fat” has consumed you. The only thing running through your mind, controlling every move you make, is a single numerical value on the scale, and your only concern is maintaining this number. This form of mental illness may seem abstract and difficult to understand for the average person, however, those fighting bulimia and other eating disorders are accustomed to the unfortunate reality that I have portrayed. Victims of mental illness including body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, PTSD, schizophrenia, etc. have their own, unique battle to fight every single day, and the individuality of these illnesses makes understanding them exponentially difficult. 

The current system for treating mental illnesses in America is frankly counterintuitive and unreliable. My first experience with the flaws of the mental health industry came when I was a sophomore in high school, and my girlfriend at the time was a recovering bulimic. Instead of trying to attack the source of her body dysmorphia, the therapists and nutritionists were content with giving her ways to simply cope. She was told to maintain a weight between 115 and 120 pounds, and wasn’t allowed to participate in high school extracurricular activities or work out like the majority of us can, fearing any fluctuation of the number on the scale. Finding a therapist that was actually effective became a striking obstacle as well, because as I previously touched upon, everyone’s story is different. In my girlfriend’s case, the professionals that she spoke with failed to connect with her on a personal level, and she had to bounce around from therapist to therapist, avoiding those that ran a high price. The utter inconvenience of trying to find someone who could successfully understand my girlfriend's situation was enough to deal with. Then adding in the constant lifestyle changes that her doctors were enforcing, her stress and anxiety only got worse. It was extremely evident to me at the time that not only did I not understand the nature of mental illnesses, such as body dysmorphia, our country as a whole has a poor understanding on how to treat mental illness in general.

For the past few years, I have often pondered if the different methods used to treat mental illness in this country are doing more harm than good, and then Robert Whittaker, the founder of Mad in America, spoke to our class about his journal's efforts. Robert and the rest of Mad work to provide the public with the true statistics and facts surrounding mental illness, and the different treatments’ effectiveness as shown through reliable studies. His interest in the field of mental health began when his early journalism exposed him to biases of pharmaceutical companies and their drug studies, and Robert soon realized an obvious discrepancy in the data supporting mental health treatments. Even though Whittaker would remind the class time and time again that he was simply a journalist writing about the data, and he has no opinions on his matters, his findings lined up perfectly with my experiences.

The most shocking statistic that he shared was related to antidepressants and their effectiveness in treating mental illnesses. Before the use of antidepressants became a mainstream practice, the one year recovery rate for those dealing with severe anxiety and depression was over ninety percent. The most reliable study that Robert discovered covering antidepressants found, in turn, that over eighty percent of patients using these drugs will develop consequential paranoia side effects in the long term. Ironically, the same study tested the one year recovery rate in patients without antidepressants as well, and ninety percent of patients exhibited a full recovery. 

When my ex girlfriend was dealing with her eating disorder, she was prescribed different medications based on how severe her side effects were, constantly cycling through new prescriptions trying to find the proper sedative. The problem in our capitalist society, aside from a developing understanding of the mental health field, is the constant need for profit, and major pharmaceutical companies have noticed the lucrative opportunities in treating mental health. As Robert asserts, these companies will fund the studies being conducted on their products, adding considerable bias to the processes. As a result, countless drugs are being overprescribed in an attempt to suppress symptoms, not cure the root cause. 

I don’t necessarily have an answer to the mental health madness in America, and I don’t know if I ever will. However, based on my time trying to understand what my ex girlfriend was going through, it’s clear that people dealing with serious mental illnesses are already confused enough trying to figure out why their lives are harder than the average person’s. Flooding our databases with conflicting information makes treating these illnesses much more complicated for the patients, and it’s not fair for them to bounce around from therapist to therapist, or medication to medication, praying that the next will be the final solution. The best road to recovery remains unclear for mental health, but with the growing support and awareness in this country, a breakthrough may be right around the corner.


Nicholas Forcellati

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