To ease the heartache of her first child’s stillbirth, Kelli Montgomery chose rigorous exercise, yoga and meditation over the antidepressants and sleeping pills that her physicians immediately suggested.
“‘You need to be on this medication or that medication.’ It was shocking to me that that was the first line of defense,” said Montgomery, 42, director of the MISS Foundation for Grieving Families in Austin, Texas. “From the time I was in the hospital to when I was seeing my general practitioner, that’s what they were insisting on.”
Her choice stemmed partly from a longtime aversion to taking prescription drugs. It was also the result of listening to a growing group of psychiatrists, psychologists and clinical social workers from around the world who argue that depression and other normal responses to life’s toughest challenges are too often labeled as disorders — and as such, demand medicine with sometimes dangerous side effects.
Protesters such as Montgomery contend diagnoses of serious psychological and psychiatric disorders have also needlessly skyrocketed alongside the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ expanding list of what constitutes mental illness. The manual is considered the bible of psychiatry because it’s the criteria mental health professionals use to diagnose patients.
One example of the issue is the frequency of bipolar disorder in children. It has jumped 40-fold in the last two decades, said Dr. Bernard Carroll, a former Duke University psychiatry department chairman.
Using downward dogs to treat depression
[For more of this story, written by Katti Gray, go to http://wwlp.com/2015/04/20/are...sing-mental-illness/]
Comments (0)