They're just throwing chemical darts and trying to sort out what they're left with. They don't know if they're making people worse or better.<p>E.g article comment at <a href="http://nyti.ms/12QAy1D" rel="nofollow">http://nyti.ms/12QAy1D</a> points out "six months of mania as the result of a [drug] reaction…followed by a misdiagnosis…" Author herself doesn't seem to notice that she has depression <i>before</i> being treated with drugs, but it's bipolar <i>after</i> being treated.<p>Not a single mention of meditation or similar therapies, which have been much-studied and successful for many people. As if they don't exist as therapies.<p>A friend took a drug for mental health issues for ten days, and has had nearly twenty years of side effects (so far) affecting his sleep (he twitches when melatonin is released—or taken as a supplement). It never happened before, became severe on the drug, faded slightly in the months afterwards, and has never fully receded. Has tried many things to treat. And this is a small thing!<p>Throwing chemicals at problems when they don't know what will be solved or caused should really only be a last resort.
It took me a while to read all the way through the article, because I was doing things with my family. And maybe that is exactly the issue. The author of the article reaches a happy ending when she reflects on involvement with children and hoped-for grandchildren. The anecdotes she relates about her treatment, by the way, reflect the how far understanding of bipolar mood disorders and their treatment has come in the last few decades. She writes as a sixty-year-old with decades of treatment behind her. If you are the age of a typical Hacker News user, you are younger, and today in 2013 if you seek treatment your doctor or psychologist has a much better experience base and theoretical framework to work from in designing your treatment.<p>The author's main point about what needs more attention in treatment of bipolar mood disorder I cannot fully agree with. Unlike her, I have lived in more than one country of the world for a long span of my life, and at a slightly younger age, I have decades of my life that were spent looking back at living a very culturally and linguistically different place, where "self" plays a very different role in individual lives. Human beings get better as they become more connected to their communities, not usually as they become more self-absorbed. (I'm looking for a link just now about that--perhaps I'll add it in an edit if I find the link I'm looking for.) It's great that the article author has family and community connections. The best reason to take individually prescribed medicine is to help build up interpersonal relationships. Preoccupation with self-identity is not a cultural universal, but being with and dealing with our fellow human beings is.
Well-known hacker Zooko wrote about his family's experience with bipolar disorder: <a href="http://zooko-on-aaronsw.blogspot.com/2013/02/part-2.html" rel="nofollow">http://zooko-on-aaronsw.blogspot.com/2013/02/part-2.html</a>
The self is such a critical over-looked aspect for doctors that are primed to think of everything as a physical, chemical, medicinal equation when it is often so much more than that.