Mental Health Post SHTF

[Jonas]

For those with bipolar disorders, once the meds run out, those folks are toast. The whole post-SHTF period will be a massive "Darwin Award" contest...

[Mortblanc]

I am old enough to remember the era before ADHD, ADD and all the other alphabet labels that got the schools special funding.

Kids learned to control themselves, or wished they had. They channeled all that excess energy into sports and play.

They won sports scholarships to major universities due to their excess energy level.

Then when they graduated they got another label I remember well from Psych class back in the 1960s,

THE TYPE A PERSONALITY!!!

The over achiever that became the corporate CEO, got rich, married the trophy wife and retired to his own estate on a Caribbean island.

Usually while in that early retirement stage he set speed records, climbed unconquered peaks, led revolutions that changed the boundaries of nations and called up Prime Ministers and told them what they were going to do next.

---

Sadly enough, we now medicate the people that won our wars, built empires and shaped the world.

[MaryN]

Well. Scythe, I would imagine that those folks suffering from some mental illness would continue to be cared for by their families post SHTF. I've only ever had to deal with people suffering from depression and PTSD, and I know how difficult that can be, particularly as they are often conditions where the sufferer does not look any different. I agree with Jonas and BP, anyone needing complicated medications is probably not going to survive for long on an ongoing basis - unless of course bhy some miracle they had access to their meds.

To be honest, I doubt if many people could (or possibly would want to) deal with the really mentally ill - psychotics or bi-polar - it would be too difficult to manage, and the stress involved would, I suspect, knock any attempt to be kindly on the head. If you think about some of the mentally ill folks "released" into the community (and unfortunately some of the things they get up to), the thought of trying to control them would be a non-starter for me.

I suspect that many of the more minor conditions, like ADHD and such are "made up" and would probably fade away under conditions of real life. The treatment of them at the moment may provide a few shrinks with a pretty good living.

I suspect that the main mental health issues post SHTF will mainly be stress-related, i.e. PTSD or depression.

Just my opinions, you understand.

[Jonas]

Mary, with all the news recently, could I have PTSD (Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome)?

[bigpaul]

surely we wont have time to get stressed, we'll be too busy even to think about it. mind you I think my S-I-L is a prime candidate for something like this-most of the family think she's "lost it" already! I've said in the past i'll give her a week post SHTF!

[Midnitemo]

There's a lot of flaky people out there right now with the current state of affairs , just imagine how many are gonna go postal if you increase the stress and pressure tenfold.....normal life in all senses of the word will go out the window.....these occasional freak outbursts of angst by random individuals were seeing currently will escalate dramatically.

[CharlesHarris]

While I have no statistics for the UK, based on law enforcement studies in the US, one person in ten is either chemically dependent, has a personality disorder or is potentially violent, so that they would pose a threat.

They are out there!

[CharlesHarris]

In 1961, the late, great Thomas Szasz wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness... Szasz, who passed away last year, was a frightening adversary in debates, and few colleagues dared take him on. He was funny, caustic and ridiculed the absurdities of modern psychiatry: “If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”

He averred that psychiatry was unique among all professions in its capacity to commit people who have done no wrong to insane asylums by way of involuntary commitment (imprisonment). As such, it should more properly be labelled a branch of law than medicine. He was not against psychiatry per se, only what he called coercive psychiatry... All this is relevant in light of the recent mass shootings in the US. Virtually all shooters of the last decade have been on “therapeutic” levels [sic] of psychiatric drugs, something the mainstream press has belatedly recognised. Tragic though these killings are, Szasz would at least be satisfied that psychiatry is at last getting the kind of spotlight it deserves...
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/ciara...l-illness/

The man charged with killing one student and wounding two others at a small Seattle college last week had stopped taking his medications because he "wanted to feel the hate," and he detailed his plans in a handwritten journal for two weeks before the attack, a prosecutor said Tuesday. "I just want people to die, and I'm gonna die with them!" Aaron Ybarra wrote the day of the shooting, King County [WA] Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said... (This is not the first case in which I've seen a report that the killer was no longer taking his prescribed psychotropic medication. I recall that a few were reported to have discontinued taking SSRI antidepressants. To my knowledge, the two types of psychiatric patients most likely to discontinue their medication are paranoid schizophrenics – who often perceive any side efect as evidence of attempts to poison them – and those who experience manic phases of bipolar disorder – as they only need to stop taking drugs to feel, albeit for short periods, the euphoria that other experience from taking CNS stimulants.)
http://www.kptv.com/story/25741092/prose...t-off-meds

[Tartar Horde]

Psychiatry is not an Empirical science, it is quackery based on the writings of a sexually repressed cocaine addict called Freud. The subject has been controlled and driven by Governments who use it as another weapon. In brief: utter bullshit.

[Mortblanc]

It might seem that way to those that do not work in or around the field.

Psych really does have it uses, but not in a way that we have come to expect from medical science.

Psych does a fantastic job of diagnosing and labeling mental disorders. Those disorders can then be medicated and proper supervision maintained over the patient.

The problem is that those disorders are inside a human brain and they have no mechanical means of making repairs that is acceptable to society.

It is like going to an oncologist and he tells you there is cancer in your body. He has no cure. He can operate, but it will leave you an unthinking husk of an animal that is not quite human, or you can go home and die on your own.

When the psych practitioner is used as a diagnostic aid for prediction of behaviors and treatment to the levels that we do have available it is a valuable service. You can not medicate patients and maintain control of them with out an official diagnosis.

The problem comes when a psych decides they can "CURE" a patient. Or that a patient is "CURED" and can be released into society with no restraints.

Keep in mind that psychs are medical doctors first, and have their own mental health issues and "God Complexes" to deal with.

People in these "help professions" tend to be drawn by the problems in themselves that directed their attention to a specific field.

I have worked around a lot of them and they tend to be crazy as a sack of bats!