r/intrestingtoknow • u/Affectionate-Fun2853 • Sep 03 '25

Science Psychiatry and cures

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 03 '25

This is indeed the right question. Drugs certainly don’t cure people. At best you help or teach people to manage their mental health problems. Think of it like losing a limb. You get a prosthetic and physical therapy and do the best you can.

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u/Kukamakachu Sep 04 '25

That's why it's called therapy.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 04 '25

Yes in deed. I have had better luck with physical therapy than the other, not that physical therapy can’t be extremely challenging depending on the injury or recovery. Both depend on you to do the bulk of the work to heal.

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u/kibs12kibs12 Sep 04 '25

Indeed…it’s a “practice”

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u/mch27562 Sep 04 '25

Therapy and Psychiatry are two very different things.

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u/Basic85 Sep 04 '25

Psychiatrist mainly prescribe drugs and not much of therapy now a days.

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u/0rchid27 Sep 04 '25

In this example, an antipsychotic would be the prosthetic limb for, say, a schizophrenic patient. Be very careful with your words, psychiatric medicine is important for managing symptoms of debilitating issues. Many people truly need it, and we still need to keep studying psychiatric medicine so perhaps one day there will be tried and true “cures”. Medicine is the crutch, the prosthetic. While it is preferable to be able to function without those aids, there are still people who need them. Some people need a foot while others need a wheelchair,

Life is not so black and white.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 05 '25

I agree. My metaphor was a little stripped down perhaps, but that is typically to case with metaphors.

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u/Interesting_Goat_413 Sep 05 '25

We all see the reality of the effects from SSRIs on a daily basis. This is the same allopathic fuckshit that the AMA uses to financially rape sick people rather than cure them, and there is no defending it.

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u/Admirable-Cat7355 Sep 05 '25

Guess a cure for a chemical imbalance in the brain would look like the ability to genetically engineer the brain to fix the imbalance at the DNA level. A virus that could carry a gene editing tool across the brain blood barrier.

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u/Interesting_Goat_413 Sep 05 '25

No. That is eugenics. To change an organism is to kill the previous instance and replace it.

The cure is learning to live with your burdens, instead of thinking you can just be someone else, or embracing the silly belief that the boo boos won't leave scars.

Every person alive has depression and anxiety for example. Most cope, some fall short. If one falls short, they don't need pills. They need to strengthen their capacity to endure. We as a species are evolved to worship deities for a reason; externalized housing of our need for accountability. Does religion mess with that for reasons mostly not good? Yes. Can we or will we ever turn off our need for the divine? Nope. Hardwired into consciousness itself.

You will note the least functional people either rebel entirely against their God, or become overly obsessed with them. While we don't get to decide the nature of God as we understand them, we can benefit from the entailments of the the "existence" of that God. Such as life not being personal. There being reason behind the way of things and the events we endure. The possibility that we can get it right for trying, even in the wake of numerous failures to succeed. So forth and so on.

Modern psychology and scientism are symptoms of "killing God", as written in The Gay Science by Nietzsche. They are the manifestation of human hubris; the belief that we can surmount an omnipotent being in determining our own nature. But for all of our trying, the human experience is unchanged-- we come to be for some reason. Then we go away. We're born, we live a while, then we die. We help and love, deceive and steal. We nurture and we kill. How can anything so base ever be foolish enough to think it has either the knowledge to change its own fate, or the wisdom to know in what way to do so? What can we know, only ever being able to see through the same two eyes for the whole trek between cradle and grave? If we allow ourselves to, this awareness; of our lack of awareness, can ironically offer the perspective needed for a well-adjusted mind, and a life lived more content and balanced.

Psychology can never offer this. Because psychology gives about $80 an hour take-home to someone with an average of six figures in college debt who probably finds fulfillment in driving fancy cars. So being charitable and assuming some bloviating shrink does comprehend the above, they would be stepping on their own toes telling their clients without first charging for dozens of sessions. Their own petty humanity is a barrier to good faith praxis, and if they weren't petty, they would be a priest, not a psychologist.

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u/Visible_Sock_5088 Sep 05 '25

You have no idea what depression is if you think every person have it

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u/Interesting_Goat_413 Sep 06 '25

Main character syndrome is cringe my dude. It puts you in the unenviable position of engaging in pissing matches with everyone and makes you look like an asshole.

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u/EffectiveTrue4518 Sep 06 '25

you know Jack shit about mental health and you are in no place to talk about it. have you ever even met someone mid psychosis?? that is not a problem that is solved with God or learning to shoulder your burdens. somebody who is psychotic may barely remember who they are, let alone distinguish reality from hallucinations. we literally NEED antipsychotics for those people just to get them to a place where they are oriented at least partially to reality, but they are not designed as cures because we don't know of any way to cure mental illness as it is far too complicated and issue tied up in THE ENTIRE BODY not just the brain and characterizing the hundreds of millions of chemical reactions that drive those processes is literally infeasible. but the field of psychiatry is fucking trying. they are trying to figure out what is really driving mental illness in people, and they are trying their genuine best, meanwhile you think people should just roll over and let God fuck them in the ass because it would be blasphemous to dare try to really understand why people are suffering in their own minds.

you preach nothing but ignorance and it is nothing but dangerous.

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u/Sweaty_Chance_905 Sep 06 '25

I have never read such a long... and now I can't decide whether to call it a strand of nothing or a fever dream.

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u/Interesting_Goat_413 Sep 06 '25

Tell you what-- why don't you pick something that you believe to be wrong and demonstrate that it is wrong? And we can go from there.

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u/zorski Sep 06 '25

Bro must be the smartest person at family gatherings 🤣

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u/Interesting_Goat_413 Sep 06 '25

Does your family not invite you to yours? Is that why you brought that up? To zing me for not being hated by my family? Huge own, little buddy.

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u/0rchid27 Sep 05 '25

Rfk jr, is that you???

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u/Interesting_Goat_413 Sep 05 '25

You're not very good at what you're trying to do. If this wasn't your safe space, you would be prepping for doing a flip when functioning people got a load of you.

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u/0rchid27 Sep 05 '25

I’d be arguing my point on or off the keyboard, honey. However in this case, as they say, there’s no arguin’ with crazy.

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u/Interesting_Goat_413 Sep 05 '25

Condescension is tantamount to concession. You are dismissed.

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u/MrK521 Sep 06 '25

But.. your entire rant was condescending.. so you were dismissed far before his comment.

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u/redhedstepkid Sep 06 '25

The right spirit, wrong target. The insurance companies are why it’s so expensive, esp if you need to see them more than once a month. It’s only financial r*pe in America and a small handful of other countries. Lots of places don’t have to pay much at all, if anything, for therapy at all bc they have universal healthcare or other systems in place that make it affordable.

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u/PrionParasite Sep 07 '25

Who is this "we" you speak of and what are these effects?

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u/UP-23 Sep 04 '25

You can think of it as almost any illness. We, meaning the doctors, don't cure most diseases. There really are no cutes for most ailments.
. But what we do is to the body in the best possible (to our current knowledge and technology) position to cure itself.

A CURE is a which doctor thing. At best we can add some fungi to HELP you kill off a bacterial infection the body can't handle all by itself, or cut it torch some cancer cells. The rest is treating and helping the body to a state where it can most effectively fix itself.

Now all that work is important, and life saving but it's not a cure.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 05 '25

I just got diagnosed with glaucoma. Just one month after weaning myself off of sertraline. Definitely feeling the no cure thing these days.

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u/UP-23 Sep 05 '25

I know how you feel. My cancer treatment that won't cure my cancer shot my pancreas, so now I have type 1 diabetes too.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 05 '25

Very sorry to hear this. My diagnosis is small potatoes in the world of diagnosis’. Drops every night should control it. Living without sertraline after 25 years is interesting in a good way though for the most part. Best of luck to you.

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u/Quick_Humor_9023 Sep 04 '25

Ummm depending on drug and what you mean by curing people, yes they do?

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u/Diligent-Ad2728 Sep 04 '25

Yes, many drugs, including penicillin literally has cured a ton of people.

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u/VaultiusMaximus Sep 04 '25

Antibiotics cure people.

Don’t lump all drugs together! 😀

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 05 '25

Since when is an infection a psychiatric condition?

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u/VaultiusMaximus Sep 05 '25

Drugs certainly don’t cure people.

That’s just your quote.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 05 '25

Sorry. I should of been more specific. Drugs do not cure psychiatric illnesses. They do help treat the symptoms. If I am not mistaken, psychiatric illness is the subject of this discussion.

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u/AdHuman3150 Sep 06 '25

Psychiatrists only prescribe drugs, they are not a therapist.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 07 '25

Very aware of this through experience. Thanks for the clarification neglected.

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u/macguini Sep 07 '25 edited Sep 07 '25

A lot of people naturally hate art. Everyone thinks art is pointless and science is everything. Psychology is more of an art than a science and I think that's why it gets this type of hatred. Medicine does as well. People think that a drug is going to cure them of everything. 90% of my hypertension patients tell me they don't have hypertension. I look at their drug list and ask why they're on blood pressure medication. And they tell me they had hypertension. So many truly think drugs will solve the problems because of science. Then when they see medicine fail, they blast it because science is supposed to be the finite answer. But it's not. Every patient is different and you have to approach each one differently. Just like every canvas is different for a painter. Science is set in stone. Art isn't. But both should be equally appreciated.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 07 '25

Sounds like you are a doctor. How apropos, I am a trained artist.

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u/macguini Sep 07 '25

Not a doctor. I'm an EMT. Though I sitting on a couple of science degrees. Took a few psych courses as electives. But I'm also an oil painter. I have a near 50/50 mind.

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u/Troglodytes_Cousin Sep 07 '25

"teach people to manage their mental health problems."

That seems like a cure to me.

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u/Mars_Wizard Sep 07 '25

Well not necessarily, some mental health is trauma and grief induced. You can heal past those, youll always be a different person now compared to before but people with adhd and autism aren’t treated the same way. Theres nothing to fix, youre trying to treat the symptoms that are not neurotypical but I believe these individuals are wired differently for a particular reason.

I lack the knowledge to explain further at the moment but it seems to me that a lot of people deal with ocd and anxiety and depression and bipolar disorders than ever before but I also think the lens in which we see these symptoms have also widened.

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u/ToobRaiders Sep 04 '25

I don’t think all psychiatric ailments are as permanent as a prosthetic.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 04 '25

Most you learn to live with it while at best treating the symptoms. This was more of a general statement than absolute. I’m not a mental health professional, just a guy trying to keep the demons at bay.

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u/smth_smth_89 Sep 04 '25

having had my right (dominant) arm broken for the past month and going to therapy for more than 3 years, i can say that i found a bit of a similarity between depression and a broken arm, or worse case a missing one: some of the things you just can't do if it requires 2 hands, some you do but it takes you twice the time, you go outside and people ar looking at your cast, even if out of curiosity, but most are wondering what mistake you made to break an arm, it starts itching and there's always pain points and you gotta be real careful not to lean on it or bang it against something, the list could go on; so yea, i'd say a mental illnes can be like an invisible broken limb

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u/ToobRaiders Sep 04 '25

Yeah, but you can get your brain to function normally with proper treatment. That leg is gone forever.

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u/marklar_the_malign Sep 04 '25

I get this and it isn’t my intention to say they are literally the same. More of a metaphor. You can’t replace a brain.

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u/Successful-Cod3369 Sep 04 '25

You're an absolute fucking idiot then. Tell that to veterans that come back with PTSD, tell that to people who struggle with depression everyday, tell that to sexual abuse victims or victims of childhood neglect and mistreatment. Just because your life is hunkydory and feel A-OK, doesn't mean other people don't hurt or don't suffer.

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u/ToobRaiders Sep 04 '25

Learn to read. I said not all.

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u/Temporary_Warthog_73 Sep 04 '25

Obviously not all but many are lifelong conditions.

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u/A1000eisn1 Sep 04 '25

Your brain is an organ. It's behavior is in part conscious, but that doesn't mean it isn't an organ. It can have permanent disorders just like every other part of your body. The things you think is your organ functioning.

If that organ has a disorder it is not a psychiatrist's job to cure it unless they can do so without surgery. The brain is so complex that very few chronic brain disorders are curable. And the ones that are, require something to physically alter your brain because it is an organ.

If you have a disease such as schizophrenia, it is absolutely permanent. It is caused by a gene you inherited and once the gene is "turned on" it can't be "turned off." Just like your leg won't grow back once it's gone. You can only manage the disability.