From the August 2002 "Polemics and Exchanges" section, page 5
ON MEDS AND MENTAL ILLNESS ~ by B.K. Eakman
[B. K. Eakman's response to Letter from psychiatrist on her May 2002 article:]
If [psychiatrists like] Dr. Parsons find "an undertone of hostility" towards psychology and psychiatry among conservatives, and if he notes that many of his colleagues tend to be politically liberal and sexually confused, this is not surprising. The politically left-leaning, in my experience, tend to prefer a quick fix to the arduous, long-term challenge of dealing with life experiences, which requires a certain strength of character.
Where psychology and psychiatry -- and, indeed, all of the behavioral sciences -- began to go wrong was when guilt and conscience began to be condemned. In the 1940's, the argument was that guilt and conscience forced people to take responsibility for feelings and events beyond their control. This view was promoted heavily after World War II by Drs. Brock Chisholm, Ewen Cameron, and John Rawlings Rees, among others. Then these ideas made their way, into women's magazines. Women of the immediate postwar era were vulnerable to this logic and ready to accept it. "Do you want to be a Hitler, a Mussolini?" psychologists challenged. Nobody did. So this ef fort to eradicate or at least soften guilt, sin, shame, and conscience during the 50's and 60's started to overturn 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian thought.
Suddenly, we were looking at guilt and conscience not as civilizing influences that reign in the baser instincts but as neuroses and psychosis. Of course, troubled people would prefer to let a pill cure their troubles or at least help them to deal with their problems rather than take on the incredibly difficult task of applying religious principles.
To save his own life, a person with homosexual tendencies should learn not to practice his behaviors at all. Ever. That is easy to say, of course, but not easy to do. The person who is hypercritical and without patience, whose gut reaction is to cut down anyone who gets in his way or annoys him, should learn to stop his tongue, to say nothing, to think something else every time, period. Again, easy to say, not easy to do. But that is what Christianity demands. The Sermon on the Mount sets out this principle repeatedly. Better to lose one of your limbs, Jesus said, than to cast your soul into hell.
Any psychologist will admit that, once the behaviors mentioned above become habits, they will quickly become ritual obsessions, wreck your life, destroy any enjoyment that you may otherwise have -- and you cannot fix that with a pill, with electroshock, or with psychotherapy.
I never claimed that all people who take psychiatric drugs go berserk. I wrote that angry persons who take antidepressants often lose impulse control. Does that mean murder? Not necessarily. But it may mean throwing the pan of oatmeal boiling over on the stove right through the window, or smashing the computer keyboard because you hit a wrong key. Many adults who are prescribed antidepressants for migraine headaches and other problems have had such reactions and are too embarrassed by these behaviors to tell their doctors. Some simply stop taking the pills, citing the excuse that "I just didn't feel good." But what about kids, who lack impulse control anyway? They aren't going to make the connection between out-of-character behavior and normal teenage impulses.
I find it troubling that Dr. Parsons should applaud the fact that so many mentally ill people have been discharged from hospitals now that psychiatric medications have allowed them to "function" in society. Is that why we have thousands of rapists, murderers, pedophiles, and folks with criminal records as long as your arm running amok?
We are dealing with a problem of perspective. Side effects such as weight gain do not compare, in any way, with such side effects as loss of impulse control, and pills and psychotherapy cannot take the place of character, integrity, and con science.
B. K. Eakman, a former teacher turned speechwriter, is executive director of the National Education Consortium and the author of Cloning of the American Mind:ÿ Eradicating Morality Through Education.ÿ (Huntington House)
