Tom's Crusade Against Psychiatry
rather than the underlying condition. It's a bit like putting the cart before the horse because it makes a lot more sense to blame it on the underlying disease rather than the medicine used to treat it. Depressed people, ones who are not on any medicine, or ones who are on medicine but NOT on a dose that is high enough to make them undepressed can be suicidal and more rarely homicidal; that is the nature of the disease. It IS the underlying disease and NOT the medicine that causes this situation. When people blame the medicine, it is a bit like saying that cancer medications cause deaths in cancer patients when the patient really died from the underlying disease, cancer! Inadequately treated depression can be just as deadly as not treating it at all because the underlying disorder can be deadly.
My concern really is that folks will listen to Tom Cruise and his rant against psychiatry and quit taking their meds or not start taking them when they need them. This causes a lot of problems and sometimes results in death thru suicide. Untreated depression takes a very high toll on society and its members. Sick time from depression has a financial toll on the business sector. Depressed parents have less to "give" their kids in terms of their joy, their energy and their vitality. For single parents this can be an especially devastating problem because there may not be anyone else for the children to depend upon. Life can pretty much seem to suck for people who are depressed but it isn't much fun for their loved ones either. Friends and family of the depressed watch in utter helplessness as their relative slides into a deeper despair and sometimes suicides "out". For those who lose someone to suicide, the pain and guilt can be hard to bear. It seems all the more tragic because it may have been prevented with good treatment. I shudder to think that some people may die and all the pain that will follow because of Tom's rant against psychiatry.
Taken in this light, I can see the reason that the journalist wrote the article that she did to counter the destructive message from Tom Cruise. If you have any question as to Tom's true ignorance of this field, you only need to listen to him use the words "antipsychotic" and "antidepressant" during his interviews as though
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