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TERM PAPER Psychotherapeutic Medications
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There are many ethical issues surrounding the use of psychotherapeutic drugs to treat mental illness. When should these drugs be prescribed? To whom should these drugs be prescribed to? Who should have the responsibility for prescribing them? Background In general mental illness implies inappropriate behavior, excessive or undesireable emotional states and/or inappropriate thinking. Identifying people as mentally ill is left up to the judgment of professional clinicians (counselors, psychologists, social workers) or medical personnel (psychiatrists). Helping professionals view mental illness from a disease perspective that implies that the disease is the result of a pathogen or causeative factors, in this case an imbalance in neurochemistry or traumatic life event, that there are symptoms: delusional thinking, liable emotions, bizzare behaviors,etc. and a cure or treatment, e.g. counseling, ECT and medications. The identiFcation of symptoms, a diagnosis based on those symtoms, and a recommended treatment re±ect what is referred to as the medical model. Prior to 1950 treatment for mental illness was crude and lacked scientiFc validity. Mentally ill people were ±ogged, starved, had hot irons applied to their bodies, and were subjected to bloodletting. Electroconvulsive Shock Therapy (ECT) was used on severely depressed patients and lobotomies were performed on schizophrenics. Since the late 1950s medications have been used to treatment mental illness. Initially these new psychotropic medications were viewed as “mircle drugs” since they permitted formerly institutionalized mentally ill clients to function in the open society. These medications however are not without serious side e²ects. To further complicate things determining what is normal or abnormal behavior is fairly subjective. DeFning mental illness is complicated by the diversity of cultural and biological factors inherent in human experience. What may be considered abnormal varies with time and across cultures. ³or instance in 1973 the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-II (DSM-II) removed homosexuality as a classiFcation of mental disorders. This in part, re±ected a change in society’s view that homosexuality is a variant of sexual expression or a lifestyle choice rather than a pathological mental disorder. The individual’s behaviors did not change; it was the culture’s attitude about those behaviors that changed. All of us have unique ways of coping, or not coping with, our social environment demands. This may include our family, work or school settings, public behavior and other societal expectations and norms. People can have personal problems that are not necess
