This is an important question related to the treatment of schizophrenia.
Now let me be clear. I self medicate using alcohol and cannabis. I used to be medicated by psychiatrists and I didn't like it.
Other people haven't taken this path. They welcome the psychiatric drugs and the hope it gives them that it treats the disease. Antipsychotics are still the mainstay of psychiatric treatment. The drugs are often prescribed for life.
Schizophrenia is a behavioural and emotional disorder which is meant to be caused by brain differences. Again, I disagree. Regardless of my opinion, the drugs don't treat the brain illness.
As far as I am aware there are no treatments for brain illnesses in general use though there is some pioneering work which might change this. Major tranquiliser drugs actually cause brain differences. High doses used in monkeys in a placebo controlled study showed 8-11% loss of brain weight in the treatment group. Reviews have shown small loses in brain matter in humans. The drugs also cause illness, side effects and early death.
They don't treat the core pathology of schizophrenia. They are not scientifically proven to stop the delusions and hallucinations. A study on clozapine said few patients experienced any antipsychotic effect. Those that did said it barely reduced the voices. (It made me think are patients on cloazpine poor placebo responders which is why other drugs don't work). Clozapine is the most potent and dangerous psychiatric drug. It has killed many people worldwide. It is also supposed to be the most effective treatment for schizophrenia.
It doesn't heal the brain and it kills the patient. So what does it do? It shackles the person using chemicals to stop their expression and thereby makes them easier to deal with. It is used to suppress unwanted behaviour by making a person relaxed and docile.
It does not treat the biological problem and the dopamine theory of schizophrenia has been repeatedly debunked by people like Robert Whitaker. It treats the person in the sense a pain killer treats something. These drug reduce pain but don't actually treat the cause.
The problem is the pain which major tranquiliser drugs treat isn't the pain of the individual. It isn't real pain. It treats the insignificant pain of individuals and society who have become used to a world where people don't act strange or odd or different or crazy.
It just takes looking at the use of the drug in dementia patients to see what it is really doing. It wasn't used for dementia patients before. Just schizophrenics. The convenience of the drug meant that carers and care home workers could have docile, easy to manage people. Then it was discovered that 1,800 old people died because of this drug every single damn year.
People could learn to accept and learn to deal with unusual or challenging behaviour from their elders...or they can use psychiatric drugs to make people relaxed and docile so they don't exhibit behaviours which are considered unusual or difficult to deal with in modern society...and kill them.
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