Michael Mitchell: Archive

How exactly do drugs cure mental health problems? They don't. They temporarily solve physical health problems caused by mental health problems.

For example, when I don't eat breakfast I get sad 🥲, but after I eat I cheer up 😀. If instead I took a happy pill for my condition, it would merely cover up the problem, not solve it. I know the importance of eating breakfast, though, so I'd never make this mistake.

A mental health problem would be not seeing the emotional consequences of not eating breakfast, but it's not enough for a psychologist to simply tell someone suffering from this condition to eat breakfast because only an individual suffering from this condition can make that connection, so it's easier to just give drugs to someone suffering from this condition than it is to teach them how to think.

All mental health problems aren't this simple, of course, but they are all simply the physical consequences of mental errors and poor judgment, and not necessarily the mental errors and poor judgment of the person suffering the consequences. For example, the mental errors and poor judgments of the psychologists prescribing drugs to their patients rather than actually helping them solve their fucking mental health problems.