陳書耘
The World Health Organization
calculated that by the year 2020, depression will be the greatest burden
of ill-health for people in the developing world, and by then severe
depression will be the second leading cause of death and disability.
But psychologists have
come to realize that
some mentally-ill patients may be receiving inappropriate treatment
because they have been diagnosed in 「general terms」, such as manic
depression.
In accordance with a recent
research, some anti-depressant herbs may harm sight. And even Prozac
and drugs like it could make healthy people with no history of mental
illness feel suicidal. If those relatively healthy people are diagnosed
as manic depressive and prescribed these antidepressants, the
side-effects will do them great harm.
Experts say that many
doctors may be too quick to label patients who show symptoms of mental
illness. Doctors fail to take
account of individual differences in
patients』 lifestyles and backgrounds,
so
many patients are either
incorrectly diagnosed or do not get the right treatment.
Such practices may explain
the situation why the number of depression patients are increasing
drastically.
Mental illness is much more
complicated than physical disease. Doctors should be more scrupulous
when they handle mental illnesses instead of being cursory and
diagnosing with prejudice. Although the World Health Organization has
pointed out that 1 in 5 manic depressives will commit suicide without
proper treatment; still, doctors need to make sure that the people they
give these pills to are going to benefit from the medication. Besides,
diagnosis is sketchy shorthand. It has serious weaknesses and using a
single term for a large number of people is, perhaps, a little bit
slipshod. Medications have very large and unpleasant side-effects and
they don't work for everybody. If doctors continue such superficial way
of diagnoses, the consequences will be unimaginable.