A short excerpt from a YouTube interview (FMU December part 2 featuring Dr. Andrew Scull) in which the speaker cautions that psychiatric drugs have important limits: they often only control symptoms, can carry severe side effects, and are not curative. The speaker warns against losing perspective and becoming overly enthusiastic about prevailing treatment trends.
It is important to understand with psychiatric drugs, their limits. And we often forget, unless we're on the sharp end of these things, that these drugs can, in many instances, carry severe side effects along with them. There are many patients who fail to respond to the drugs. And even for those who do, what they do is control symptoms. And I don't mean to minimize that. That's an important accomplishment. But they certainly are not a psychiatric penicillin. They don't make any of these conditions go away. One of the things that troubles me about the way in which we seem to lurch from one extreme to another is that we lose perspective and we get overly enthusiastic about whatever the fat of the day is. And that's certainly a concern I would have in the present climate.
