Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?

[DebJ]

104. The article refers to every category of mental illness, does it not?

In your professional experience, what types of life issues cause mania? And what kind of talk therapy
is a solution, all by itself, without medication, when the manics brain, also being powered by OCD, can not, just
can NOT accept any input, because it is on hyperdrive? Perhaps for a few moments the person can be
talked down.........then, they go home.... a piece of toast burns, and they are off to the races again......

My son has suffered severely from bipolar since he was a child. We have been blessed
for most of his most recent years, but the past 30 days have been a pure hell of mania,
with explosive anger ever day from 3 pm until he goes to bed, when he goes to bed.
Talking alone is not going to fix this. If the proper med mix can not be found, and soon,
the consequences are going to be horrific. He is totally, absolutely, completely not himself,
and not in any control of his brain's functioning, for agonizing, horrifying hours every day.
(And yes he was in the hospital recently, just 20 days ago, but the situation is still pretty
dire).

He sees both a psychiatrist for meds and a psychologist for counselling; he needs BOTH.

I believe the poster to whom you were responding made their point very clear....to say
bluntly that there is no biological basis, no chemical imbalance that is aided by pharmaceuticals
is..........INSANE.

It is not an either/or. Human life, human biology, human psychology are so immensely complicated
by such an enormous number of factors, that we will never know them all. To bluntly state that meds
are unneccessary is criminal.

On Edit: also, there have been brain images, MRIs if I recall properly, that showed a pattern in the brains of people with bipolar disorder, where certain areas of the brain are structured differently. For example, the area detecting smell is often much larger.