Do you think psychological drugs help or harm

On one hand, to peg the whole entire array of psyche drugs used in I don't know how many millions of cases out there as either harmful or not requires heavy duty lack and white thinking that preemptively shuts out nearly all all drug by drug and case by case observation and other inquiry.

On the other hand, if you look at the stories of certain drugs, patterns begin to emerge and they tell us or suggest a lot that should really concern us and raise questions.

For example, U.S. school systems have been commonly and heavily involved in pushing, yes, pushing, Ritalin on school children. In a lot of cases, parents are bullied into it, essentially. When you look at that phenomenon on a national level, certain patterns jump out at you and tell of fads that have heavy handed political and pharmaceutical corporate fingerprints all over them. Drug pushing, children and corporatism are a very questionable mix and are especially ironic during the current War on Drugs era. Not only that but consider that ADHD hasn't had a truly definitive diagnosis. True, we have a number of conditions out there that don't really have a definitive diagnosis and the reasons for that are another set of deep topics, but that means a lot of kids can get diagnosed with ADHD but may be suffering from other things like abuse, a variety of stress issues and/or poor parenting. The point is that the effects of other things can mimic ADHD to a truly amazing degree. It doesn't mean all kids with ADHD don't actually have ADHD but it's probably prudent to question if way too many kids subject other issues are getting mistakenly diagnosed with ADHD when they shouldn't be? But school systems push for Ritalin to make children manageable despite the fact that that could be considered not just bullying committed against parents but a widespread practice of chemical restraint (which is using chemicals to restrain or make more manageable)? We really should ask a lot of questions like that, especially when it's pointed out that the U.S. consumes something like 75% of the world's Ritalin, much of that by school children (or their pill chucking parents/siblings who "borrow" a little). Also, Ritalin pretty much acts like coke on the brain. So, is Ritalin's phenomenal financial success in the very political corporate pharmaceutical and school environments harmful or not? Even if it isn't in particular cases, in a lot of ways it is. It's very troubling.

On the other hand, a lot of drugs are amazingly instrumental in improving the quality of life and really, really should be taken.

I like that we had the third option here but sometimes we should question at levels beyond the patient team level. There often can be so many things to consider -- politics, diet, corporatism, culture that pushes pharmaceutical drugs (often in questionable ways), larger patterns that perhaps tell of questionable fads, stress management, talk therapy and the list goes on and on and on.

The balance between when we should question,what we should question and when we should leave things up to the patient's doctor or team is going to vary from case to case, drug to drug, situation to situation and even country to country.