Comment by stiff

My layman's impression is that the current generation of drugs for serious psychiatric diseases does more to help family and society in general to live with the patient, than to help the patient itself. Our understanding of the brain is still very basic, so, even with the best intentions of the doctors, all the treatment often seems to do is to alleviate the most visible of the external symptoms, causing several new problems in the process, or simply making the patient apathetic, "solving" the problem for everyone but the patient. The dilemma described in the article is all the more difficult given that suicide is so common in many of those diseases, and not administering drugs (or using the wrong ones) might, on the other hand, cost the patient their life.