Do you believe psychiatry/psyc. provide people with effective solutions?

Question:

Now let me start out by saying I began going to a therapist and psychiatrist about 6 months ago. I was just out of college and didn't have a job. The situation made me feel depressed and anxious. Not surprisingly, they said I have depression/anxiety. However, talking to my therapist and the medications prescribed by the psychiatrist never made me feel noticably better. I do feel better now because I was offered a great job. But I'm having serious doubts about the effectiveness of the psychs at least for me.

Here are some interesting facts: There is no objective medical test to determine if someone has a mental illness, no blood test, no x-ray test, just talking. It's highly subjective. Next, psychiatric diagnoses are taken from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses (DSM) whose criteria are vague. They are in fact arrived to by consensus so coming up with mental illnesses is a virtual parlor game of naming "symptoms" and voting them "diseases."

Answers:
people who are more receptive to a therapist will be helped i am not one of those people i can talk to someone all i want but the choice to make changes had to be mine and i knew that

as for the medicine it made me feel dead inside limiting someones emotions with pharmaceuticals is unnatural and messes with a person they made me worse and even worse when i stopped taking them. i think no medicine for the most part is the best thing

Other Answers:
I don't believe in shrinks

No, absolutely not.
http://www.sntp.net/

Depression in itself is vague. What you had seems to be the blues more than depression. Your idea of going to see a psychiatrist/psychologist probably came about as a result of feeling helpless.
Alot of emphasis these days is being placed around making people with the slightest problems go see a mental health specialist and the specialists' need to find a solution makes them prescribe medications, offer help, etc.
There are though, people with problems that require immediate attention and intervention of a mental health specialist to sway them away from harming themselves and/or others. In that sense, psychiatry and psychology offer immense help to the individual and society as a whole.
But you are absolutely right in your assessment that the guideliness by which psychiatrists diagnose patients (most psychologists don't believe in a diagnosis) are vague at best. So when a person presents himself with the blues, an incompetent doctor could well prescribe him a set of medications in a desperate attempt to help them even though they do not need any help but time. This in turn would lead to a worsening of symptoms and much more serious interventions, which could have easily been avoided by a small pep talk.

Yes I agree that the tests need to improve as far as objective medical tests for major depressive disorder. However, chances are pretty good that you feel pretty lousy if you answer yes to most of the depression questions given by therapists. A self assesment is a good one because no one knows how you feel but you. Major life changes can also lead to depressive episodes and another test is usually given (by a good psy) to see how many major life changes have happened in the last 6 months to a year. The therapist can then determine if it is a one time thing due to life change or if it an internal thing due to a chemical or hormonal inbalance.

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Do you believe psychiatry/psyc. provide people with effective solutions?

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