Chato Stewart is a cartoonist and a mental health advocate. His goal and mission is to use humor as a positive tool to cope with the serious and debilitating effects of mental illness. His cartoons are drawn from his personal experience of living with Bipolar Disorder. The topic of this cartoon is the use of prescriptions by psychiatrists. In this cartoon there is a patient sitting down with his psychiatrist who is holding his patient’s medical records. The psychiatrist then asks his patient if the new combination of drugs is helping with his depression. The patient then states the side effects he’s feeling from the drugs that have been prescribed to him. The psychiatrist then says that the drugs are working since the patient never mentioned …show more content…
The job description of a psychiatrist is that they are medical doctors who diagnose and treat mental illnesses. They often employ individual or group therapy to gain insight into a patient’s past and find coping methods to help patients address their own problems. Unlike psychologist, psychiatrists are allowed to give out prescriptions. With that power of having the ability to give out potent medications also come corruption. How do the most popular psychoactive drugs get out to the public? By not only corrupt psychiatrist but also from other doctors that are licensed to give out prescriptions. Drugs are prescribed for a wide range of reasons from behavioral issues to anxiety and pain. According to IMS Health, the top three most prescribed drugs by psychiatrists in 2013 were Zanax with 48,465,000 prescriptions, Zoloft with 41,416,000 and Celexa with 39,445,000 (2014). Those drugs are typically used for anxiety and …show more content…
It’s so easy now a days to just give a prescription for something that will temporarily hide the psychological issue rather than putting in a lot of time to get to the bottom of the problem and then finding the best way to solve the problem. In 1999 L. R Mosher did an experiment on people that were schizophrenic. Schizophrenic patients were put in a house and were treated with compassion no drugs were involved. The results showed that compassion worked just as well as the drugs (Mosher). This shows that in some cases drugs aren’t necessary. Naysayers such as F.K Goodwin believes that drugs have improved millions of lives and when patients take prescribed drugs it makes it easier for psychosocial intervention to work (1999). And to that I say at what cost? There are drugs being produced that have been shown to not have a significant difference from the placebo 30- 40% of the time (Fisher & Greenberg 1995). There are antidepressants being given to kids that end up making them feel more suicidal (Vedantam 2004). Naysayers might also say that there are illnesses out there that absolutely require medication as the solution, and I agree with that statement. People of all ages can have or develop a mental illness, so if you just so happen to have or develop one wouldn’t you like to go about treatment in