I am thrilled that later today, Martha Roberts’ post on her own experience taking medication for mental illness, will run here. I first came across her post through a tweet from Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Pharma. It’s nice to know that he has not oversimplified the “bad pharma” argument into this meme: all drugs are inevitably bad for mental illness, overused, and inappropriate. Yes, there are huge problems with selective publishing of clinical trials data, withholding negative drug trials, and more. But mental health and mental illness are a lot more nuanced than a simple meme.
A lot more ink needs to be written about mental illnesses from the patient point of view, that show the real-life hurdles of people unfairly stigmatized, unemployed, or under-employed. I hope that this upcoming post (I’ll link to it here) is the first of many more.
If you have something to say about this, use the comments, or if you have a longer contribution, email me at patientpov “at” gmail dot com.