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kmanning's picture

the ethics of pharmacology

Submitted by kmanning on Sun, 09/14/2008 - 1:03pm.
Many things struck me in "The bipolar puzzle," but one of the most troubling was the following quote about bi-polar disorder: "The tricky part, diagnostically, is that out of those seven symptoms, three — distractibility, activity increase and talkativeness — are also symptoms of A.D.H.D. Which means that a severely irritable child who has A.D.H.D. could be, theoretically, only one symptom away from a bipolar diagnosis."

This article really brings to the forefront many of the issues involved in trying to treat mental illness pharmacologically, while the definition of many mental illnesses is still a mixture of both scientific and non-scientific symptoms. If our treatment plans are scientific but our definition of illness is still in part behavioral - and thus influenced by many non-scientifically quantifiable factors - are we using people - and in many cases children - as lab rats?

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