Who truly believes that medication for the mind is the way to solve trauma and emotional distress? I can tell you now, I sure don't. The use of medication is often the first port of call for people who are experiencing some form of distress, whether that be psychosis or depression caused by some form of trauma or emotional distress (Kinderman, 2019).
I personally have been prescribed antidepressant medications for the past 3 years of my life, prior to that, at the age of 6 I was advised to undergo talking therapy to help me understand and live with the upheaval in my family life. Personally, I feel as though the counselling I received in my childhood has definitely helped me more than any prescription medication ever has. The medication does not help me work though my experiences, instead it numbs the emotional upset inside me, and it is like putting a plaster on a grenade in the hopes that it will stop it exploding once the pin is pulled. This is most definitely not the case, well at least not in my own personal experience. I find that the use of medication makes me feel absolutely nothing, and then when even the simplest of things goes wrong it can be like a tornado has torn through my mind and taken me back to square one. How can this possibly be viewed as a form of treatment? It is not. It is simply delaying the inevitable.
Statistics show that there has been a massive increase in the prescription of antidepressant and antipsychotic medication in the past decade in the UK with around 1-6 adults having taken them at one point or another within their lifetime (Duncan and Davis, 2018). Why is it that this statistic is increasing but the use of therapy like counselling and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) seem to have had not had much of an increase, especially not in terms of NHS funding (Kinderman, 2019).
If services like that of counselling, CBT, art therapy and so on were more widely available would that have an impact on the amount of medication prescribed for mental health? I feel as though this would have a positive impact as people would be given more of an opportunity to work through their traumas and emotional distress to help them come to terms with the things that have happened in their life (Lynch, 2019). As well as this it also has the possibility of giving an individual someone that they could confide in without fear of judgement as this is often something that may seem small but can assist someone’s recovery to no end.