Posted by SLS on February 23, 2014, at 9:33:16 [reposted on February 24, 2014, at 16:51:41 | original URL]
In reply to Re: THE root cause of TRD is, posted by baseball55 on February 22, 2014, at 19:10:34
> My legislators (In MA) are most all endorsed by NAMI, want government funding for science and health. They also all want restrictions on gun sales. Would you vote for them?
:-)
LostBoy,
I am mostly offended that someone should blame the mentally ill electorate for the lack of extant knowledge that is to be "THE" root cause of TRD. Was this true 100 years ago before MAOIs appeared by accident? No, of course not. From what I read on the Internet, research is proceeding at a fevered pace. It occurs to me that more money might not have quickened the pace of discovery over the last 55 years. There are still sticking points as the evolution of medical technology to perform experiments simply did not exist, and today dictates the rate of discovery.
Okay. I vote. Now what? Severely depressed people have difficulty getting out of bed. Now what? Severely depressed people don't read the newspaper on a daily basis in order to stay current. Now what? The newspaper often does not announce the position canditate's takes on spending more money on the research of mental illness. Now what? Sometimes, no candidate has in their stated platform an opinion on mental illness. Now what?
Tell me who to vote for. I'll do it!
The answer is not so much how to vote, but to produce canditates to vote for.
It is unfortunate that politics should so often dictate the behaviors of politicians. In my state, a prospective candidate for governor who had a family member with severe depression was the ideal person to advocate for the mentally ill. He capitulated to the candidate who had far more money to campaign with. In this case, I doubt write-in votes would have helped.
Grass-roots campaigns to write massive numbers of letters to incumbents and potential candidates should help produce sympathetic and activist candidates to vote for. Perhaps this is already being done. NAMI and DBSA have done this for years. Now what? I once sent a document that I wrote to EVERY state legislator in my state and managed to get it physically placed into the hands of the governor. I was advocating for Medicaid recipients who were being ejected from the partial hospitalization system. Within two months, a change in state Medicaid regulations allowed for the continued care of the mentally ill in these programs beyond the former two year limit. Did my letter writing campaign help to produce substantive change? I don't know. Probably, according to the facilitator of a local PH program that shoved my letter in the governor's hands. Bully for me. Now what?
How about severely anergic depressives with cognitive slowing? Most cannot pull off what I did. In other words, severely mentally ill people can rarely advocate for themselves. Now what? Is the failure of them to vote at the root of their TRD?
I don't know who to vote for. Maybe a democrat by default?
I have voted in the past. I remain ill. Now what?
Am I a defeatist?
I don't think it is productive to blame the victim for the absence of an effective treatment. I doubt you set out to assert such an opinion, but this is how I took it.
- Scott
Some see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1061206
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20120327/msgs/1061220.html