Why Psychiatry and the Use of Psychiatric Medication is Not Indicative of Weakness or Failure
By Luke Hamilton, DNP, PMHNP-BC
As a psych provider, I continue to find that many of my clients deal with perceptions of stigma surrounding psychiatric treatment and the use of psychotropic medications for mental, behavioral, or emotional health symptoms. This can often come by way of family, friends, or our communities signaling disapproval of meds being used for this purpose, instead favoring a "just snap out of it" or "toughen up" mentality.
I think this is one of the more damaging stigmas that I encounter working in mental health these days. Too often my clients get stuck remaining unwell because they have internalized the notion that taking psychotropic medication is equivalent to being weaker than those around them, that it means they are having to resort to an extra tool/accommodation in life that their peers do not.
This is where I still see a clear divide in attitudes towards treatment for “medical” needs vs. psychiatric needs. I use the example of a type-one diabetic to illustrate how silly this is. I doubt many of us would look at type-one diabetics—unable to naturally produce the insulin their body requires to process incoming sugars—and view their need to administer supplemental insulin as a moral failure. And yet we can still cling to the notion that somehow the depressed person is any more capable of willing themselves out of depression than the diabetic is capable of willing their pancreas into magically producing that insulin again.
While so much of the brain remains a mystery, we know that depressed, anxious, bipolar, etc. brains—brains with psychiatric illness—are different from other brains. They differ both structurally and neurochemically, much as there are clear differences between how a diabetic and non-diabetic pancreas looks and functions. While this does not equate to psych meds always being a definitive solution to our mental, emotional, and behavioral struggles, it is critical that we allow these meds a place to be valid and valuable tools we can use on the path towards recovery while free of negative judgment from self or others.
Luke Hamilton, DNP, PMHNP-BC
Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner