I read through all the letters and only saw one person who got the point of the letter-writers who had a problem with the headline of the story--that was BrianNeary.

What everyone else is ignoring is the part of the story where her son is hospitalized and given different therapies which helped him to almost overnight become better. Why in the title of the story are those therapies called "drugs" but in the part of the story where psychotropic meds heal her son are they referred to as "therapies"?

This infuriated me--please--all of you just think about that for a moment...the title screams how psychotropic drugs are BAD!!! yet at the end of the story the drugs which helped make her son better are not even given names!!!

because he had that underlying condition everyone is ready to ignore the fact that he was depressed----he did have a mental illness!!! those drugs would have helped him if not for the underlying condition, just like they help so many others!

that underlying condition combined with the doctors unwillingness to dig a little deeper were to blame for her sons problems. But drugs helped him...they did

I would rather live in todays world with all of these medications which can help me lead a normal life than live at any other time and be confined to an institution as well as be marginalized by society.

I am someone who has a severe mental illness yet I can take part in society, raise my children, love my spouse and take my pills everyday. Many of you are forgetting what it was like just fifty years ago for those suffering with mental illness.

These drugs are a God-send for so many people...

Ann,

Thanks SO MUCH for sharing this poignant story about your son. I am a parent of a child who is a bit younger than yours and dealing with some of the same issues. I very much admire your wisdom, courage, and bravery in finding the help your son needed because as we all know the path is often not clear at all, and at times seems invisible. I have had to learn to pick and choose what information might be helpful and to let go of the other stuff and to be willing to make mistakes and that is SO HARD when you are dealing with another person's life and that person is your child under the age of 18. I have found through the years that I need to trust MYSELF the most at times even when I am dealing with professionals whose livelihoods it is to help people. Because the painful reality there is that it is a puzzle and NO ONE PERSON has all the answers or knows where the pieces are. But I have also found, as you have as evidenced in your piece, that the more I share our journey with others, the more ideas, potential leads, and support I find. And along the way I think I have also helped others. And ANYTIME we can work to dispell the stigma attatched to these issues we are dealing with, it is to the greater good of our world.

Thank you for your work and I wish all the best for your son and your family.

Namaste'.

Big Cat

The drug companies must love me because I take three atypicals (Seroquel, Abilify, and Lamictal) and I'm doing very well. I feel I'm lucky that they work for me without the heavy side effects others experience and that I have insurance to pay for them ( All told these and a couple of other meds would cost me $1200 per month retail).

I am glad that the medications you use are of help to you. However, that the medications you use are of help to you is not relevant to Salon's/the author's (?) choice of a heading for the article.

I will say again: The heading should serve two purposes. It should get the reader's attention. I believe the heading accomplishes that purpose. Second, it should correctly summarize the the article.

Let us look at the article itself and not what we want to read into it. The article, which I emphasize is one person's experience and not a news story, is about the author's attempts to help her son and her feelings that, through quite an ordeal, he was misprescribed. One can argue he was misprescribed because he was misdiagnosed, but that does not refute the fact that medical professionals are sometimes influenced by pharmaceutical companies' desires to sell their product. Bauer points this out.

Bauer also clearly feels that these prescriptions did her son a great deal of harm. Nowhere does she argue that the same prescriptions may not do other people a great deal good. Furthermore, Bauer also clearly feels that the prescriptions mentioned caused her son to act crazy. She spends a substantial chunk of the article talking about how difficult it was to see him act in this manner. Surely, this is understandable.

Through internet research she manages to contact a doctor who says that her son can be helped. Eventually, he is helped by therapies not specified.

NOT SPECIFIED.

We, as readers, do not know what those therapies were. We, as readers, can only speculate. Those who don't like drugs may assume that walks in the park or talk therapy helped him. Those who do like drugs may assume that he was given more drugs to help him ease off the drugs that were contraindicated for him underlying condition.

Here is my own assumption: I assume that he was given some sort of drugs to ease him off the medications he was taking to return him to his previous stability. Autism -- any any part of the autistic spectrum -- is not insanity. It may be difficult to deal with, but in no legal or medical sense is it insanity.

I would argue that because methadone is sometimes used to ease people from heroin addiction does not mean that heroin was not bad for the person taking it. Neither does it mean that methadone is good. Methadone is only serving auseful purpose in that circumstance.

There seems to be much desire here do characterize psych drugs as either good or bad. In fact, they are either useful or not, depending upon the use to which they are put. Their side effects are either acceptable or not, depending upon the personal experience of the person taking them. My opinion is that only on very rare occasions should someone else be making that judgment of side effect acceptability for someone else. That is why doctors who do not listen to their patients about side effects and simply see complaints about side effects as the generic whine of yet another "other" rather than as the legitmate complaint of a real person with real rights are nothing but shit-headed medical abusers.

If you care to read back through this thread, you can read about my own experiences with SSRI antidepressants and all the harm they caused me. I constantly complained about their efficacy and their side effects for me and my complaints were constantly dismissed. In the interval, my diagnosis was upped to justify upping my dosage or tinkering with my prescription to put me on yet another damaging SSRI. I went from being "stressed" to being "depressed" to having "major depression" to "bipolar" to "schizoaffective." That was just what the psychiatrists said. The counselors labeled me dysthymic, PTSD, and "non-spiritual." My single psychologist -- who also had some sense -- said maybe, just maybe I was cyclothymic, but I certainly was not bipolar or schizoaffective. She also said, "But I am not going to put that in writing because you will lose your SSRI and you need that money coming in. Boy did I! Just try living on $580 a month. Oh yes, one diagnosis she got absolutely correct. I am most certainly and alway have been ADD.

I won't bore anyone with the details of how I finally clawed my way out of that hole but they do involve a nice tidy inheritance. If not for that, I would probably be homeless now, medically labeled with all those false diagnoses. I am still unable to secure private insurance.

If readers don't think a diagnosis of a psychological illness can cost them big time they are living in fairy tale land.

Three years later, I know that I have significant Seasonal Affective Disorder. I self-treat with a light box, outdoor exercise and a few supplements. I never think of killing myself anymore.

Please understand that everyone's story is different. Everyone is entitled to tell his or her own story. It is best not to denigrate people when they tell their own story. We should be grateful to Bauer for telling her story. I know I am.

I believe the persistent criticisms o the heading of Bauer's article is less about the heading and more about people's discomfort in attacking what is truly a powerful story. The article informs but it also is anecdotal. It is so much easier to zero in on the headline.

Why should we not denigrate people telling their honest stories (from their own viewpoints)? Because we have no authority from which do so. We never walked in their shoes. We can only add our own stories, told from our own perspectives and necessarily anecdotal. No one's story here qualifies as scientific evidence and no one has cornered absolute truth.