That was extremely interesting, from how arbitrary a diagnosis of mental illness can be because the pharma companies have designed the tests to make them profits by handing out the pills, to the news that massive internet companies like Google and Facebook are selling your personal information to them to better place you on their pills. Loads more to it, including some berk who pops loads of pills because he believes they make him some kind of enhanced Superman. At least he says he's happy.
I wish I could relocate a particular very interesting podcast, possibly also on YouTube, by a self-styled 'whistleblower' psychiatrist from the US. In brief, his concerns were precisely about the way drugs for the most infamous psychotic conditions, aka 'the family of schizophrenias', to use the latest jargon, are prescribed.
His analysis went something along the lines of: anyone choosing psychiatric medicine as their career path is considered a bit second-rate by their medical school colleagues, hence once established in practice they are very anxious to be seen as 'proper doctors' with a serious scientific approach - diagnosing and treating real diseases with expertly hand-picked drugs to tweak this and that neurotransmitter. But the foundations of this scientific certainty are a bit shaky: schizophrenia, for example, has always been explained as a chemical imbalance in the brain - at one time dopamine was announced to be the culprit...then when the pharmaceutical companies almost accidentaly came up with a load of drugs related to noradrenaline, suddenly
that was the key to the imbalances - and the new pills were dished out accordingly - with some success, but no convincing explanation thereof. He also contended that the 'chemical imbalance' hypothesis has never been tested: the only way would be to analyse the cerebrospinal fluid of patients, yet such a study has never been undertaken (probably not a very pleasant procedure). Blood or urine tests etc. are of no use in this case.
I've discussed his (sorry, can't even remember the chap's name) opinions with people I know who are involved in mental health services, both in the NHS and privately and they were not in the least hostile to his findings - rather approving in fact.
The upshot is that the drugs do seem to help a lot of patients suffering psychotic episodes (although some just get better by themselves, for which there is no medical explanation), but for psysicians to pretend that they
really know what is going on is a bit fraudulent. If they'd just tell patients that such-and-such drug has helped people struggling with the same problems and is therefore worth a try that would be a more honest approach.