Introduction

There was a time when mines in the United States produced ores to go into blast furnaces to produce steel to go to factories that produced cars, radios, taosters, televisions, or other things we could buy at the hardware sotre or corner store. Now, instead of huge factories rising to the sky and puffing smoke from their funrnace making steel, we have huge medical centers rising above the hills, producing steam for their hearing systmes to warm their cliniscs where medical care is provided. There is a lot of momentum to this. There are treatments for all illnesses, and diagnoses to go with all treatments that can be billed to someone, and even though 50 million poeple in thi scountry currenly have no “official” access to health care, most of them—and the rest of us who have some sort of health insurance—still find a way to get pills from somewhere. Sometimes it seems like in America today the gross natinal product has become medical care: it is as if the purpose of our exisitence is to be patients so that perhaps we can help the economy recover. Thuthfully, we are all consumers of healtcare products cradle to grave.

But what if we don’t want to be patients (and most of us really don’t want to be paitents)? More…

Optimizing Medication in the Service of Recovery: Is There a Path for Reducing Over-Utilization of Psychiatric Medications? By Neil Falk, Daniel B. Fisher, and Will Hall (PDF, 3.09MB, 19 pages)