why are drug companies unable to find psychoactive drugs that cure specific mental illnesses?
Why do you think that despite billions of dollors in investment, drug companies are unable to find “magic bullet” psychoactive drugs that cure specific mental illnesses, with 100% success?
Focus on the biological/physiological aspects of the problem, not the social and economic aspects
onlymatch4u said,
Wrote on August 31, 2010 @ 9:06 am
For a drug company to invest a lot of money in developing a drug, they need to know that it is going to “TREAT A SYMPTOM” not cure the problem. There is no money in curing illness for drug companies. The next thing is to realize most of these kinds of problems are due to nutritional deficiencies, to some very tiny extent, genetic problems, and then to problems associated with trauma.
Drug companies do NOT want to cure mental illness. That’s financial suicide for them. The biggest problem we have with drug companies is that any research they do has to be tied to a financial gain or they simply will not do it. Treating symptoms is where the money is to be made.
good luck to you
El said,
Wrote on August 31, 2010 @ 9:41 am
In simple terms, nobody’s really too sure of the biochemical & physiological origins of mental illnesses. There’s a lot of theories & models about mental illness but nothing that’s a 100% definite. Sure, there’s pills & potions which help a lot of people, but they are all hit & miss too – what works for one person, doesn’t necessarily work for another. Even the method by which certain drugs work isn’t known for sure. It’s just all a huge grey area with nothing written in stone.
Kate said,
Wrote on August 31, 2010 @ 10:37 am
You said to “focus on the biological/physiological aspects of the problem, not the social and economic aspects” but by doing so, you ignore half of what mental illness is. You CAN’T look at mental illness as just something biological or physiological, because it’s not, it’s extremely complex. Mental illnesses are often so much more complex than physical ones for that very reason – you don’t get diabetes from early childhood trauma, but you could develop a host of mental illnesses because of trauma in childhood.
But then why do some people who are traumatized as children go on to develop mental illness, while others end up being fine? There’s obviously something biological going on that predisposes people to mental illness, but then something in the environment also has to trigger it. (This is called the diathesis-stress model, which you can Google at your leisure.) Because the origins of mental illness are so complex and varied, the treatment has to be as well.
Even a mental illness like bipolar disorder, which is considered to be among the most genetically influenced, only has a heritability of 0.6 to 0.8 in twin studies (you can also Google heritability and twin studies at said leisure). That means only 36 to 64% of the basis of bipolar disorder can be traced to biology, depending on the study sample… the rest of it is influenced by other myriad factors such as personality, environment, the person’s cognitive patterns and behaviors, the weather (literally), ad nauseum. So many things are involved that it is IMPOSSIBLE to say, “This is the cause, so let’s make a pill to fix the problem.”
There are many drugs out there that are very good at treating the symptoms of mental illness, but they cannot cure it, because there are too many tangled factors involved. In fact, many people suffer unnecessarily even while medicated because they don’t treat their illness as a whole, complex disease, they only take a pill and hope for the best. The majority of patients with mental illness will respond best to a complete treatment that involves medication, therapy, and lifestyle changes.
Mental illness is not something you can take a pill or a shot for, it’s not something you can vaccinate against, and it’s not something we will be able to easily pinpoint on the human genome in our lives, or even our children’s lives most likely. There are too many non-biological factors to consider… looking at mental illness as JUST a biological disorder is asinine at best.
Dhiren Patel said,
Wrote on August 31, 2010 @ 11:33 am
Kate is right. The complexity and variables involved in a mental illness are quite expansive. Even in the case of mental illnesses that are “treatable”, the results are not guaranteed and the results are much better when counseling and lifestyle changes are involved, due to all the variables that affect mental illness. Not to mention that even approved behavioral drugs are not 100% effective, can cause the opposite of the expected effects, and can cause some other symptoms that require further drugs to resolve.