The medications I am referring to are mood and mind-altering medications… not medications needed for physical illnesses, such as cancer and viruses. I am referring to mood and mind stabilizing medications that are prescribed by physicians or psychiatric professionals.
I have never met a human being who was depressed that was not thinking about him or herself in some form or fashion.
Real alcoholism has to do with a spiritual malady. The emptiness in the soul causes such an extreme loneliness that it causes us to do just about anything to get relief. When it's not treated, we are depressed—to say the least—and when we treat it with anything other than a genuine awareness of God ("real alcoholism" being the lack of the awareness of God), then not only are we not going to get any permanent relief, but now we must pay the price for using the false idols (drugs, alcohol, sex, etc.) with which we have engaged. The prices cause us to be more depressed. So no matter what we do… other than to actually pursue a relationship with God… we are depressed.
The majority of people are not familiar with the extreme spiritual malady because most people have never experienced it. By its nature, this condition cannot be written in a book. Therefore, it cannot be studied or taught, but can only be treated by a genuine spiritual pursuit. In many cases, this type of professional treatment is restricted by laws caused by the separation of church and state.
As a result, these good hearted, well intended, very educated and caring people in the professional communities, faced with a client who is experiencing the spiritual malady, apply all of the knowledge and experience they have to diagnosing and prescribing medication or therapeutic activity to the suffering client. Here is where the problem begins. The majority of these professionals, much like the majority of the population, armed with little or no knowledge and/or little or no experience with the spiritual dilemma, therefore revert to the psychological or physical approach. This is the equivalent of innocent, but often fatal, misdiagnoses.
At this point, we not only have a spiritual condition continuing untreated, we have all of the effects of an unnecessary physical and psychological treatment to deal with. These effects are many and varied, but the most fatal one, in my opinion is what I seriously want to emphasize next, the "lack of spiritual action".
The remedy for a spiritual malady is consistent spiritual actions. Actions require the consent of the will, which require motivation. The problem with this motivation issue is that spiritual actions, due to their nature, are not logical. We are creatures of habit and our whole lives, at least in this society, we are taught logic. Our society falls seriously short in teaching spiritual principles to our children, particularly as they grow up. We even pass laws to prevent it. So now we have an adult who is dependent upon logic and it's not working. He has to completely surrender his old ideas before he will be able to consistently take spiritual actions that don't make sense. Now comes the big question… what would cause a somewhat normal human being, to completely surrender his old ideas and muster up motivation to take actions that he/she does not believe will work? Two things are required… 1) Extreme pain or the promise of extreme joy, and (2) another person to guide him/her, i.e. sponsor, spiritual mentor, caring person, etc.
"Number two" is, in my opinion, pretty much seems to be a stroke of luck… or possibly divine intervention. How many people do you know, who have experience with this flavor of spirituality, are truly consistently making themselves available to guide the sick and suffering? How many people do you know that are actually going out looking for the sick and suffering on a regular basis? Pretty sad, isn't it?
"Number one" is the kicker having to do with medications though. These anti-depressant type medications do a really good job at precisely what they were designed to do. What they were designed to do is mood stabilization. They are designed to suppress the extreme pains and the extreme joys… the only things that will motivate someone like me to take actions of the spiritual nature on a consistent basis.
I have never met anyone in AA that was required by law to be medicated. No one that I have met, who was medicated, chose to be on these medications without quite a bit of reflection and without trying some other things first. It was not a rash decision to go on them and it should not be a rash decision to come off. It was their personal decision to go on them and it should be their personal decision to come off.
Some professionals do a very good job at persuading clients to go on them. Some family members make it very difficult for the suffering family member if they refuse to go on them. Eventually the human body will develop a resistance to these medications. Combine that with that fact that we're treating the wrong problem anyway, so the problem doesn't really go away. Next, these good professionals and family members have to increase the doses or change to stronger medicines. Now we have to go on disability because we cannot get the motivation to work consistently. We cannot get new jobs because depressed people or zombie-style presentations do not do well in the interview process. Most disability programs require recommendations from medical professionals. Most of these medical professionals, not understanding the spiritual nature of what we're dealing with, will report the client is going against medical advice if he/she wants to come off the meds. Now the client cannot get his food and shelter paid for because they lose their disability payments because they are not following their doctor's directions. So there choice now becomes homelessness or living my life as a ward of the state in some form of zombie-style existence.
They still cannot muster the motivation required to take spiritual actions. They're done.
There are some exceptions, however they are far and few between. These spiritual principles are so powerful that even if you're a medicated zombie or mentally-retarded, if you take these spiritual actions you will get the spiritual results. So if the person can find motivation in any other way, that is wonderful and it should work to achieve some nice results, however the intensity of the joy will be suppressed by the medicine.
So now the question becomes, do these medications, in my opinion, have any useful value? The answer is "yes". The useful value is when these medicines are used for what they were designed to be used for. A temporary "jolt" or "pull me out of a funk"… maybe six months at the most. They were never designed to be a long-term therapeutic regiment.
I met a woman who was a PHD scientist at the University of Miami. She was actively involved in the conception of these medicines. When I discussed with her the way these medicines were being used in the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction, she started crying. She informed me that this was never the intent of these drugs. She was the person who told me what they were originally designed for.
Now that I have expressed my opinion on this pretty volatile subject, I also would like to emphasize that we are not licensed physicians and we should not practice unlicensed medicine.
I've watched people tell others to stop taking their medicines and I find this to be so dangerous, it should be criminal. We do not know, and we cannot believe what these people are telling us, what their history is and how long they've been on these medicines or the side effects of the medicines. Abruptly stopping can sometimes cause convulsions and death or injury.
On this same note, we don't tell people to go on medicines either. This is not our purpose and we are not licensed to give medical advice. Some of these people are extremely vulnerable and we need to tread very carefully.