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"Evaluations of Psychiatric Medication: Affirmations and Criticisms from the 1960s to 1980s in Japan and Abroad"

MATSUEDA Akiko

last update: 20151225


Evaluations of Psychiatric Medication: Affirmations and Criticisms from the 1960s to 1980s in Japan and Abroad

MATSUEDA Akiko
Abstract:
After the development of psychiatric medication in the 1950s, there were great expectations for the drugs, but in the 1970s and 1980s psychiatric medication came to be criticized in Japan and abroad. The purpose of this paper is to examine when and how psychiatric medicine came to be challenged.

This paper analyzes 1) the medical profession's own evaluation of psychiatric medication in the early 1960s, when medication became dominant as a psychiatric treatment choice, 2) commentaries on drugs in theoretical criticism of modern medical practice, 3) criticism of medications side effects and drug poisoning and 4) criticism of the use of drugs in hospitals.

When psychiatric drugs emerged, the medical profession evaluated them affirmatively and introduced psychiatric treatment. But, according to the criticisms of modern medicine made by the philosopher Ivan Illich and by the medical doctor Takahashi Kosei, medicine cannot cure illness and is also often harmful for the human bady. In addition, the journalist Okuma Kazuo claimed that drugs are over-prescribed in psychiatric hospitals, causing the patients' mental destruction. Given these criticisms, it is necessary, from the point of view of neuroethics, to deeply consider psychiatric medication?fs effect on the minds and personalities of people.


Keywords: psychiatric medicine, medicine therapy, medicine criticism, neuroethics
REV: 20151225
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