How much progress have we made in treatment

Question: How much progress have we made in treating mental health conditions?

Male Speaker: In terms of where we are for treatments for mental health issues we are actually pretty good and we've been pretty good for a long time. Mental health problems are in the unusual situation of having actually been hurt in terms of research. By having treatments that work reasonably well, antidepressants, antipsychotics, they are not the end-stage, they are not the optimal care for patients with these illnesses, but they work well enough and the result has been that we have tended to really study those medicines instead of trying to understand what's wrong with the people who have these disorders and use that information about what we call pathophysiology to design the next generation of treatments.

That's where we need to go. We need to have treatments that really are much closer to being cures/treatments that look like they give you full remission work in a far larger proportion of the population and they work much more quickly. We need to think about antidepressants that take six hours instead of six weeks.


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