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Causes of Psychosis Need to be Found
and Treated
Dan Stradford, President and founder, AlternativeMentalHealth.com
Published March 20, 2002, Chicago Tribune
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Los Angeles -- Few can find true sympathy for Andrea
Yates. A Texas jury, perhaps understandably, could not forgive her.
The only thing more maddening than her act is the question of why she did
it. And could it have been prevented?
The medical community clearly states it does not know what causes
postpartum depression or psychosis. The treatment of choice is
psychotropic drugs. Because such medication only masks symptoms, this
means that the actual physical cause of this disturbed mental state nearly
always remains untreated.
Whatever malfunction inside the body of Yates caused her insanity, a
physical change she experienced long before the murders, it remained wrong
with her right up to the final breath of the last drowned child and likely
continued to wreak havoc with her as her guilty verdict was read.
Added to the unknown cause was the use of psychotropic drugs, which can
have a side effect of violent impulses.
While a judicious use of psychotropics may certainly be necessary in some
cases, to pretend that the patient has then been treated is simply false.
The undiscovered cause remains and continues to impact the drugged woman.
Any honest doctor knows this.
Postpartum women have been through a horrific time, exhausted from the
birth, hormones out of whack, nutrients drained from the body, sleep
deprivation, sometimes low thyroid conditions flare. Likely physical
culprits abound.
Yet the physical cause of the problem is rarely found and commonly not
even looked for with any real zeal. Nutritional abnormalities are hardly
considered. Additionally, a number of tests and treatments exist that,
often, only alternative doctors (and almost no psychiatrists) use.
Yates received standard treatment for postpartum depression. The results
should raise public concern.
Is she responsible for killing her babies? The jury said yes; some experts
think not. But for sure, if she would have been medically tested and
prodded until the physical cause of her symptoms was found and really
treated, besides drugging her, those babies could very well still be with
us.
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