How can you research a mental illness diagnosis and treatment?

The best search engine for researching the medical science behind treating a psychiatric illness is Google Scholar. Just search for Google Scholar and then type in what you want to know about. You can search a diagnosis and then put in the concern you want to know more about. It might be post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or bipolar disorder. What will come up is a list of often hundreds of studies.

But not all studies are created equal. Some scientific journals are not very scientific. If a study does not compare a treatment with a placebo, then it may not be a valid study. You can prove just about anything if you don’t compare it to a placebo. How? Just by luck, 6 out of 10 people getting a medicine might get better with their anxiety, just by chance. This happens all the time. Let’s say it happens in one out of 20 studies. Then just do 40 studies, publish the two studies that say your medicine works, and leave out the 38 studies that said it didn’t work! Looks good! Let the money roll in for a quack traditional or alternative medicine or treatment! That’s why we have consumer protection laws and consumer protection agencies, like the Food and Drug Administration. Why isn’t this reality of how to fool the consumer–taught in high school, so young people could be aware of all the deception out there? You got me. So, if a medicine, or even an herbal medicine is not compared with a placebo (taking some thing that doesn’t do anything), move onto the next study. This study isn’t valid. It doesn’t evaluate the effect of the placebo response and compare it with the effect of the medicine. There are valid studies that don’t look at the placebo response, however, such as studies that look back at past results (retrospective) or longitudinal studies (looking forward at results for a group), however these alone are not enough to show a medication has a good effect on an illness.

You can keep notes of what you’re looking up, with references to specific journal, article titles, and review them with your therapist or psychiatrist. I’ve had patients ask me what I thought about a certain article and I’ve looked it up and sometimes it’s changed my view on certain things. I used to think psilocybin mushrooms had no medical value, but then studies came out showing they do, when used in a certain manner. Marijuana is another example.

Providers have often seen thousands of patients for 10 or 20 years, and can provide an opinion on if something works based on their experience, and the collected experience of thousands of years of experience among their patients. There are always new medicines or new herbal medicines with lofty claims being made that never pan out. In the past, there were claims that Topamax helped with bipolar, and that was ruled out. Also, there were claims that omega-3 fatty acids and fish oil capsules helped improve people’s mood and mental health in general, but this was shown to be false. Omega-3, fatty acids in seafood are very helpful for one’s heart and blood vessels, which helps the brain indirectly. The anti-depressant trazodone is mostly used for sleep. But in 25 years, I’ve only had one or two people say it helped their depression. It should be called a sedative, but it’s got the label antidepressant from studies done years ago. Every five or 10 years a new medicine comes along with the claim that it helps an antidepressant to work. Half the time it never pans out in practical clinical experience that doctor see with their patients. And half the time it does work out. The only way you’ll know is by asking the doctor, that’s one reason you go to doctors is they have all this experience, both from reading scientific articles, but also from what patients tell them are their experience.

So it’s good to research treatment options. Google scholar is one source, Google is another, and you can go to libraries, but you’ll get most of what you need on Google scholar. The National Institute of Health (NIH) website provides articles that are not influenced by drug companies. I would say that’s a good place to start. You can search National Institute of Health and then in the search bar for that website, lookup whatever terms you want, such as depression treatment options.

In the 1990s, it was not unusual for people to spend 10 or 15 minutes looking up a medicine or a treatment option. Now I often hear of people spending an hour or two or even much more, researching treatment options.

A common mistake is to believe whatever you see on the Internet. There’s lots of arm chair quarterbacks out there who are more than happy to tell you what to do to take care of your mental health. Many are unqualified. But they can write well. On the other hand, they might be pushing their biases for or against traditional medicine, or maybe they have a certain philosophy that they’re not telling you about but then that’s why they’re going to urge you to only consider, for instance, using herbal therapy to heal your cancer. There’s lots of quacks out there. They like the attention they get and will say anything to get more views and likes. Beware out there!

It can actually be pretty entertaining seeing all the quacks out there. An entertaining website about this is quackwatch.com. They list the false medical claims of different groups and why they are false.