That tends to be a conventional patient’s view of doctors.

     It’s not without reason, of course. Doctors have a four year college degree, three to four more years of medical school, internship practice, ongoing education in their medical field, and years of experience with patients.

     They should know more than you do.

     However, that does not mean you have to surrender your personal integrity to them for making a decision about your own health…physical or mental.

     Informed consent laws rose from the mistreatment of four women in the early twentieth century in America and were refined further through the Nuremberg Trials after WWII which prosecuted Nazi doctors and psychiatrists for their enforced experimentation on concentration camp victims.

     Today they are your ethical and legal protection from making ill-advised decisions about your own health. A doctor – not a physician’s assistant, or technician, or office staff – is required to fully disclose all aspects of the proposed treatment. That means he or she has to tell you the evidence for your diagnosis, the expected result of his proposed treatment, the expected result of any alternative treatment, and the consequences of you doing nothing at all to treat your condition.

     With strictly physical conditions, informed consent works like a charm. That diagnosis is based on the results of some physical assessment – blood tests, MRI’s, CAT scans, etc. – which reveal a verifiable physical condition, and then the patient is told about the recommended treatment, the alternative treatments, and no treatment.

     With mental conditions, however, there is no charm. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is the psychiatrist’s bible for “mental illness” and lists three hundred mental or emotional disorders. At least that’s what they call them. In fact, they are actually only a description of observed symptoms as they have been voted on by a panel of psychiatrists for inclusion in the DSM.

     There is no laboratory test that can be given to find a physical cause for these symptoms. There is no such thing as a detectable “chemical imbalance.”

     So the first step of the informed consent process for the diagnosis of a mental condition cannot come from a verifiable fact that is the result of a laboratory test. Therefore that “diagnosis” is only an opinion. And today that opinion most often comes from your general practitioner. Eighty percent of all prescriptions for antidepressants come from regular doctors, not from psychiatrists. They may be experts about the body, but they are not experts about the mind.

     You may know more than they do about your own mind…or at least as much. If you are prescribed an antidepressant or psychotropic drug, informed consent law requires that you be told about all of the “side effects” of that prescribed antidepressant or psychotropic drug, the alternative treatments that are available, and the consequences of doing nothing.

     When you’re sad after a relationship break-up or the death of a favorite pet, yes, it hurts. And yes a Xanax might numb you sufficiently to not feel the pain. But as you know yourself from your own past experience, that emotional stress from the loss does often go away after awhile all by itself. That is how life works.

     So, you really may know more than “they” do, and that knowledge is what you can weigh against what you are told through informed consent law about the effects and the side effects of any prescribed medication.

     You don’t have to turn yourself into a temporary zombie with a drug that “may increase the risk of suicidal thoughts or behavior”…a “side effect” far worse than the emotional condition you’re trying to handle.