Thread by @Crutnacker

By limiting you commentary to two specific and more severe conditions, you're proving @cameron_kasky's point.

You, like any number of practitioners of health woo, use a false boogieman (big pharma, drugs, unnatural, etc) to sell your own products and belief system.

https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/1165220920207659008

You place a stigma on mental health by your words, telling people that using medication is a weakness, or that people have been duped by doctors and drug companies who want to sell you something.

People who spend months and even years in fragile mental states in a society that likes to say "it's all in your head" are not helped by your words. Instead they're discouraged from seeking treatment that may make a world of difference.

Listen to people in places like @mentalpod, who are helped by medication, doctors, and therapists who work to customize and adjust treatment to help people function better.

All of us would love to improve their mental health through "natural" means, but many of us are so far down the rabbit hole that we need help that talk therapy and eating herbs doesn't accomplish.

And those conditions aren't just bipolar or schizophrenia. They're depression, anxiety, OCD, and a host of other conditions that include the most mundane.

You are not helping anyone with your bullshit rhetoric and your tapdancing around what you've said in the past. Doctors, medications, and therapists all play a part in successful mental health treatment, and what works for one person may not work for another.

Sure, there are bad doctors, questionable medications, and bad therapists. But there is also a huge cottage industry of unqualified people with products to sell who profit by making it sound like everyone but them is evil.

Mental health is something that too few people seek treatment for and often wait for it to get worse because of shame and the idea that the problem is simply they haven't tried hard enough. This is what your rhetoric does to people.

You are not qualified to make your pronouncements about mental health, and you should be ashamed of yourself for doing so. After years of increasingly worse anxiety that led to debilitating panic attacks, I finally started on medication that made it much easier to function.

My doctor has follow up visits on a regular basis to see how I'm doing and has adjusted the medication accordingly. It's helped me considerably and allowed me to work on other things that are more "natural" to help deal with my anxiety and stress.

So spare me the "I never said" crap. You have. Tapdancing around it here doesn't help your cause. Apologies might.