Delusions are caused by attention being paid to a misfiring neuron. if you stop the misfire, or stop someone form paying attention to it, you have solved the problem.
Anxiety is a function of a hypersensitive autonomic nervous system. Some people have disproportionately strong responses to a stimuli. Receiving a full adrenaline jolt in response to small stimuli isn't healthy and should be tamped down. The drugs do that.
I never said the drugs weren't over prescribed, and if you don't have adhd they don't rely work. However I do have adhd and they greatly improve my ability to focus, and have zero effect on my personality.
The drugs aren't perfect, and they don't work for everyone, but to completely disregard them is foolish.
Some people don’t really understand that some psychiatric conditions can stem from neurological problems. For example, OCD is considered a neuropsychiatric condition because the pathways involved in thought processes, don’t work properly.
The brain is a truly fascinating thing. I acquired a brain injury 18 months ago and am truly fascinated by how messages can become confused in the brain - how they don’t always follow the pathway they should. It has led me to understand better how thoughts can be disordered.
I always think of the brain as a huge filing cabinet. In normal circumstances, everything will be filed in an orderly way in categories, in individual files, in individual drawers. When you need to access a thought, or a movement or an emotion your brain knows exactly where to find it, without having to think about it.
For some people - whether it’s an acquired brain injury, ASD, ADHD or neuropsychiatric conditions - it’s like someone has emptied the filing system out all over the floor, making it much more difficult to find the right response for the right stimuli.
Medicine has a place in helping put those processes back together again, in some conditions, depending on why the thoughts have become disordered. Of course, there will be other conditions where the brain needs to be retrained. Often, a combination of medication and retraining will be required.
This example, is more of a physical response, but it shows how thought processes become altered. Since having my brain injury, if I see something which might normally have made me feel nauseous, I sneeze. Similarly, if I choke on something, I sneeze rather than gag. Somehow my brain has mixed the reactions up. I don’t know if time will fix it - I’m beginning to think not, at this point. Also, if I have an itch and scratch it, it doesn’t always go away. My neuro-rehab consultant tells me that my brain may be confusing where the itch actually is.
The brain is a very complex thing.