Ramaswamy Claims ‘Faith-Based Approaches’ Are ‘Better Ways’ to Treat Mental Illness Than Medication
Ramaswamy Claims ‘Faith-Based Approaches’ Are ‘Better Ways’ to Treat Mental Illness Than Medication
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said mental illness may be best treated using "faith-based approaches" as opposed to pharmaceuticals.
He gets so close-
Violent crime has risen over precisely the period we have shuttered these psychiatric institutions. And you know what? The number one psychiatric institution today is jail. It’s prison. And they don’t do a very good job. And now you then get the calls to clear the jails or to have commuting of sentences or shortening of sentences. People leave those jails in a worse psychiatric condition, often, than when they even entered.
Yes! Yes!
We can do this again learning from past mistakes without those abuses. I don’t think I want to be pumping psychiatric institutions with pharmaceuticals into people.
Seems reasonable.
Faith-based approaches – there are better ways to do this.
Oh for fuck's sake.
And, of course, the ironic thing is that Ramaswamy is a pharma bro.
Ramasmarmy saying whatever he thinks the Republican base wants to hear. So weird seeing him bet all in on a base that despises him.
Aye. At this point I'm convinced he's saying anything to get attention and raise money. I also wonder if it's a play to siphon off extremist votes, but I'm not sure who'd benefit outside of moderates like Chris Christy
This is literally his brand. His books are actually filled with policy contradictions, because he's figured out that a significant portion of Americans simply reflect whatever most recent political messaging they've heard. There is no attempt at broader synthesis or framework consistency.
The average voter hears something they like, neuron activation gives them dopamine, and that's the end of the experience. This entirely explains why there are more than zero people who can vote for Obama and then vote for Trump. Because these are simple folk. The common clay of the new west. You know, morons...
This He's just trying to get a buzzword the religious right can latch onto.
I bet he's not even a Christian
He is Hindu, I thought.
That’s fucking dumb, people kill each other over religion every single day in staggering numbers. Maybe they can institute a program that has speakers from the IRA and the Taliban come in to talk about strong faith.
I cant believe grown adults believe in fairy tales, it’s absolute insanity.
At the end of Peter Pan, the Lost Boys along with Wendy and the other kids are tied to a mast while Captain Hook monologues at them. Peter has pushed Tinkerbell away, and she's fading out of existence. It seems all hope is lost.
But then Peter gets an idea and begins to chant. "I do believe in fairies, I do, I do." Soon, they're all chanting it together. "I DO believe in fairies! I DO I DO!"
And Tinkerbell pops back into existence to save the day. This is what faith is. The idea that if you believe in something hard enough it will pop into existence.
Of course, it's a fantasy story for children. I can't believe grown adults think it's true, either. It's absolute insanity, agreed. But that's where Republicans have to meet their constituents, who apparently live in Never Never Land.
This guy is an even bigger shill than Turd Cruz. He made his money in pharma, his wife is a physician. And yet here he is shilling for FaiTH BaSeD CuRE.
Fuck off Vivek
Ironically, his name means conscience.
He's got none.
Religion is a mental illness.
Religion is about control and people exploiting this are 100% sane and know exactly what they're doing. That's the scary part.
Just what we need, another fake ass politician, billionaire, douche bag lying to Christians.
I don't know. If I tell the entire church my daughter is depressed, and we all pray about it during the 11AM Sunday service, and every old lady in the church constantly asks her if she's "feeling blue," she'll shut up about it and never trust me with any intimate secrets ever again. That means it's cured, right?
So you treat mental illness with another form of mental illness?
Religion is not an issue itself (I am religious myself) but the misuse of it is the problem (but yeah, nah, medicine is the way) 🙂
Belief in fake gods has never been the solution.
I'm so sick of these narcissistic cunts who will say and do virtually anything for attention and graft.
YOU started a pharmaceutical company. Shut the fuck up. Your face is as big as Charlie's. Seriously, there must be some sort of correlation between right-wing vitriol and small faces because holy fuck.
lol. Nobody trusts a right winger.
Lmao I read that as right whinger at first
Still apt
So now these dipshits are unironically and very seriously borrowing from the Scientology playbook…? And here I thought religion in America couldn’t get any worse.
Moron.
Only someone who is (probably) comfortably insulated from the reality that real people face in crises could say something so inane
Bruh isn't his wife a doctor lmao
I'm sure there are plenty of doctors with little to no respect/understanding of mental health.
Fair enough.
Vivek is wrong. Mental health should be taken seriously.
It’s kind of like the joke “if alternative medicine worked, it would just be called medicine”.
A faith-based approach could also be called a hypothesis-based approach: the only thing that distinguishes it from a scientific approach is that it is a hypothesis that either hasn’t been tested or has failed the scientific method.
A hypothesis must be falsifiable, which anything faith-based is not (the whole point is belief without evidence), so it cannot be called a hypothesis-based approach. It's not that it has not been tested or has failed testing. It cannot be tested by definition.
I was thinking you could test whether a faith-based approach accomplishes what it is supposed to accomplish, but you’re right, my characterization of it as hypothesis-based, even though I meant it facetiously, ignores your important point
What a fucking idiot
So his big plan is to just tell everyone, "Y'all need Jesus!"?
Apparently. Except he's a Hindu, so who knows?
He's a pick-me. It's still Jesus.
Sick that they would blatantly lie to try and increase conversions.
It always amuses me when people try to recommend faith or faith based healing to cure their medical or mental health problems.
How is faith based healing any different from using the placebo effect on someone by giving them a sugar pill and telling them it'll help cure their illness? Only difference I can see is you are replacing the pill with God, another placebo.
It's worse because it attributes any improvement to God instead of you or statistical noise.
I want to just say. Get fucked. Thank you, that is all.
So we can safely infer he's not appropriately medicated? That explains a lot.
Sir you have a minority religion in this country. Do you think religion is irrelevant to this or are you hoping a bunch of Americans get shipped off to Vishnu camp when we get depressed?
Isn't he s pharma guy?
You know, we have a term for alternative medicines that have been shown to have a positive effect on patient and are backed up with evidence. That term is called, medicine.
Ramaswamy is a pharma bro.
Seems not to be the greatest salesman from my point of view. Unless he sells faith in a vial.
He's selling himself for a job in Trump's cabinet, so he's a better salesman than you think. He's already rich off the pharma investments. I just like the irony.
Yeah, but this isn't a job he got yet. And greedy assholes are never rich enough, they need more.
"Faith-based" is the weasel word here, insert your meaning. The reductive correlation of violent crime rising as psychiatric institutions shuttered leaves out the economic context. Public healthcare isn't on the table, this is just redistributing the effects of not having proper care available for everyone and claiming it's a solution. "Let the churches deal with it instead of the prison system." Is he advocating we decriminalize and reduce sentencing? Are churches in a position to hide/harbor what the law determines to be a criminal? No talk of re-allocating police budgets.
I mean I'm not going to tell my friend with Asperger's that he should abandon his accepting church community. I blame the fact that our economic system deems him as a worthless burden, unless laws are in place that force employers to treat him with the same dignity as everyone else and accommodate him. The fact he can't access a career a "normal" person could is a huge part of the problem.
Oh, is this the insufferable a-hole trying to out-crazy Trump and still polling almost dead last?
He admits that people with mental health disabilities are just locked up in prisons and not given help (true), but then says let's bring back insane asylums and not give them medication or therapy, just let Jesus take the wheel.
To anybody who thinks this is a good idea, if Jesus could cure them of their mental afflictions, you wouldn't need the insane asylums to begin with.
What he is describing is a just prison system by another name.
Running for Republican nomination as a non-white person who also isn’t a Christian isn’t the most realistic move. It seems like he’s trying to bring up religion and allude to Christianity to make people not notice he’s a Hindu.
Who?
Not engaging with anymore republiQan horse-race crap. It doesn’t help, they’re obviously way past even discussing and it only serves the Murdochian Evils to talk about them.
So, No.
I think he has a fringe right wing bingo card he's trying to fill out.
He is just afraid the temples are running empty
tbh he isn't entirely wrong wrt depression and anxiety, but that mindset is dying - I literally can't have a faith based approach to mental illness because I know better.
I'm sure people who can actually put their faith in God's will and plan or whatever can find solace, that's literally what people did for thousands of years and why religion was invented, but that's not an option for me.
No, he is objectively wrong.
People who actually believe in that stuff can really just put their faith in God that things will be okay and He will protect them and that He loves them.
It doesn't work if you know better, which is why it can never work for me. Probably not for most people, even. God is dead and we killed Him
Believing in a higher power that’s responsible for things you can’t control can help but obviously that’s not what he’s talking about. The faith based help republicans want is to force their belief of god on people. A god that judges you which definitely won’t help anxiety.
That's my point - his faith based approach is worthless for me because I know better. God is evil and God is dead, so there's no faith based approach for me.
He'd try to force me anyway, of course.
Depression and anxiety management is a thing. It helps to have medication, but it absolutely is not a cure-all. It takes years of practice to manage this stuff effectively. Believe me, I know. Even with medication, it took me years to learn how to manage my own head.
Sometimes, our bodies and minds are simply just broken and the damage can't be wished away. Drugs can be an excellent crutch to help people live a normal life without the need to dedicate all of their precious time on this planet to healing.
Recovery from depression usually involves finding activities the person finds fulfilling and meaningful. This is why faith based recovery works. However, It's mostly because you're placing worthwhile meaning in an activity that is giving you purpose to let your mind heal. It is about having a regimented schedule, like attending church on Sundays, praying before meals, attending church functions.
We use the same kind of techniques in therapy based recovery too and we encourage our clients to attend church if they want to for that very reason. Faith is an excellent tool if it drives you toward being well. Again, it just has more to do with what you find meaning in and what gets you up and going. For some people, it's going for a jog, for others it's working out, for some it's faith.
I used to think that faith in a religion could be a healthy method of recovery. Unfortunately, after much thought, I believe that it is just a quick
solutionbandaid for things like addiction and other types of mental crisis that has the potential to do more harm than good in the long run.Having been through various rehabilitation programs for alcohol, I did believe for a long time that faith in something like a religion could help. Unfortunately, there is a large subset of people that will quickly get disillusioned very quickly once their mind starts to heal from whatever.
Once I learned that life just is and death just is, it helped me accept everything for what it is. Soon after, I learned I had complete control over all of my decisions. I found my own inner peace, in a way. Once that happened, I had no reason to slowly kill myself anymore with booze.
My point is that pointing someone in the direction of their version inner peace is good. Using religion to do that is dangerous as you are pointing a vulnerable person in the direction of establishments that exist to exploit people.
Having faith that there is a Purpose for you and you are Loved and that you are not Alone is, itself, powerful beyond just simple habit and ritual. People who actually believe in God can really just put their faith in Him and really be comforted by it.
That's nice for them. Worthless for me
While it is true that medication does not fix mental illness. Huge studies came out blowing those meds out of the water. I think diet, lifestlye, and spiritual life is best way to move forward. Most ppl do not have mental illness, they have been dragged into the cult of Big Pharma
Diet, lifestyle and spiritual life will definitely stop a bipolar person from being delusional during a manic phase.
Believed magic was real from years of untreated mania.
Now I'm depressed because I know reality isn't what I knew.
This is the dumbest shit I've ever read
this won't be popular to the "better living through chemistry" folks on lemmy, and Reddit. except for the fact that mental health issues are at an all time high, and so are prescriptions. so no one is actually better because of them. while it is proven that people engaged in faith activities have better mental health outcomes.
People engaged with community activities have better mental health outcomes... because they have people who care about them that they see regularly and the support structures that come with that. The community doesn't hane to be faith-based, though many are. It could be volunteering at an animal rescue, in-person gaming-oriented activities like board games or TTRPGs, a cycling group... Anything that gets you out and helps make friends and connect you to other people.