@freemo Have you read or heard of the book The Body Keeps the Score? Great book about the effects of trauma in both adults in and kids - people know PTSD is a thing for those in the military, but don't appreciate that childhood trauma (which could be as... innocent as an early medical hospitalization) is more complex, because it's happening during key brain development.

This is close to home for us as adoptive parents with an ever increasing understanding of early childhood trauma, and trauma in general.

Anyway, his concern (if I recall correctly) with seeing a mental issue as a "disease" is that it can put a lot of people into a place of feeling like there's no point in trying non medication treatment because diseases just happen and are up to the prescribing physicians to medicate, whereas he's seen a lot of progress with non medical approaches as well that get ignored by most of the mental health community today who often see us as nothing more than chemistry sets that need to be balanced out. He's not anti-medicine, he still prescribes, but focuses first on other treatments I wasn't familiar with before reading his work.

I appreciated his perspective as someone who has been in the field for so long, and the balance there. You're not a terrible person for medication, you're not a terrible person for seeking out alternative things that may be even more beneficial in resolving root causes rather than masking or compensating for symptoms.