Is there any alternative to medication?

Hello! My name is David and this is my very first blog! Like most of you who use mindblogging I have a long-standing mental health problem and like most of you, I suppose, I just try my best to survive and get the most out of life despite the condition of my health. Occasionally, though, things or issues seem to arise which really bother me. For instance, recently I have been very bothered about the side-effects of my medication. Since I have started taking it I have put on seven stones in weight and have become seriously unfit. As a result my psychiatrist tells me I run the risk of developing diabetes, or worse could develop serious problems with my heart. Indeed she seemed to suggest that more and more people like me are actually dying due to taking anti-psychotic medication, putting on loads of weight, and then keeling over due to heart disease. The only option I seem to have is to just take a different type of medication, but the thing is that the majority of them have the same side-effects. So, while the positive symptoms of my psychosis have been cured, I still get extremely tired, sleeping up to twelve hours a day, and have to possibly just come to terms with the fact that I am overweight and therefore run the risk of serious physical illness. So am I just swapping one set of symptoms for another? And is there any real alternative to this conundrum?
Well, after having done a little bit of research, it seems that modern psychiatry relies heavily on the understanding of illnesses such as mine as bio-chemical conditions. Unfortunately by doing this psychiatrists can and often do relegate psychological or environmental causes for the illness to a socondary position. The result is that doctors just throw pills at patients, when perhaps other methods could be used, such as CBT, to alleviate and control symptoms.
Indeed, it wouldn't be so bad if the use of medication with patients was a resounding success, but it is not. Most of us remain socially isolated, ecenomically non-productive and poor. About ten per cent of us take our own lives and astonishingly people in the developing world have higher chances of recovery than tose who live in the industrialised nations.
Perhaps, then, one would long for the days of the anti-psychiatry movement in the 60's, when people like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz even began to question whether psychosis was in fact an illness or just another way of constructing reality. Szasz even thought that such diagnoses were a way of "medicalising" people whom society found difficult or challenging, in short, psychiatry had actually become a means of social control. If only there were people like that around today we might actually begin to get some genuine alternatives to what can be the miserable position of having to take medication for a life-time. Until then, if any of you out there have any magnificent ideas I would be extremely pleased and grateful to know about it. So, that's me for now. Take care and don't believe the hype!