There are very good reason opiates aren't used in modern psychiatry. For one thing, they are very addictive; an addiction to opiates will compound any psychiatric conditions. In fact, becoming an addict can change a persons personality, and IME it's never for the better. I'm an opiate addict myself, and before I began my opiate "career", I was an outgoing and perfectly normal kid; a decade later, and I'm like another person: I have depression, insomnia, a distrust of people in general, asocial tendencies, anxiety, and paranoia. opiates will work only too well at completely suppressing a wide range of mental conditions; when your high as a kite on opiates, you'll feel no anxiety, no fear, no depression - you're in a kind of blissed out euphoric bubble, feeling neither life's highs or lows; it's an emotional plateau, in effect. This may sound perfect, but in reality it's a very bad thing, as the whole point of engaging in psychiatry is to treat the underlying causes of the problems; the symptoms can be alleviated with medication, and that's obviously widely used in our medicated society, but the real goal of psychiatry is to treat, and hopefully cure, these conditions permanently. This has to be done in the right frame of mind, and it involves tackling them through therapy and serious self-work. If you're on an opiate "cloud nine", this approach is unlikely to work in my personal experience. I saw a psychiatrist in my heroin days; I was too high to engage, and merely smiled, nodded, and portrayed myself in a positive a light as possible - I manipulated the shrink, because I wanted to be somewhere else.
It's for this reason that in the UK, people who suffer from conditions which have been medicated with benzodiazepines in the past, are more likely to be referred to CBT therapy or counselling; they know the drugs are great for eliminating anxiety in the short-term, but will not help the patient in the long run. it's a far more difficult approach, for sure, but it stands a better chance at really helping them.
Btw I completely agree with the fact suboxone has improved the lives of many people. It's worked very well for me, too. Not so much as an antidepressant, but I haven't used a true opiate for almost a decade, and I have no craving for opiates whatsoever - a miracle for me. It doesn't blunt the feelings at all; you're thinking "straight", and have to learn to deal with life again. So yeah as others have pointed out, there is a lot of potential in suboxone, at least for opiate addicts. It's no magic bullet or wonder drug, but when people describe it as a lifesaver, I tend to agree.
