“is no therapeutic effect”
That’s just not true. They’ve done scientifically randomized controlled drug trials, and had antidepressants failed we’d know it, and not just from some 60 Minutes episode.
Then again, who the heck knows what “depression” is, anyway, or if it even exists? It isn’t exactly diagnosed with scientific precision, so it’s inherently arbitrary to say whether it’s gotten better. However, antidepressants aren’t only used for depression, and have therapeutic value for a number of disorders and diseases.
” They’ve done scientifically randomized controlled drug trials”
The trials were done by the companies pushing the drugs.
Depression is anger turned inward.
Our society no longer works in the fields all day to survive so we have lots of time to sit around and ruminate over perceived ills and grievances.
To quote Pete Steele of Type O Negative;
Idle hands may be the devil’s work
Unbridled minds you see are so much worse
Too much pity spent and wasting time
Irresponsibility not my only crime no
Obsessive thinking, depressed drinking
The person I once was, he’s dead
Exhume the past this time or be my last
This is my final quest to remove my mask yeah
Pete was given Prozac which he took for *years*.
Almost all of his songs are desperate internal dialogues about being freed from his numbness and despair.
In addition to the Prozac, he self-medicated with booze and coke to ‘feel’ again.
His ‘sudden rages’ were infamous and he did time on Rikers Island for beating the crap out of people.
he got odd the drugs, legal and illegal, stopped drinking and re-found God...just in time.
Now he’s dead, his heart having given out from the chemical excesses.
IMO, he would still be alive if not for the Prozac.
You can virtually track his physical/mental descent through his albums.
Ironically, in spite of his fame and success, he pined for the days when he was a maintenance man in Central Park.
The hard work made him -happy-.
Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather's girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.
Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.
Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.
Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.
Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.
Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.
Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.
A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.
Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..
A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.
Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.
TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.
Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.
James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.
Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania.
Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California.
Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.
Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.
Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic's file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.
Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.
Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI anti-depressants.
Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.
Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.
Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family's Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.
Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara's parents said ".... the damn doctor wouldn't take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil...")
Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002 (Gareth's father could not accept his son's death and killed himself.)
Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family's detached garage.
Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.
Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.
Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.
A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.
Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and "other drugs for the conditions."
Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.
Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.
Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.
Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.
Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.
What drugs was Jared Lee Loughner on, age 21...... killed 6 people and injuring 14 others in Tuscon, AZ
What drugs was James Eagan Holmes on, age 24..... killed 12 people and injuring 59 others in Aurora, Colorado
What drugs was Jacob Tyler Roberts on, age 22, killed 2 injured 1, Clackamas, OR
What drugs was Adam Peter Lanza on, age 20, Killed 26 and wounded 2 in Newtown, CT
More here: SSRI Stories
As someone who suffered from depression for decades, I can attest to it's existence. I wasn't a little blue, I did have suicidal thoughts.
I tried Zoloft, and I got worse. I actually had some auditory stuff happen to me (like someone screaming in the back of my head). That scared the hell out of me, and I refused to take it anymore. Drs. want to give it to you, but, I couldn't risk that happening again. It had never happened to me before, or after I stopped taking that drug.
Funny thing, when I went thru menopause, my depressions got a lot less frequent and I wasn't constantly down anymore. When I had a hysterictomy (cancer), and all the lady parts left, so did my depression.
I am old enough to remember the first feminists shouting about the "mysoginistic" doctors ripping women's uteruses out just because they hated women and were doing it for "hysteria". Well, I now wonder if they just had enough experience of seeing women improve from their troubles with depression, that they would do this surgery for that reason.
Anyway, my life dramatically improved after my surgery, and I know that my problem was actually hormones, and these drugs can make a problem worse.