Posted on 04/16/2008 11:06:29 PM PDT by neverdem
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.
But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.
It was not an issue I had seriously considered before. Most of my patients, who are adults, developed their psychiatric problems after they had a pretty clear idea of who they were as individuals. During treatment, most of them could tell me whether they were back to their normal baseline.
Julie could certainly remember what depression felt like, but she could not recall feeling well except during her long treatment with antidepressant medications. And since she had not grown up before getting depressed, she could not gauge the hypothetical effects of antidepressants on her emotional and psychological development.
Her experience is far from unique...
--snip--
The reason has to do with the way drugs are tested and approved. To get F.D.A. approval, a drug has to beat a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically involve a few hundred subjects who are treated for relatively short periods, usually 4 to 12 weeks...
--snip--
This large gap in our clinical knowledge is compounded by the public’s growing and well-founded skepticism about research sponsored by drug makers. A study in the January 2008 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, involving 74 clinical trials with 12 antidepressants, found that 97 percent of positive studies were published, versus 12 percent of negative studies...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I feel sharp as a knife now, and have lost 20 pounds in the past three months. That sh#t is poison.
Here's the kicker: I work in the pharmaceutical industry.
Here's my advice to those considering SSRIs: Have another drink, go to a shrink, eat Ben & Jerry's, smoke if you got'em. Anything but that psycho poison they try to prescribe.
Is It Me or My Meds?: Living with Antidepressants by David A. Karp
good book to read which addresses this subject
who would they be without the drugs?
Going off SSRI’s cold turkey can be dangerous. Better to taper off. Congratulations on kicking the poison. Psychotropic drugs are way overprescribed and I believe partly the culprit in the addled thinking and moral relativism that plagues us. Feel guilty? Take a pill to soothe your conscience. Here’s your soma!
I’ve been on meds since I was 6 and I know exactly what I am. A washed up tired loser going nowhere and lies awake at night wishing he wasn’t alive. Did the drugs do it? Damned if I know or maybe I was supposed to return to god and missed my appointment.
Agreed. I was lucky. After a week, I felt pretty good. But this course of action is not for everyone.
a frigging DOCTOR Friedman:
“But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.
It was not an issue I had seriously considered before.”
Friggin doctors. Just give the drugs. Take away the symptoms. Don’t deal with the causes. Too busy pushing drugs to try to learn the causes and deal with them. Spend all their time learning about new drugs. Forget about practicing real medicine and ever actually attempting to heal people. Gotta keep going to pharmaceutical-company taught classes to learn about the new drugs coming up.
Gee I never stopped to wonder what the drugs actually have done to my patients as a person. The guy admits he never thought about it. I am so optimistic about what passes for medicine in this country.
Yep...all doctors are exactly alike.
Hang in there utherdoul.
Ask Him if you missed the appointment. See if you can make another one.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
I doubt you missed one.
You are still here for a reason.
Trust that God knows what He is doing, FRiend.
All our hardships train us for something in the future, whether it be to help another or to acquire a skill we will need for ourselves.
Ask and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you...
Does this doctor have any kids? Being a teenager is crappy enough for most--I'd never do it over, even knowing what I do. It is an emotionally brutal time when kids are sorting out thier place in the social heierarchy, what they want to do with their lives, and dealing with the raging flood of hormones fluxing through their systems in puberty.
How in the heck are kids goin to learn to cope with the disappointments and ups and downs of life if they are not exposed to the highs and lows which go with them--especially in the years they should be getting guidance and mentoring from parents or friends?
Just say no! and take your meds??
it is nuts.
Exactly. The basic premise behind the use of these meds is that pain is bad. It's not. It hurts, yes, but it's even worse to live your life as a zombie. I'd rather feel anything, even pain, than nothing.
PLEASE be careful going cold turkey off effexor! Did you talk to your doctor? You seriously need to slowly decrease your dose with that drug.
“Gotta keep going to pharmaceutical-company taught classes”
...often held at fabulous hotels or resorts...lots of alcohol, gourmet food, golf, etc....no bribery going on there...just making sure the physicians are aware of the “benefits” of the meds.
A young man I know was put on these drugs one after the other. His growth was stunted to where he is now only about 5 ft tall and is in prison.
However, I know someone else who claims to be benefiting from the drugs. They scare me to death.
Praying for you, friend.
Given the fact doctor prescribed drugs and botched medical procedures KILL thousand of patients every year, my support of the medical field has also declined.
I recently tried cold turkey off 10mg of Paxil/day. No can do. I even tried backing down to 5mg/day. That said, after 5 days of feeling terrible (dizzy, light-headed, fatigued) I decided that I'm going to need a week of vacation from work to fight this battle. There's NO WAY I can be effective in my position as a Data Analyst during that ramp down...
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