A major factor IMO, which has received little serious attention, is that relatively low physical activity levels are associated with both depression and ADD... Holy sh!t! We agree! I've battled bouts of depression since single-digit childhood. In my late teens I had a wonderful psychoanalyst who finally had the sense to say "You don't need me--you need exercise." He was totally right. Does exercise completely do away with my depression? No--it makes it manageable, which is all that drugs do, and exercise has much better side effects.
I don't know if I'd lump the ongoing Shields/Cruise debate in here, however. From all that I've read, what she went through was treading into post-partum psychosis territory, not the much more common ppd that the bulk of moms deal with. Moms with post-partum psychosis--IIRC, roughly 1-3% of moms at best--should, at the very least, be seeing a medical doctor for treatment of their "circumstance" (for lack of a better word), at least twice a week, if possible. Andrea Yates is a good lesson about what's at stake. It is a temporary situation. Hormone levels nearly always return to normal naturally, often within weeks of delivery or weeks of weaning from the breast.
BTW--in my most humble opinion, Tom Cruise is a butt wipe.
Andreas psychosis was brough on by the drugs!! She was released from a mental hospital the day before she murdered the kids and killed them in a anti-depressant psychosis, which is a common side effect of these drugs...
The truth is that when serotonin metabolism is impaired, as every one of the SSRIs do - this is thought to be their "therapeutic effect" - it has been shown for decades of medical research to produce impulsive murder and suicide. At this point we have a decade and a half of these drugs being used on the general population as proof that the research from the past several decades is indeed correct. Counting the dead from the SSRI induced impulsive murder and suicide will take a very long time. As if the problems with these drugs were not already bad enough, if Wyeth has their way we can just use college campuses as microcosms to help us see what adverse effects these drugs have upon a very vulnerable group within our society. It was in the spring of 2000 that Elizabeth Shin set herself on fire under the influence of Celexa in her dormitory room at MIT. But Wyeth's Effexor has been in the news so much this year you would think someone might have noticed some red flags popping up. To list only a few: First we had Andrea Yates go to trial for killing her five children while under the influence of both Effexor and Remeron at maximum dose of each drug. The drug companies have spent the past few years coming up with some powerful and very expensive anti-psychotics. They know when all those folks on Anti-Depressants finally start to come off of them, as many will when they press starts to share the facts as they have done this past week, that some, if not many will suffer from mania and psychosis. This is what the medical profession does. They come out with a proceedure or drug, and then when they have milked it long enough, and when they have something new waiting in the wings, they finally capitulate and let it die, all the while reaping a harvest off the new drug of the month, year, or decade. If the 90's were symbolized by Prozac and depression, the new millenium will be symbolized by Psychosis and all of these new expensive anti-psychotics.... just wait and see.... Jenny