Posted on 02/18/2008 9:26:24 PM PST by neverdem
Despite recent bad publicity over withheld studies showing marginal results, the resume of America's arsenal of antidepressants is enviable: consort to celebrities, subject of best-selling books and tabloid headlines. They may be the most celebrated pills since Valium.
Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa and Lexapro, among others, have become both household words and medicine-cabinet staples. Known collectively as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, these antidepressants are prescribed for anxiety, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and numerous conditions besides depression.
SSRIs are now the most commonly prescribed of all medications in this country. The rate at which physicians prescribed SSRIs more than doubled between 1995 and 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. SSRIs are considered the first line of defense in treating depression, an illness that afflicts more than 20 million Americans.
Given their wide circulation, SSRIs will have a profound impact on the nation's mental health in the decades to come. But whether their impact is for good or ill depends upon whom you ask.
Most antidepressants boost the amounts of messenger chemicals, or neurotransmitters, circulating in the brain. SSRIs were the first to target the key neurotransmitter serotonin, with highly touted...
--snip--
Just last month, a report in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that the makers of drugs such as Prozac and Paxil didn't publish results of trials indicating that their products performed just modestly better than placebos, which have no actual pharmaceutical value.
--snip--
Rosie Meysenburg of Dallas and Sara Bostock of California met at a public hearing on SSRIs sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration. Both had strong reservations about the safety of SSRIs. Together, they created a Web site, SSRIstories.com, which catalogs more than 2,000 news stories detailing violent acts -- murders, suicides, school shootings -- by individuals taking SSRIs...
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
ping to read later
MHO as a retired (yes!) shrink, is that the disorder, depression, itself, is the underlying scourge and not the anti-depressant medications, whether they be SSR or tricyclics or whatever. Depression can be very serious and very debilitating to body and mind. Recovery therefrom is not always smooth sailing no matter whether Rx is used or not.
Earlier I found out that whether or not I see a shrink I had the same probability of success.
Now I'm really depressed.
Because we all know that untreated, these individuals would have not committed such violent acts, or at least would not do so at a rate greater than the bulk population. This is Nobel material folks.
Might as well just prescribe a 6-pack of beer. It’s all just don’t-give-damn medicine, and the beer is cheaper.
>>2,000 news stories detailing violent acts — murders, suicides, school shootings — by individuals taking SSRIs.<<
My guess is that they are likely prescribed to a population more likely to do such things.
We’d also need to compare. How many total articles total?
The Google news archive shows 1.9 million articles with the word “murder” If a quarter of the population takes anti-depressants then 2,000 articles is very low, not high.
This pair’s website is a contribution to junk science. Ask any statistician or scientist and they’ll tell you in your sleep that a ream of documented anecdotes is meaningless - real correlation and cause-and-effect require carefully designed, conducted, controlled and analyzed studies. Without all of that, the results are bunk.
But it will inflame public perception and makes an easy point of entry for a reporter looking for an easy story or a big splash. And once the public is softened up, a crappy study without proper methods will be plastered all over the evening news with absurd Captain Obvious headlines like “Psych Drugs Carry Risks.” By the time the proper criticism and context of the story reaches the media, they’ll be on to their next manufactured crisis.
The calls of reasonable people like yourself saying “mentally ill people being treated are still mentally ill” will be ignored in a rush against Big Pharma, which will by then be accused of putting depressants in Tylenol to create demand for SSRIs.
The New York Times did the same thing with a handful of crimes committed by Iraq War veterans. (I don’t recall if Afghanistan veterans were included in the survey, but since the NYT doesn’t seem hell-bent opposed to the Afghan action I guess that’s data they don’t want to see.)
Right you are. Here is IowaHawk’s brilliant “data extrapolation” on journalists:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2008/01/notepads-of-sha.html
To this I can (personally) attest. Another way to look at this I suppose is that the current generation of SSRI's are much less annoying than, say, MAOI's. (Which thankfully, I never had the "pleasure" of being prescribed).
Thanks for that link!
Man, thats why I have been depressed since I quit drinking. Thanks. I'll stock up.
Regards
My concern about all these anti-depressant medicines is:
when people are depressed, rather than do the hard work of:
1. figuring out what is bothering them;
2. figuring out whether it SHOULD bother them;
2.5 not allowing themselves to get depressed over things that shouldn’t depress them (I don’t mean to be flippant - I know that’s HARD work)
3. altering what they are able to alter that’s bothering them;
4. accepting the things they can’t alter, and changing their responses to them;
5. facing the wrong behaviors/attitudes they possess which they must change within themselves;
6. seeking help;
7. discipling themselves in appropriate ways;
8. reaching out to others in order to alleviate overly self-centered thinking -
9. making sometimes big, hard changes like moving, changing careers, changing environments, changing diets, changing relationships;
10. developing positive and life affirming hobbies, habits and thought patterns -
most of which is hard, grovely, time consuming effort, two steps forward, one step back, start to do better then get knocked on your keester -
they take pills and try to skip all the hard work.
And you know, I just don’t think that, long term, pills work. MAYBE they work for a short term. and MAYBE, enjoying their effects for a few months makes you even less able to cope with hard core depression the old fashioned way.
Depression can be totally debilitating and should not be treated lightly. I think using prescription meds is a way of treating them lightly. I’m not a medical professional. It’s just my observation. I think you need to fight your way out of depression, and often you need help, but I don’t think the pills are help.
According to Dr. David Healy in "Talking Back to Prozac, the depressed don't commit mayhem.
Making Sense of the Great Suicide Debate Just follow the links please.
But he also saw that his position would be strengthened if he could cite the results of a drug experiment on undepressed, certifiably normal volunteers. If some of them, too, showed grave disturbance after taking Pfizer's Zoloft—and they did in Healy's test, with long-term consequences that have left him remorseful as well as indignant—then depression was definitively ruled out as the culprit.
The doctors get back zero dollars and zero cents.
Right you are...the meds are a tool, not a cure.
I feel the same way about Neal Clark Warren - supposedly eharmony is great, but I can’t stand that guy’s smarmy face. He seems to want to sell people the idea that the problems and challenges go away if you’re with the right person (excuse me...your “soulmate.”) It’s simply not true, unless you’re John Lennon and Yoko Ono, so I think he’s selling people on the idea that it’s not you, it’s them - a dangerous mindset to be in if you’re looking for long-term security with a loved one.
With regards to item # 2. Supposed you witnessed an aircrash into Pearl Harbor that killed 11 of your close friends. Then you ID'd them in the morgue. Then you spent a week burying them. Should that depresses you? And if so, what next?
Regards
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