Careful, you started with a genetic fallacy by attacking the source. It makes one look like a liberal... Don’t do that. That book report and the referenced book were both submitted for peer review.
The scientific method /inductive method is nothing without circumstantial evidence. Observation, hypothesis, test.
Boy on ssri dreams intesly about killing his parents, school children, then self. Boy removed from the ssri and the dreams stop. Boy is later put back on the ssri, dreams return. Boy removed front ssri treatment.... Dreams stop.
A couple years later actual shootings start.... All buy kids on ssri.
That alone is more empirical data then was available indicating ssri were safe for adolesence.
Now ther is research showing placebos are more effective. What exactly is the risk reward balance for ssri use?
If you phrase it that way, then I think that our viewpoints are a lot less father apart.
SSRIs do have severe negative reactions in some cases. This isn’t news to professionals, and is typically why many people are hesitant to rely on them for extended periods of time, especially for children. My contacts in the field view anti-depressants as a “crutch”, and that it should only be used in certain cases until a person is able to cope without them by utilizing other forms of psychotherapy.
You’re correct that this is a correlation, but I do not think that enough evidence is gathered to prove that this correlation is causation, and that the hypothesis is proven. Too many people are rushing to judgment and bashing psychiatry.
I’m deeply critical of shoddy medical practice, be it psychiatry or general medicine. However, when incompetent general practitioners over-prescribe antibiotics and other medications which is leading to things like antibiotic resistant strains, people criticize the action, not the field.
Because psychiatry is not as socially acceptable by certain people, when similar actions are taken, people fly off the handle and attack the field completely which is NOT productive. Which is why people (even Whittaker surprisingly) are making leaps in logic to “SSRIs may be more risky than their rewards” to “all pharmacology is more dangerous than its worth”, to “all major psychiatric conditions are episodic and we don’t need long term care”.
Those leaps in logic are too far and have horrific consequences. Schizophrenia is not episodic, it’s a chronic neurologically based condition, and anti-psychotics are FAR more worth their side effects such as effecting blood pressure and weight gain if it means a patient stops having hallucinations that their neighbor is possessed by Satan and tormenting them, or that people are living in their attic watching their every move.
Too many people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater because ONE class of drugs may be problematic. If you think that more clinical studies need to be done on SSRIs, then that’s a perfectly acceptable view, but people are making grander claims than what the current data available supports.