Questions About Antidepressants are Growing

[bananas]

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/managing-depression/2010/10/questions-about-antidepressants-are-growing/

Questions About Antidepressants are Growing
By Michael D. Yapko, Ph.D.

Antidepressants are the most popularly prescribed class of drugs in the United States. Is that because of good science— or good marketing? Reading the posts here on PsychCentral by some, promoting the hopefulness for a drug solution is a common theme. To be sure, antidepressants do help people and far be it for me to challenge that fact.

But lately, a flurry of books and articles have directly challenged antidepressants, suggesting they pose little benefit beyond placebo.

Just a few weeks ago, a new review called Efficacy and Effectiveness of Antidepressants by H. Pigott et al. was published in the professional journal, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. It involved four meta-analyses of efficacy trials submitted to the FDA and suggested that ADMs are only “marginally efficacious” compared with placebo, showing “a sustained benefit only 2.7% above placebo.”

The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., is a new book providing a detailed accounting of the huge controversy he sparked by suing to obtain the hidden data about antidepressant medications.

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[ejpoeta]

1. as someone who has benefitted from the use of antidepressants myself

I have to say that it's probably not the antidepressants themselves but the overprescribing of them thanks to all those commercials. and now there are drugs to take with the other drugs if you don't feel completely better. maybe expectations about what these medications will do is an issue. They don't make all the sadness go away. What they did for me was help me to be able to function. They helped me to pull myself out of the darkness. I am not currently on any anti depressants, but have taken prozac, wellbutrin and lexapro over the past 20 years. Not all at the same time of course.

I think it's like ADHD.... just give them out without actually finding out if that is the problem. And maybe people going to their doctor after seeing those ads is part of the problem. I want this particular drug. this one i saw in the commercial. they are unhappy with their lives and they want a pill to fix it.

[LiberalEsto]

2. I would in all likelihood be dead without them. nt

[Odin2005]

3. RIIIGHT, their effectiveness for me is all in my mind...

:eyes:

[Posteritatis]

4. Anything referring to them as a monolith strikes me as just a little suspect. (nt)

[Confusious]

5. The effect is all in my mind

and so are the panic attacks when I don't take them.

[Quantess]

6. You know it!

Withdrawals can be horrible.
Try quitting Effexor. What a nightmare that was! I finally got that mean little monkey off my back.

[Confusious]

7. I ment the attacks I have without the medication

Nothing to do with withdrawals.

and i was being sarcastic. 10 fucking wasted years when I could have been happy and not miserable. 18 to 28. What are suppose to the best years of your life, wallowing around in depression and panic attacks.

The only people who attack the medication are those who have no clue, and don't want to. They only act like they have any real compassion because they want to sit on a high horse and judge.

If you take some hippy herb and it works for you, you haven't got a real problem. You just lack introspection to see what is truly making you unhappy, or you don't want to see.

[TZ]

8. More bullshit pseudoscience in the science forum I see

I suppose the fact that several people in my family would be fucking DEAD without anti-depressants doesn't fucking matter to idiots who push this CRAP.
I hate this stuff, because it can scare people off meds who really really need it. I wish I could unrecommend this 1,000 times. :grr:

[Deep13]

11. Some people are determined to see mental health problems...

...as spiritual rather than medical. Drugs that actually work are a threat to their point of view.

[ProfessorGAC]

14. Outstanding Point

Very well said. As someone who has a spouse who has true BPD that has been returned to me as the woman with whom i fell in love due to the right meds, i want to pound those with the point of view you describe. They are utterly clueless quacks.
GAC

[bananas]

15. BPD is generally treated with mood stabilizers rather than antidepressants.

Bipolar and unipolar depression are different diagnoses with different treatments.

[ProfessorGAC]

17. I Know That!

I think it was pretty clear that i know the nature of the diseases, since my wife has one of them. And, they DO use ant-deps, WITH mood stabilizers for BPD. It is well-accepted in the psychiatric community that a cocktail of mild meds with different functions is often more efficacious than higher doses of a single med. This is EXACTLY how my wife was treated succesfully.

And, i wasn't comparing the two illnesses. I was decrying the lack of understanding of the value of these meds to people who otherwise would be far less functional by what has become a cottage industry of pseudopathology. So, you're point appears to be disconnected to what i wrote.

It doesn't matter one whit if BPD and clinical depression are the same or not. The pharmocological impact of the meds, or lack thereof, would be similar enough to make the actual manifestations irrelevant.
GAC

[bananas]

16. Since you mention "quacks"

Did you ever notice that "GAC" sounds like "quack"?
If you sound out your user name, it sounds like "Professor Quack".
HTH!

[ProfessorGAC]

18. They're My Initials

That should been pretty easy to figure out.
GAC

[applegrove]

9. Antidepressants changed my life. I got my working memory back.

[Deep13]

10. They work.

And not just a little, either. It's like night and day.

[semillama]

12. The questions should not be confused.

There seems to be two questions here: Do anti-depressants work better than placebo? and Are anti-depressants over-prescribed through marketing pressure? It's easy to confuse the two as one issue since the whole thing evokes a lot of emotion.

I feel that there is a big difference between depression brought on by one's situation and outlook in life, and depression brought on by neurochemical issues. I had the first in my late twenties, and a few good therapy sessions really helped. My wife has the second, and would be a very different, less-functional person without her medication.

[ProfessorGAC]

13. Another Pseudoscientifc Counterindustry

This is ridiculous. The underlying premise of such research is patently obvious.

This whole field of study is only valid if one believes that there is no such thing as true clinical depression. Nobody needs these things. It's all in one's mind.

Ridiculous claptrap.
GAC