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Are Psychiatric Medications Hurting More Patients Than They Help? (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American's Cross-Check blog:
Two new posts on this website have me contemplating, once again, the terrible possibility that psychiatry is hurting more people than it helps. Reporter Sarah G. Miller notes in "1 in 6 Americans Takes a Psychiatric Drug" that prescriptions for mental illness keep surging. As of 2013, almost 17 percent of Americans were taking at least one psychiatric drug, up from 10 percent in 2011, according to a new study. "Antidepressants were the most common type of psychiatric drug in the survey, with 12 percent of adults reporting that they filled prescriptions for these drugs..."
This increase in medications must be boosting our mental health, right? Wrong. In "Is Mental Health Declining in the U.S.?," Edmund S. Higgins, professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, acknowledges the "inconvenient truth" that Americans' mental health has, according to some measures, deteriorated...
It's all more evidence of something their blogger wrote in 2012. "American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis -- harmful medical treatment -- in history."
This increase in medications must be boosting our mental health, right? Wrong. In "Is Mental Health Declining in the U.S.?," Edmund S. Higgins, professor of psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina, acknowledges the "inconvenient truth" that Americans' mental health has, according to some measures, deteriorated...
It's all more evidence of something their blogger wrote in 2012. "American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis -- harmful medical treatment -- in history."
Let's ask APK...
The balance sheets for the various drug companies clearly state that everything is just fine.
In happiness charts, Denmark continues to score the highest while they also have the highest prescription rate of antidepressants in the world.
Not saying Denmark is some shining beacon of mental health but the problem is quite simply harder to diagnose than to correlate psychiatric drug prescriptions and mental health stats. More serious studies are definitely needed.
“From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They are not infections, but infarctions; they do not follow from the negativity of what is immunologically foreign, but from an excess of positivity. Therefore, they elude all technologies and techniques that seek to combat what is alien.” Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The truth the medical fraternity face is that many have had their lives ruined by the drugs they religiously believe in. The 'evidence' rests on a mire of untested and flawed assumptions (in particular the premises of the statistical methods used to relate data to conclusions: many of which cannot be justified unless the possibility of and influence of complex brain behaviour can be safely ignored). The clinical psychology fraternity, and a number of 'maverick' psychiatrists are, more and more, putting across why mainstream 'medical psychiatry' has much wrong. But this is all too easily swamped by billion dollar marketing machines, lobbying and selective sponsored trials which have a habit, like 'proven by science' infomercials, of showing the sponsoring company's products as better than others.
John_Chalisque
This story only made it to Slashdot's front page in order to out the members of Scientology on the board! They're coming to get you!
Ok maybe not.
For the first time in ages, the related links beneath the summary are actually... related.
The ones at the bottom of the comments still aren't though...
I don't know a single person who has taken these drugs and come out better in the end. Usually they feel better short term, then go off the deep end along with their personality completely changing.
Is there any study showing that life today is more -- or less -- stressful than life decades ago? These days, it seems like both parents need to work in order to have enough money to raise kids. Further, the kids need to do more extracurricular activity to get into a good college, which means the parents spend more time driving around.
To be clear, that is just my observation. I have not done an objective study to measure stress. I just don't think we should blame the medical industry until we've ruled out the other possible cause(s) for more people with mental health issues.
(1) Suicide rates -- In the US I think the increase in suicide rate is likely attributable to increased firearm ownership. There is no evidence that I know of that indicates that the increased level of gun ownership presents an increased risk to others -- in fact the rate of firearm homicide has gone down (along with most other violent crimes). But suicidal impulses -- which are very common -- plus a handgun in your pocket... that is a very dangerous combination.
(2) Rate of DoD PTSD rising -- likely to have to do with the influx of veterans from three wars (Gulf 1 & 2 + Afghanistan), plus a higher survival rate from severe physical trauma.
(3) Rise of opiate abuse -- coincides with the appearance of new prescription drugs and more aggressive prescribing of pain medication.
(4) Rise in disability awards -- conflated with a drive to recognize mental disabilities as on a par with physical ones.
At my age I've lived through many a moral panic, and this feels like the beginnings of one. Which is not to say mental illness doesn't cause real suffering, or that we shouldn't make it more of a priority. But what we need are more evidence-based approaches. Unfortunately we seem to be headed in the opposite direction.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"The Church of Scientology - brains washed 24/7. Don't forget to ask for your rundown purification coupon book - of $50 value!"
Think of two solutions to mental illness:
1. One that works - quick, fast, cheap, done.
2. One that requires multiple visits to a doctor, every two weeks for 10 years. Oh, and lots of expensive drugs.
Guess which one is incentivizes doctors and drug companies to pursue it?
You are oversimplifying mental illness; the human brain isn't a piece of machinery where you can just replace a non functioning component with one that does and everything goes back to normal. The problem is people are being prescribed drugs that they don't need where a few sessions of therapy or a change in life circumstance would suffice. However the line between needing medication and not needing it is very blurred, and it differs from person to person.
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Whereas once upon a time it was quite normal in society for everybody to drink alcohol regularly, nowadays it is unfashionable to be an alcoholic so psychiatric medications have taken over.
A hundred years ago, if I had anxiety I would just drink booze to get over it. Now I take Paxil. Not only am I spending a lot less money (because a single pill costs less than a bottle of wine or 6-pack of beer), but I can safely drive a car, and I'm not an asshole to my family.
You may also notice that it seems every other kid is on some medication for ADD/ADHD. Why? My guess is that it's because we can't beat them anymore. Now that it's no longer socially acceptable to hit children who act out we have to medicate them instead.
dom
This piece is written by a kook who frequently writes on various "spiritual" and pseudoscientific topics. Among his recent posts:
Seeing the Miracle of Existence in the Darkest of Times
Does Evolution Have a "Higher Purpose"?
Astrophysicist Says Experiments Might Soon Reveal Dark Matter's "True Nature"
What Would a Machine as Smart as God Want?
My Doubts about Deepak Chopra and the Monetization of Meditation
World's Smartest Physicist Thinks Science Can't Crack Consciousness
The Mind–Body Problem, Scientific Regress and "Woo"
Dear "Skeptics," Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More
True to form, this article's point is a passive-agressive claim based on absence of evidence:
"Like most psychiatrists, Higgins does not consider the possibility that medications might be contributing to the decline of mental health."
Actually, I'm sure most psychiatrists HAVE considered this possibility, and they follow the peer-reviewed evidence which concludes the opposite.
If anyone wants to argue with this scientific consensus, they are welcome to do their own peer-reviewed studies. But this article and its sources haven't.
"Antidepressants were the most common type of psychiatric drug in the survey..."
Last two times I've visited my general practitioner I was given a "new" form to fill out that essentially tried to convince me I was depressed; I was visiting for a cough and my yearly physical, neither of which had fuck-all to do with depression, but they sure as shit were trying like hell to get me on medication for it.
We have the same industry to thank for the opiate/heroin epidemic as well. How fucking ironic the drug pimps addicting America are marketed to "help" us. Perhaps it's time we actually start putting health over profits.
There is a strong motivation for school psychiatrists to diagnose students with a disorder that requires drugs. If a student has a disorder that needs this kind of treatment, the money the school receives from the state is tripled.
The amount of students we have here that have some kind of disorder is now massive, and it's very strongly linked to how schools get their money; not to any actual disorders. Obviously, some are true disorders that need treatment - but the motivation to get so many students on drugs that it's difficult to get any diagnosis from medical staff in the schools pay.
In the past, most mental health issues went unreported and untreated. The availability of medication is one of the many factors increasing the number of people who come in for diagnosis. If you're schizophrenic but there are no meds for it, who's going to bother taking you in to a doctor? People used to just seal up their mentally ill relatives in a back room of the house for life and try to forget about them. But when there are meds, that drives people to seek treatment and be measured.
We've also increased the number of things we'll label as mental health problems, of course, as we feel more capable of treating things that may appear less extreme. People who were previously just labeled as weirdos and shunned are now told there might be something we can do for them. Of course meds frequently fail or cause problems worse than the original problem, but they give people enough hope to try.
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How do you make the leap from "America's mental health is deteriorating" to "Psychiatric medicine is causing it." Maybe the article addresses it, but I doubt it. Bad summary. The thing is that I have heard this vacuous leap made before.
Posting anonymously because I really don't need the shitstorm of antidepressant 'true believers' flaming me to death for triggering them by daring to express my opinions on the subject.
I've been on the receiving end of the antidepressant agenda and in the aftermath of it I'm a firm believer that they're playing Russian Roulette with your brain chemistry, all because it's cheaper to give you pills than it is to have you sit down with a counselor or therapist, talk through your problems, and learn effective coping strategies to deal with depression. At best, antidepressants should be a 'band-aid' to put on your problems, to break the self-reinforcing downward spiral, while cognitive therapy can start having a positive effect. People who have known me before, during, and after Prozac will tell me now that I was rather scary when I was on it, not reacting to things in ways a healthy human being would, but they didn't know what to do for me at the time. At one point I even had myself convinced that sexual desire was the result of some sort of ancient sexually-transmitted virus that the human race has had for so long that we've accepted it as normal. Of course that's insane, but I remember truly believing that. That, and I'd be fine with just about any level of stress in my life, right up to the point where I'd break, and then I'd be completely and totally off the hook over whatever it was that'd triggered me. Not good, any of it. In part because of what that junk did to my personality I ended up losing a decent job, and the medical insurance I had along with that, and had to go cold-turkey off Prozac, which by all accounts should have made me suicidal, but I managed to cope with it. Took me literally years to feel 'normal' again, think in ways that are considered 'normal', and have sexual functioning return to normal, too. Even to this day I feel like I don't see the world exactly the same, like something has permanently, but very subtly, changed the way I perceive reality. I am given to understand that my experiences are far from being unusual. There were a few incidents of being talked into antidepressant use subsequent to that but I never stayed on any of them long enough to do any damage, and they never seemed to really help anyway. In the aftermath of antidepressant use I've learned to recognize the early signs of feeling depressed over something and work through it cognitively rather than running to a pharmacy. I believe that's the best long-term solution for the vast majority of people who are feeling depressed, not popping pills ad infinitum like the pharmaceutical industry would have us do. The healthcare industry is also to blame for this, the beancounters specifically, because prescribing a pill is infintely cheaper for them than expensive facetime for therapy with a professional, essentially trading people's best interests for profits.
So, to summarize: If you have chronic depression that doesn't respond adequately to cognitive therapy? I feel for you, and perhaps pills really are your only option. Everyone else, who has acute depression (or is just feeling 'a little down' over something temporarily)? You should try to work through it rather than running to the doctor for Happy Pills. Major life event? Death in the family? Short-term antidepressant use (emphasis on short-term) is probably OK, but you should get off them at some point. Playing around with your neurochemistry, regardless of a 'medical professional' supervising it, is not 'Amateur Night' stuff to be fooling around with. You can cause actual damage to yourself.
Like something going wrong in the brain, perhaps?
The problem is that we don't know when a few sessions of therapy or a change in life circumstances would suffice, yet we are so quick to claim they would.
How about a cause that is neither an infection nor an infarction?
The single biggest influence on the state of psychiatry today is moral conservativism and other assorted panderings to popular culture and the law. Their desire to stay profitable and respectable in mainstream society long ago destroyed any real credibility they had as a serious hard science.
Pretty much every highly effective anti-depressant ever made (including but certainly not limited to opioids and dopaminergics) is a scheduled substance and almost never prescribed for depression, because apparently every single human being alive is just a helpless addict just waiting for the chance to swallow twenty pills at a time chasing a high. SSRIs have abysmal efficacies, but that didn't stop them from pushing the placebo revolutionary drug Prozac to being one of the most prescribed drugs in the country. A lot of people are still under this weird impression that antidepressants work by re-establishing some natural balance of neurotransmitters present in "normal" people, when there's every indication that this is not the case. (FDA is partially at fault here allowed pharma companies to put out some ads that strongly implied this was how SSRIs worked.)
And it's not as if modern antidepressants aren't addictive; like many psychotropic drugs, SSRIs and SNRIs induce physical dependency with potentially severe withdrawal symptoms if abruptly terminated.
No, the actual difference between modern antidepressants and "addictive" drugs that actually make you feel good is... the latter actually work. Consistently and compellingly. And it's for that very reason that they are deemed dangerous. Drugs that are highly effective in enabling human happiness work better at higher dosages (which is how dosage increase works among most drugs that are actually effective, if you think about)... which of course leads to massive problems among the subpopulations of people who have poor impulse control or are overly euphoria-craving.
And all of this plays directly into the hands of religious and social conservatives who have for millenia made careers out of claiming that anything that people like too much must be bad. You'd think that more people would be suspicious of a profession claiming to be a science that was, just a couple generations ago, trying to chemically castrate people against their will to cure them of their homosexuality... ah well.
Really? How were the questions phrased. They ask me about depression, but they are hardly phrased in a way that would make be believe they are trying to convince me I am depressed.
And my financial advice from vines.
You know when a non techie talk about the Internet as a series of tubes? This is one of those times but about psychiatric meds.
First off, of course it's wrong if you take meds so you can handle the stress of two full time jobs or assume you can just take a couple of pills and your depression will be gone.
But for most people out there with a psychiatric condition meds and therapy (and some more therapy) is a life saver. The meds will remove some of the symptoms so you can live an almost normal life while therapy helps with the cause for them. A depression is nothing like feeling a bit under the weather, a panic disorder does not go away with a gluten free diet, and grave OCD is as easy to just hold in as Ipecac
The problem is that we don't know when a few sessions of therapy or a change in life circumstances would suffice, yet we are so quick to claim they would.
Of course we don't know but they at least have to be tried before we start throwing medication at people.
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Psychiatric medicine seems to rely on a lot of trial and error, to see what works and what doesn't. The problem compounds as soon as multiple medications are used. Differences in physiology and the nature of the disorder, including factors such as incorrect or incomplete diagnosis seem to lead some unfortunates down the wrong paths, where the presumed illness is incorrectly treated. For example, some personality disorders, such as BPD, can't be effectively treated with medication at all, and must be tackled therapeutically instead, but are often misdiagnosed as something else, or, are sometimes only recognized as anxiety or depression, and while some SSRIs can help with that component, the bigger underlying diagnosis isn't recognized.
In short, treating mental illness can really only be done on an individual basis, and not every psychologist or psychiatrist is going to get it right, and more often than not, many mental illnesses are not treated correctly from day one. To some degree this is to be expected, but it also results in many people seeing nothing but confusion when looking at treatments which are in place. It takes time to get to know someone's mind, so it's no wonder that years can pass before even skilled doctors are able to make a positive impact on many mentally ill patients. It's also no wonder that many of these patients fall through the cracks in the mean-time. Not everyone can afford the kind of treatment required by some diereses, and the waiting game can be frustrating to even well adjusted people.
All I'm saying is that there are many problems which lead to GPs continuously prescribing a regimen of ineffectual drugs, without even thinking about issues such as poor education or practices, or the various evils, (imagined or otherwise), of pharmaceutical companies. To be clear, it's not the drugs that are the problem. The drugs actually do help in many cases. It's getting to that point where they do help that is the trick.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
I knew it, Ozzy must be involved somewhere.
But the drugs just takes care of the symptoms to some extent. Not the cause. We need to dig deeper.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
But the drugs just takes care of the symptoms to some extent. Not the cause. We need to dig deeper.
Kind of hard to dig deeper if the person is overwhelmed by the symptoms. If someone wants to kill themselves today, you don't want to risk taking 3 months of therapy to try to get to the bottom of their problems. Also, finding the cause doesn't necessarily fix everything. The brain is plastic. Every time a person goes through a bout of depression, it increases the odds of another bout irrespective of the cause.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Every person's brain is different. Some people react well to one medicine but not another. Others need a combination, and lots of work to get the dose right - and there's no guarantee that the illness won't deteriorate with time.
The side effects for any individual can't be predicted in advance, same as any other medicine.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
One of the reasons to prescribe medication is to get the person to a state where they are not overwhelmed by their problems, are open to therapy, and can look at their problems in a different way with outside help.
A person who can't sleep, can't work, can't concentrate because they are in a serious depression and they have continuous intrusive thoughts of suicide, and you want them to learn enough cognitive behavioral therapy so they can work out how their thinking is distorted before resorting to medication? Therapy takes a few months - what do they do in the meantime? Kill themselves? Someone in a crisis doesn't have the luxury of taking months and months of therapy once a week. And they would be too distracted by their illness to benefit from it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You probably think that there are carburetors that allow a 4000 pound car to get 100 miles per gallon but don't appear on the market because the gas companies hid the research.
Time to up your meds.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's rare these days that Tom Cruise doesn't get a listing in the credits..... except on /. apparently.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Yes psychiatric drug help. There are peer review on it, and plenty of people staving off depression, schizophrenia, and various other problems with their help. Do you rhink those people would be better off with depression ? If so , as someboy which was sucessfully treated for depression and does not take anymore medications : fuck you. This type of bullshit i expect from a scientology outfit "all psychiatry is abd" or from a gutter toilet paper of a journal like daily fail.
I am a single person who says otherwise.
I had mild depression and bad OCD and other issues like fatigue or rather narcolepsy. After a bad breakup with an exgf and stuck in a job I was not too found of a doctor prescribed me Celexia or Citaprolom.
My genitals became numb within 72 hours. I was told it takes a few weeks don't worry side effects. So I continued. I became forgetful at work and couldn't remember simple things. I started drinking and spending thousands on my credit card. I quit excersizing and developed heart issues.
Worse my sex drive completely vanished. I mean months after taking it! Zero interest in sex now!! Gone. I became also boderline trans and started having bad gender dysphoria after month 3. That scared the shit out of me and I wanted to stop asap. But that is where the fun just started. :-)
Quiting an SSRI is like quiting crack or alcohol. My brain was so dependent on it that I needed the drug to function. I was turning into someone I did not recognize but had to stay on it and taper slowly.
It took 3 weeks to taper off and I had nightmares, brain zaps, sickness, paranoia, and missed work and almost got fired. Going off it brought major depression as my mind had so little serotonin receptors left thanks to the SSRI that it couldn't function right.
Here I am 3 months later still with no sex drive or sexuality left, thousands in credit card debt, and depression which wasn't that bad before and who knows if I will ever get it back. Thankfully my gender dysphoria went away after staying off. I still have bursts of it which were never present before taking the medication. That was not me. This stuff changes you
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Um doctors get their information from drug salesmen. There are psychiatrists who do not like SSRIs as no one really knows for sure how they work.
http://saveie6.com/
BS. When you go to a doctor and s/he prescribes some magic ointment to clear up a rash, but it does work, do you automatically assume s/he pulling a scam to get you to come back in?
Nobody really understands how anti-depressant meds work. Oh they can prove THAT they work easily enough, that's cause and effect, easily documented and established. But nobody really understands HOW or WHY they work.
One of the things you're overlooking is the part where it can take weeks of taking the meds every day with no effect, and then one day, suddenly, WOW! It kicks in.
There's another experiment that seems unrelated at first but bear with me here... You wear glasses that turn the world upside down. For several days you stagger around, trying to live in an upside down world. Then, after a few days, your mind adapts and suddenly everything is normal again. Now you take the glasses off, only to find the regular world seems upside down. It takes another few days to adapt back.
It's kind of like that with these meds. We know they affect neurotransmitter levels in the synaptic gap. And we know that somehow, after several weeks, this will have an effect on depression. But beyond that... It's magic. Somehow the mind is adapting to the new levels of neurotransmitters. But it takes weeks to have an effect.
As for addiction: Look at the withdrawal effects of alcohol. Delirium tremors? That's nasty! These anti-depressants? It's not like you can take twice as much and get a better high. It just pushes you up to normal.
Two more fun points for you: Depression usually goes away on its own after 6 months. Nobody knows why. So the real goal is to keep folks from suffering, and killing themselves, until the mind repairs itself. Or to enable folks to talk it out in therapy to understand how they've gotten their life in such a rut. The great evil of depression is that folks who have it can't seek help. They just don't have the motivation or energy. It's a trap! The meds let you get help and overcome it.
Second point: Depression is trivially caused -- created -- by poor sleep habits. Insufficient sleep, staying up too late, getting up too early. This is how you create depression in the lab to test new drugs. Mix this with our work habits, working 10, 12, 14, sometimes 16 or more hours a day for weeks/months/years at a time, both parents working multiple jobs while trying to raise kids, being on call 24x7x365, etc.
We live in a society that manufactures depression as a side effect of corporate greed.
Time to watch it again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (@1:25).
FWIW, I'm a linguist (more in computational linguistics these days, but reasonably well based in several theories of linguistics). So I read his two articles about Chomsky. I can't speak to the other articles, but his articles on Chomsky make a lot of sense, and seem accurate enough.
I'm not qualified to pass judgment on most of his other articles (and I've only read a handful), but his article about the consciousness problem seems reasonable: https://blogs.scientificameric...
So I'm not sure it's justifiable to call him a kook.
They didn't complain about simple infections either - they just died.
For those that research these drugs for a family member, one look at the potential side effects has to make deciding on whether or not to grant permission can be a really tough choice. There are a number of drugs and one may work while another doesn't. Or one may have minimal side-effects while others have a lot of side-effects. There's the cost of drugs and the experimentation period of getting the dosage right. I don't know whether or not these things are addictive but that's another potential problem. If caring family is around to help make an informed decision, then I think that they'd be in the camp of using as little as possible as this stuff while making the patient's life comfortable, bearable or livable. It seems like our problem is that family isn't available for a lot of people with psychiatric problems.
Tom Cruise being right is about as likely as him being tall.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Absolutely. Not saying it's wrong. I'm saying it takes time to get it right, and while doctors may have that discipline, many of the patients and people trying to support those patients simply don't.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
We do know that prescribing meds for ADHD doesn't substantially improve outcomes in cohort studies and regional studies on average ... but we're doing it any way. The most generous way of interpreting this is that they don't do much of anything, the scary way is to say it does help some people. Because that would mean it would harm others to get the averages to work out, our doctors just can't predict the outcome.
Any reason not to say "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy?"
My pics.
Gaaah, bad copy pasta - I meant to write:
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
My pics.
WTF? Look around dude, we are a long way from cavemen. For all we know those stupid drawings on cave walls were made by the depressed guy who didn't want to go outside anymore.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
I actually enjoyed the lack of sex drive sertraline gave me (unfortunately just for a couple of weeks, then it gradually came back). Not so much the always clenched jaws and the diarrhoea. But as long as it helped I continued to take it (about a year) Switched to mirtazapine a month ago without any tapering. Mirtazapine has its own set of side effects, but as long it works...
Then again I have been struggling with a depression for the best part of the past twenty years - anything that helps is welcome. And sertraline really helped a lot in the first 6 months, then it slowly stopped working. I took just 25 mg, but going any higher didn't help more, just made the side effects more pronounced. So yep, I whis I'd started taking psychiatric medication years ago instead of being scared off by the horror stories like yours.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Kind of hard to dig deeper if the person is overwhelmed by the symptoms. If someone wants to kill themselves today, you don't want to risk taking 3 months of therapy to try to get to the bottom of their problems.
If it takes you 3 months, go find a job you don't suck at. It never takes me more than an hour.
Also, finding the cause doesn't necessarily fix everything.
Yes. You actually need to treat the cause and your average therapist doesn't know much about that.
Therapy only takes a few months when the therapist doesn't know what they're doing.
That's not going to change any time soon, hence medication.
Nah, they just jumped off the cliff. That does cure depression, actually. Side effects include death, though.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>WTF? Look around dude, we are a long way from cavemen.
I am not entirely sure if you're joking, but have you seen the news lately? Humans are barbarians. latest example : Aleppo.
I've found encounters with emotional intimacy quickly deteriorates my mental health. When I'm emotionally-hurt and insecure, I get away from people; rather than healing, I get worse if people start crowding around with their sympathy. The entire notion of an emotional support structure as a critical component in treating depression, ADHD, or other psychiatric conditions works completely-backwards in my case, to the point of eventually driving me to violent antisocial behavior.
I guess violence is the correct answer to what is perceived as a constant, unending, harmful assault. The perception might be a bit off, but the outcome makes sense. I cope well: I simply don't have any friends, because there's essentially nothing good about having friends, in the same way there's nothing good about using a razor blade to cut yourself repeatedly.
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There's no sense to thinking that medicating something would make it better. In this case, like in all cases, medicating the issue only makes it less-worse. It'll always be a gradual decline. Headache pills don't make you superman. They reduce the headache 99%, they don't eliminate it, and they have side-effects.
There are loads of reasons for modern-day psychiatric problems. I'd bet that most of them surround being indoors -- lack of light, lack of exercise, lack of real-world animal problems, lack of proper fresh air, lack of visual distance, lack of colour, lack of contrast, lack of sun. I'd bet that the rest surround a lifestyle based on work -- lack of variety, high stress, mostly indoors, all-hours, lack of control.
So given that the solution is a change in lifestyle, and probably a change of environment, the medication is nothing more than a crutch. If you don't solve the problem, congrats-to-you, now you live with a crutch. Gradual decline.
I suffer from anxiety and depression that runs in my family. I used to be afraid to enter a building if there were other people in it, this invisible wall kept me from doing things I enjoyed, and I would often feel worthless, despite having a decent lifestyle with what could only be described as first world problems. Anxiety attacks that felt like either a heart attack or this sense of impending death occured almost every day. These do not occur due to some sort of emotional trigger. I tried exercise, eating healthy, and relaxing. There was some benefit, but nothing that stopped the anxiety attacks. Sertraline has been life changing for me. I'm able to go outside, I'm less nervous in large groups or around strangers, and I'm more accepting of both my gifts and my shortcoming. I haven't had an anxiety attack for years. I don't miss having one. The only major side effect is that I have to pee a lot, and I get nauseous if I miss a dose, but I'm willing to make that trade off. I wish I could go back in time and reclaim 10 more years prior to starting zoloft. I recommend that critics of psychiatric medication watch Stephen Fry's "The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive" or listen to the experiences of people who rely on those medications before making blanket statements of "useless" or some conspiratorial claim.
(Meta: Posting in a discussion about psychiatric meds using a style that's more crazy than usual. Sure! Why not!)
But we know that you're a transSEXual from the Transylvania Galaxy here to make Christmas illegal! That's the only reason! That's why you hate God Emperor Trump! You're in cahoots with the lizard people! Get over it! She lost, you leftist transSEXual!
Don't cry about gender being innate you transSEXual freak! We've heard all the excuses we should accept raping little girls in the women's room! Everybody knows that gender is a social construct, and it's YOUR failure to assimilate to your assigned gender you transSEXual rapist!
She lost! Get over it! Trump! Trump! Trump! Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up! Now sieg heil to Santa you heathen leftist politically correct transSEXual rapist!
Wow. WTF?
APK is an abbreviation for "Addicted to Pain Killers" ... not a reference.
Heh, you don't come around here often do you?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I wonder if it's not necessarily over-medication, but a reduction in under-reporting. Even in the golden age of the middle class (1950s or so in the US) people never talked about mental issues. Now, everyone talks about them, everyone's in therapy and everyone's taking something. It used to be somewhat normal for the father of a family to come home from work and get exceedingly drunk if he had a bad day -- that's not seen as normal now. Same thing with smoking - it's a really bad habit, but having almost every adult inhaling nicotine all day probably masked a lot of problems. So, the reduction in self-medication along with a reduction in the stigma associated with getting help might explain this. One problem I see is that if you need real help, not just a bunch of pills, that part of the system isn't there anymore. Most states are completely done with inpatient mental health services, only providing enough funding to house the truly dangerous and some of the cases that are hopeless and can't ever transition to a normal life. There's no way to call a time-out and dig into what's really wrong.
I do think that society has changed to a much higher level of under-the-surface stress. Those of us who work in IT for big companies are just waiting for the MBAs to finish their reports that will prompt the CIO to offshore the workforce. Even if you're not a "model consumer" everything costs a lot and is geared to having two well-compensated spouses working. As a parent in that spot, I can attest that it's very hard keeping all the balls in the air - you have to simultaneously focus on your job, your financial situation, your kids and your spouse. It's very stressful and I could definitely see people losing their grip on things if any extra stress gets heaped on top of it.
One trend I've been seeing over about 25 years of working is the flattening of organizations and the changes in work. Back in the 50s, that father i talked about might be a mid-level paper pusher or work on a factory line doing basic work. Factory work and basic corporate work is disappearing. With flatter organizations, ordinary workers aren't as protected from the constant raining down of office politics...I know i have several virtual managers all pulling on me for various things. Corporate politics is nasty business and regular workers used to be protected by supervisors...now the MBA theory is recommending 5 or less levels between you and the CEO. This sounds great in theory - less bureaucracy, etc. but it exposes people to a lot of extra stress they wouldn't normally have.
What I mean is that most often just the meds are prescribed and nothing else happens. No tests that checks if there's an underlying cause like out of balance thyroid etc. Doctors are too focused on their special area that they don't want to admit that the problem may be relieved better and faster if there's a root cause examination as well.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Perfect.
With parents who decided to try and be their kids BFFs, and with schools that hand out participation ribbons, it's no wonder kids grow up not learning how to deal with adversity. Then suddenly after four years of partying in college, they're left with a huge pile of debt, and limited job prospects, and poor coping mechanisms. I'd be willing to bet that the demographics also point mostly toward middle to upper class millennials for the increase in issues. Of course, there's still a large cohort of baby boomers who've been unable to make a decent living since they got fired during the recession...sure, they're probably working, but I said "decent" living.
Just another day in Paradise
This explains the response to trump victory. Seriously.
FTFY. Seriously, I have a couple close friends who've told me that their millennial aged kids called them in tears after the election. Fucking snowflakes, learn to deal with it. And, for the record, I didn't vote for him.
Just another day in Paradise
I think that the medications are great for those who need it. For them the meds are great and sometimes life changing.
However, I think there is a large portion who are prescribed such medicine that really need to be prescribed nothing more than a healthier diet and at least 10 minutes of sun a day or try to get more than 4 hours a sleep a night. Try 8 hours for a few weeks.. Or perhaps need to be simply told that five 64oz soft drinks a day is not good for you. DUH!
And don't get me started on giving kids drugs simply because a kid has a lot of energy . . .
Question then, why do YOU post as an anonymous coward? Is it perhaps your flavour of insanity isn't valued around here?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I don't buy the "slower" part. My connection to the world is very, very fast, so fast as to be almost instantaneous. So, try again.
I think the reason you post anon is so people can't block your bullshit from every thread that you spew.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
All of these drugs have severe mind-altering side effects. Memory loss sometime permanent is a frequent complaint. Dulling of emotions another. Of course, along with all the dulling, the bad thoughts are also dulled and thus the effectiveness. The drugs make you less human so that you can live with the fact that being human is a tough sordid ordeal. Hell, being alive is a tough sordid ordeal. It's just that since we are sentient, we question everything and that causes the root problem. I think that if depression is caught early and diet and exercise is introduced, it can be prevented from becoming life-consuming but it is not recognized early enough and it becomes severe, there is no times for games, the drugs are then needed to prevent a much worse outcome.
Re: 1 & 2 -- I'm referring to the therapist.
Re 3, I hope so, been doing this professionally for 20 years.
It's a joke derived from how he thought Trump voters were crazy, but that there's really more leftists taking psychiatric meds and on disability than conservatives.
Nothing crazy about this post...
In order to get psychiatric treatment, you have to be willing to get it. I've run into enough people who thought my depression was a character flaw, and would never admit such in themselves, and my guess is that they tended to vote Trump.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Meds are cheaper than therapists. Proper mental health treatment tends to take a lot of professional hours, whereas proper physical health treatment generally requires a lot fewer, and treatments are less expensive. If you're trying to run a health system on the cheap, cutting back on talk therapy (which should be used with the meds, for clinical depression) saves a lot of money.
As far as the root cause goes, it would be wonderful to find a treatable root cause, but we don't understand mental illness nearly well enough for that in most cases. Depression, to stick to what I know, is diagnosed as a combination of self-reported symptoms, and progress is measured by self-reporting. There's probably multiple causes, only some of them benefiting from anti-depressants, but it's cheaper to throw a prescription at someone than to understand and heal them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
APK - alprazolam, Percocet, ketamine. I think that explains the posts ;-)
The warnings on antidepressant for suicidal ideation comes from the fact that when you're severely depressed and the antidepressant start to work you actually get a little motivation. The lack of motivation in deep depression might have kept you from jumping off that bridge but once they start to work and you have motivation but haven't been working long enough to help the depression you just like find the energy to do it.
To be honest, a lot of the time, it is a character issue. Hear me out. Most depression happens because things are going very wrong in one's life, which is usually (but not always) a result of past decisions. I've been depressed, and I recovered stronger than before. Most people do not belong on psychiatric drugs. They're too dangerous. They may help one be a productive citizen, but in my experience with family members, they beget their own disorders, and can disrupt one's ability to establish meaningful relationships.
;p
On the other hand, your friends may have jumped to assumptions about your situation, but we all do. Most people don't have the energy to deal with their own problems, let alone somebody else's. Some things in life we all go through alone before we fully realize the importance of friends.
To sum it up, I don't think Trump supporters need antidepressants to see the light and vote for entitlements
There's different types of depression. There's situational depression, in which you're depressed because of the crap happening to you. I'm no expert, but my impression is that antidepressants are of very limited, if any, use in treating this. Mine was not situational. Some people asked me what I was depressed about, and the answer was, basically, nothing. That, I believe, is where antidepressants are useful. I'll agree that they are often overprescribed.
I'm also not over my depression, although I keep improving. A few years ago, I felt unhappy, instead of depressed, for the first time in something like fifteen years. I haven't seen that antidepressants in particular cause more problems than they can solve, and my ability to establish meaningful relations is far greater with them than without them. There are other psychiatric medications that have more serious ill effects, but the question is not "Is this person better off healthy or on those meds?" but rather "Is this person better off on these meds or off them?"
There's experimental evidence that depressives perceive the world more realistically than non-depressives. Since my impression is that Trump supporters are looking at him overly optimistically, and listening to what they want to hear, we'd be better off if they were on depressants.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Fair enough, but I'm also familiar with "seeing things more realistically", and on the scale of special snowflake to cynical pessimist, conservatives don't tend to be snowflakes.
The reason Trump supporters are so excited is because we haven't had a feasible opportunity on the ballot to vote against government corruption in a long time, and it was the perfect way to show what we think of Political Correctness, and put the SJWs in their place. It's not about optimism. Whether Trump is the vehicle or not, the movement will continue to grow because people are affected by PC politics.
Trump and Pence are apparently special snowflakes. The theater is not a safe place, although you usually can get trigger warnings.
Voting for Trump was not a vote against corruption. The guy bribed a state attorney general into not prosecuting him, after all. He's known for underpaying contractual obligations and telling the people stiffed to sue him.
The most common use of "political correctness", in my observation, is to behave like an asshole and call objections "political correctness". Attacks on PC are usually linked to racism, sexism, or other bigotry. The movement you described is primarily white men who don't think for themselves, and that demographic is shrinking relative to the population.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Oh, now I see, you support trigger warnings, political correctness, and condemn racism in the same breath as generalizing white men -- you're an SJW! You're the reason we put Trump in office. Trigger warning, you might find the rest of this post offensive. Please locate your nearest safe space in case of dangerous ideas.
The only people who think Trump is a special snowflake ARE SNOWFLAKES who don't know humor when it smacks them on the face. Trump constantly satirizes PC culture and leftists actually thinks he's being serious!
You can say "political correctness" is used to promote racism, but that's not true, nobody believes that. It's been in use by intellectuals and academia for decades to refer to the insane ideas liberals have about changing the English language. The truth is, people are tired of being called racist for no good reason, and saying it more certainly won't change their vote.
The only reason natural born white Americans are shrinking in proportion is because corrupt politicians are letting immigrants in at unprecedented rates. White people aren't disappearing, they're just getting displaced. Do you think that is sustainable? Either you get a huge nationalist movement, or immigrants make America another big government third world country, and "white people" go build their wealth and freedom somewhere else.
Regardless of what trump does in office, votes for him were votes against corruption and SJWs, because that's what he campaigned on. If he doesn't fix these issues, then the movement will just grow until someone does. I don't expect you to understand any of this. You're too indoctrinated in the left to see any of this happening.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. Saying that a group is mostly white men is not saying anything in general about white men. There are other unpleasant groups that are primarily not white, but bringing those up wasn't relevant.
I don't know how to point out that there's lots of racism in our society without sounding like I'm saying some people are racist. If you're not racist, good. I'm not talking about you. If you are, it's your fault, not mine. Am I supposed to not say what I see because it will offend special right-wing snowflakes? Should I give trigger warnings when I say something I've noticed? Those of you who are white racist and sexist men (and there's lots of you) can certainly come up with safe places.
Immigration isn't as big a deal as it was early in the Twentieth Century, when people complained about the influx of largely Catholic populations like Irish and Polish. Learn some history.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There was no point in saying they were white men except to be racist and sexist. We do have racism problem in America, but it's not from conservatives, or white men, it's from left wing radicals, like BLM and SJWs -- the ones who tell you who the racists are. The most racist white people are tame in the midst of an immigration crisis, while BLM shuts down traffic, shoots cops, and attacks white citizens who passively resist. It's not a contained issue like the KKK has been for decades...it's TOLERATED, and even publicly cheered on.
Comparing the Irish Catholic immigration to the current immigration situation is like comparing stale water to arsenic water. The Catholics, while very different from protestants, largely held the same core beliefs. After all they're both christians with work ethic who believe in limited government and human rights. Not even close to the suicide pill America is swallowing today.
Right-wing snowflakes with trigger warnings and safe spaces? You know those come straight out of the liberal handbook, right. It's how describe themselves, not conservatives. Conservatives don't ask for safe spaces, but for simply the right to free speech anymore. Conservatives are actively suppressed in educational institutions, corporate media, and corporate social media. Even with the internet, it's possible for traditional American values to slip by you and your peers never spoken. If you want answers, you need to look farther than slashdot.