There's some weird causality here, seemingly suggesting that Prozac caused an increase in depression.
>"Prozac was introduced in 1988, and we all know what happened then. Depression went from a relatively rare condition (affecting well under 100,000 people in the 1950s) to an epidemic disease affecting 27 million Americans. "
I'm pretty sure more than 100,000 people suffered from depression in the US in 1950. They might have just gone undiagnosed and self-medicated with alcohol rather than (non-existent) pharmaceuticals. Given that the mental health state of the art in 1950 was an icepick to the frontal lobe, I can hardly blame them for not seeking treatment.
I would imagine that the increase in _diagnosed_ depressed patients occurred because of an increase in both awareness and viable treatment options.
If I'm understanding the logic that this article presents... Apparently after Prozac was introduced, depression became a huge phenomenon in the US. It showed up everywhere. This is evidence to suggest that antidepressants caused depression.
SSRI drugs (sold as 'anti-depressants') have always been known to cause suicide ideation... While they do seem to help some people, it is now known that this is because of the drugs' effects on the neurosteroids [1], NOT because of 'increased serotonin'. Anti-serotonin drugs (LSD, various MAOIs, etc) are much more effective anti-depressants.
There are some good articles in the Boston Globe's archives about Prozac, circa 2000. "Prozac, Revisited", etc [2]. Robert Whitaker [3] worked for the Boston Globe, before he wrote Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic.
[2] http://www.narpa.org/prozac.revisited.htm (the boston globe's official archives site is not so easy to use, but I've previously verified that these stories exist)
The first patient in this BBC article could also have been diagnosed as 'exhausted':
> She had begun taking [SSRIs] while caring for her seriously ill mother and studying for her final exams at Cambridge University, but suffered severe side-effects after her GP prescribed a stronger dose of tablet. (emphasis added)
I think 'exhaustion' is a frequent cause behind the symptoms labeled "depression".
In May of this year, I watched Lexapro (an SSRI) destroy all the progress I'd made with my girlfriend... She'd asked for this drug a month after she'd escaped from her court-ordered tranquilization, because she thought it had helped her years ago. Really it just helped her relapse on cocaine then. This time it caused rapid heartbeat, and much anxiety. Her last benzodiazepine turned her into an anxious wreck... The psychiatrists got hold of her again, and they're making sure that she will never recover.
About a week ago I went through videos on my phone... and found one of my girlfriend about a week before she was taken to the hospital. The video proves, beyond any doubt, that she is not "persistently" disabled, that the symptoms that originally put her in the hospital were entirely due to quitting her addictions cold-turkey, and not due to 'defective genes' or other pseudo-scientific rationalization for forcing her to use palliative drugs.
I'm a bit nervous about these articles clearly centred on the USA which seems to have an epidemic of private drug companies pushing all kinds of stuff via doctors who may or may not be getting backhanders to push certian drugs.
I'm not saying this isn't partially true in Europe but the USA definitely comes across as choosing drugs as the first resort for many things that you wouldn't in Europe.
Also, as many have found out, Prozac is cheaper than therapy or CBT which is what some people might benefit from to actually help them resolve the vicious circle of depression.
Except America is the only industrialised nation that allows direct marketing of antidepressants to its populace.
Other industrialised countries - Australia, the UK, France and Germany, etc have also experienced a rise in patients under treatment for these conditions, in lockstep with the US experience, despite this difference you suggest is responsible
Huh, given that something like 15% of Americans are on SSRIs, I wonder how this affects the political landscape (which seems overrun with a new kind of moralizing in the last few decades)
Interesting thing is that antidepressant use rised despite antidepressant being mostly ineffective and their underlying principle of action being flawed.
This raises the question of why antidepressant use rised this way. Could it be that heavily medicated people are easier to manage and keep under control to prevent them from rebelling against the lives they're forced into by the societal system ? Could it be related to huge profits from pharmaceutical corporations ?
Then again Facebook and the computer as a machine middleman in human interaction is destroying social interaction and society fabric by replacing actual meaningful interaction that builds human ability to be human. Not the single cause but a recent and efficient accelerator of a trend that push us further apart from each other.
I recommend watching the following BBC documentaries by Adam Curtis:
The Century of the Self[1]
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom[2]
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace[3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(TV_series)
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_(TV_series)
Well that would explain why placebo is also rising against antidepressants, unless more American are diagnosed with being depressed than they truly are.
There is very little evidence that depression is caused by chemical imbalance in the brain, it's something that big pharma have sold you so they can sell their drugs.
Great book on the topic, check out lost connections.
The headline is a bit confusing. At first glance it might seem to say that 1/3 of Americans take anti-depressants. What it's actually trying to say is that 1/3 of Americans take prescription drugs that have depression as a possible side effect.
Even that seems bizarre to me. What is the percentage of Americans who take prescription drugs... period? I'm a middle-aged man, and (knock on wood!) still haven't come down with any chronic conditions requiring medication. So I would probably assume that no more than 1/3 of Americans take ongoing prescription drugs at all.
Which means I'd have to presume that pretty much all drugs have depression as a possible side effect.
This sounds like an apologist's explanation for an inconvenient truth. Sounds reasonable, but falls apart when confronted with actual data.
(Edit: I'm sure you were paraphrasing what you'd read somewhere.)
Here's a quote from the Boston Globe's 5/7/2000 article:
>> Three years before Prozac received approval by the US Food and Drug Administration in late 1987, the German BGA, that country’s FDA equivalent, had such serious reservations about Prozac’s safety that it refused to approve the antidepressant based on Lilly’s studies showing that previously nonsuicidal patients who took the drug had a fivefold higher rate of suicides and suicide attempts than those on older antidepressants, and a threefold higher rate than those taking placebos.
>> Lilly’s own figures, in reports made available to the Globe, indicate that 1 in 100 previously nonsuicidal patients who took the drug in early clinical trials developed a severe form of anxiety and agitation called akathisia, causing them to attempt or commit suicide during the studies.
"Among both males and females, the study found that people aged 40 and older are more likely to take antidepressants than younger people."
"The study also found that women are two and a half times more likely to take antidepressant medication as males, while 23 percent of women ages 40 to 59 take antidepressants, more than in any other age or sex group."
This comment betrays a remarkable ignorance of mental illness. There is, in fact, a link between the commencement of a course of antidepressants and suicide, but to claim that "...mental illness is created as a result of these Big Pharma medicines" is to ignore a tremendous body of research.
I remember reading an article years ago (I want to say in the New Yorker in the late 90s?) that made something like this point and kinda alarmed me. It pointed out that a second generation of anti-depressants (SSRIs like Prozac) had emerged and been aggressively marketed just as patents were expiring on the first generation (Lithium?) and some troubling long-term effects with those earlier drugs were becoming apparent. It questioned the long-term effects of this new generation of pharmaceuticals. (Or even shorter-term effects whose data had not yet been fully collected and analyzed.)
I have tried periodically to relocate this article but have not yet been able to find it. It's probably old enough now that one could even evaluate the validity of its forebodings.
SSRI use has skyrocketed, and multiple meta-analyses have confirmed that they lead to an increase in suicidal thoughts and behavior when used by children and adolescents.
I don't necessarily agree with the grandparent poster's point of view, as I do think there are big societal changes leading to decreased mental health that are unrelated to the way we treat mental illness...but I do think the increase in usage of psychiatric drugs is a big problem, and may at least partly explain the increased suicide rates.
http://www.alternet.org/health/146659/are_prozac_and_other_p...
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