This is exactly how I feel about the pharmaceutical industry. The brain is such a vast and unknown universe and we're hitting it with wide hammers to see what will happen. Wasn't it just shown that Prozac did more harm than good?
1. "Eight showed improvements in reported levels of depression, with four of them improving so much they were no longer classed as depressed. Some responded within six hours of the first infusion of ketamine."
2. "Lead researcher Dr Rupert McShane said: 'It really is dramatic for some people, it's the sort of thing really that makes it worth doing psychiatry, it's a really wonderful thing to see.'" [emphasis added]
Wait ... what? Saying, "Take this pill and you'll feel better" isn't how psychiatry is (or was) defined. That isn't psychiatry, it's pharmacology.
Also, none of the treatments, the old ones like talk therapy, or the new ones including drugs and/or deep-brain stimulation, suggest or identify a cause for depression. So far we've only been treating the symptoms of a disease whose cause we don't know.
I long for the good old days, the days of science, when we identified the cause of a disease, then designed a cure based on our understanding of its cause.
This isn't a cure, it's a symptomatic treatment, and to remain effective it would have to continue forever, reliant on a drug whose mechanism is as unknown as the thing being treated, just as with ADHD and PTSD. I'm sure Big Pharma is very upset that another perpetual market for drugs is opening up.
Having been through chronic suicidal depression, the idea that we're now going to be treating it with yet another psychoactive medication, this time way more powerful and costing significantly more money, doesn't sit right.
To be clear, that does not imply that people are more depressed over the past two decades. On the positive side, it could mean that we're finally able to diagnose and treat something that has plagued us all along. On the negative side, it could be the direct result of the Big Pharma marketing and profit machine.
> These are the medicines the pharmaceutical industry have been pushing on us for decades to treat any malady of the mind, and they have been proven to be barely more effective than placebo treatments.
Weird, the studies where they're given to sufferers of severe depression and anxiety say otherwise.
A lot of strong claims here. Can you provide solid sources?
I have a hard time believing that psychiatrists and psychologists would endorse psychotropic drugs because of some big pharma conspiracy.
If you're right, I'd like to know. But if claims like, "every longterm study on every pharma drug shows that you are worse off in the long run," are so sweeping as to seem spurious.
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.
"Over the years, thousands of people taking or withdrawing from Paxil or other psychiatric drugs have committed violent acts, including suicide, experts said, though no firm statistics are available. Because many factors could have contributed to that behavior, it is still far from clear who is at risk — and for whom the drugs are protective."[1]
So we have a case where thousands of people we're put at a big risk,with clearly illegal practices , and nobody is going to jail ? and on the other hand, no major systemic change has happened - like taking the responsibility for clinical testing , and drug advertising out of drug developer's hands ?
I wonder if anyone is doing a study into the particulars on the three groups to try and find common characteristics to guide future prescription? The cynic in me assumes not as that would reduce demand so why would a manufacturer fund such a study? But perhaps I am over cynical.
Speculating wildly for a moment, think that misdiagnosis is one likely reason. Maybe anti-depressants work on depression (the disease), but do not work on (say) CPD (where depression is just a symptom). Of course actually correctly diagnosing people will be time consuming and expensive. And I personally am not convinced we actually have a good grip on what diseases exist in mental health but that is another whole discussion...
Well that would explain why placebo is also rising against antidepressants, unless more American are diagnosed with being depressed than they truly are.
Seems like psychiatry is throwing things at the wall and going with whatever sticks. That plus spurious statistical correlations supporting the use of certain medications.
I can appreciate how this would be incredibly controversial. I think part of the biggest problem with this decision is that everyone is agreeing that the reason for diagnosing people with a problem is so that people can get insurance coverage. So we are going to change how we interact and support people in our society just so that insurance can cover their support. It probably means that we need to actually reassess how we provide mental health care coverage for people under insurance rather than creating diagnoses for the insurance companies.
Also, I agree that the drug company response to this is also another big concern. Given that there have not seemed to be significant advancements (if I'm wrong please send links!) in depression and anxiety research that has provided actionable treatment options beyond the pretty blunt SSRI and other antidepressant and CBT, I could totally see drug companies just find more similar drugs that have the same blunt effect and tell people they need to be medicated. I realize those drugs have provided some life-saving help to some individuals, but it would be great to better understand specifically what causes those feelings/sensations/thoughts and find truly targeted mechanisms for understanding. The same is probably true in cases of extreme grief as well
Not a surprise given their general method of action. Messing with seratonin pathways is always tricky.
The issue here I feel is that sometimes depression is a symptom that one needs to change something in their life. So I dont think we should try to blunt all suffering.
Pharma really will do anything to find a depression drug they can sell for huge markup when LSD, ketamine, and psilocybin are already known to work effectively.
I see patients still take it seriously because of the heavy marketing of Zoloft in particular.
The drugs are literally have serotonin in the name.
I still hear people regularly refer to mental health problems being due to a "Chemical imbalance", often as a way to defend their use of pharmaceuticals and dismiss the efficacy of any other intervention. It's that they see people justify a non-falsifiable in the efficacy of the current course of treatment. It's that it's hard enough to convince people who have been on SSRI's for decades and are doing badly to take a month to ween off them, a month to see how things go, and a month to get back on them. If they believe their brains are fundamentally broken without evidence it's just about impossible.
It's that when a sixth of American women have taken anti-d's in the past month, and the most popular explanation as to why is they have broken brains that need to be treated with medicine, as if their problems must all be due to some genetic issue or whatever, I find it abhorrent.
I don't know, it pisses me off that these drugs are popular largely due to a mythology and how difficult they are to stop more than they're efficacious is all (not that they are not efficacious). It's not that psychiatrists don't know this theory isn't true, I'm well aware the theory has been well known to lack support for a long time in medical circles, it's that they don't effectively inform their patients.
Medicine should stop calling them "SSRIs" if the SSRI part is a tangential side-effect, better educate patients on the fact that medicine doesn't really know why the drugs work, or even if a given patient will respond to them better than placebo. Governments should ban pharmaceutical advertisements because they make people sick and misinformed.
Why not both? Pharma and Social Media profit from depressed people. Nothing ever has a single root cause. There are always multiple causes often working together in a vicious cycle. Also, what's wrong with vibrators?
I have noticed. Multiple times I've gone to a Psychiatrist and they have decided to try something because it's new and supposed to work, when the reality is they've only ever put 2 or 3 clients on it and it has been working for a few weeks, and the medication itself has only been out a year.
In addition, the worst times in my life were the times when I was taking psychiatric medications.
The problem is that most of these medications have bad side-effects and only suppress the symptoms. It's not that these drugs are inherently evil, but that they are erroneously used way too early and often.
The biopsychosocial model [1] is ignored more and more. That is, social and psychological factors are given less and less weight. For example, someone who is working an unfulfilling job in a big city is too easily prescribed some SSRI instead of promoting a career change and heavily increased social interaction to form deeper relationships.
The trend even just among biological factors is frightening. Classic example being bad diet. Promoting improved eating habbits and exercise is increasingly looked at as body-shaming. Because this removes personal responsibility. It's easier to tell someone that they just have bad luck with their brain chemistry than to point out that their life choices suck.
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