Antidepressants May not be as Effective as Believed
Many people across the world deal with the difficulty of depression every day. A recent study completed by the Archives of General Psychiatry has revealed that over thirty one million American’s are taking antidepressant medication to combat the disease. Recent studies have shown that these medications such as Prozac, Celexa, Zoloft and Wellbutrin are just as effective as sugar pills given during drug studies.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has found the results between study participants who received actual drugs versus the placebo sugar pills to be similar in many cases. Many doctors believe that although antidepressants have been shown to be effective, many patients are using them instead of changing behavior or life situations that are leading to depression.
It has also been found that many studies revealing the ineffectiveness of antidepressants have been held and not published. Some believe this is because of the large amount of profit pharmaceutical companies see from these products. In 2009 over 9.6 billion dollars was attributed to antidepressant meds.
I always thought ADs were used to stabalise your mood so that you were in a better place to help yourself. I was told that ADs ideally should not be used long-term. If a person's depression is environmental in origin, they may not really be helped by ADs, whereas a person who has some sort of chemical imbalance could be.
This is nothing new, studies have shown this for years.
I think the severity and cause of the depression has a large influence on whether a placebo will work or whether the real thing is needed.
There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: 'This glass is half full'. And then there are those who say: 'This glass is half empty'.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: 'What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!
I always thought ADs were used to stabalise your mood so that you were in a better place to help yourself. I was told that ADs ideally should not be used long-term. If a person's depression is environmental in origin, they may not really be helped by ADs, whereas a person who has some sort of chemical imbalance could be.
That;s why I am on mine, to get my mood up to a level where therapy will help, then combine them with therapy, and then take me off them to see if it will help.
Mmm every other AD study says how they're no more effective than a placebo. But then there are lots of reliable ones saying they DO work. Sometimes you have to watch out for who commissioned the study, on either end of the bias.
Wake me up before I change again
Remind me the story that I won't get insane
Tell me why it's always the same
Explain me the reason why I'm so much in pain.
I know for a fact my ADs work for my physiological depression. They do **** all for emotional depression though. If I'm sad, I'm sad, and no pill is gonna fix that. But when my chemicals are imbalanced, I feel the effect of the drug.
I know for a fact my ADs work for my physiological depression. They do **** all for emotional depression though. If I'm sad, I'm sad, and no pill is gonna fix that. But when my chemicals are imbalanced, I feel the effect of the drug.
This.
'Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.'
['There is only one thing we say to death. Not today'.']
'We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.’ – Oscar Wilde
‘It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.’ Sydney Carter
I know for a fact my ADs work for my physiological depression. They do **** all for emotional depression though. If I'm sad, I'm sad, and no pill is gonna fix that. But when my chemicals are imbalanced, I feel the effect of the drug.
I'm incredulous to any hypothesizes that ascribes mental illness to simple chemical imbalances. If that was all there was too it, then drugs should have an immediate effect. I guess what it come down to, try the drugs. If they work then continue them, if they don't help then discontinue them.
Sorry, I should have been clear. When I referred to chemicals I was speaking of the specific hormones you mentioned. The tablets I take affect my brains response to those hormones. When they are out of whack and causing a physiological depression, they are effective. When I am lost in bad memories and feeling sad, they do not, because no amount of hormone manipulation will get rid of the memories I have.
The symptoms of depression are know to occur from a wide variety of physiological problems. Wikipedia lists many of them.
Anyways, that drugs mainly effects only one of the neurotransmitters I listed. I take bupropion, an NRI. It effects a different neurotransmitter, but is mildly effective at keeping my mood from dipping. I'll repeat myself and say that attributing depression to a single neurotransmitter seems too simplistic.
Like people have said, such studies have been coming out for years, yet it doesn't seem to be slowing doctors from prescribing them unnecessarily. Thing is, if you have typical major depression, anti-depressants will probably work very well for you. Same with having typical bipolar disorder or typical schizophrenia with their related meds. Reality is, most people do not fit into those categories. There are people whose moods are related to problems with one or two neurotransmitters and meds work well and it has nothing to do with anything environmental. But they really aren't the majority. Most people don't fit into those labels, and so I think that's why psych meds often do not work, and sometimes create imbalances where there was none before. People are often misdiagnosed, diagnosed correctly but have a combining environmental factor, or the problem could only be environmental, or there could be a comorbid disorder. Humans are usually more complicated than psychiatry tends to treat them.
All an SSRI, for example, does, is stop serotonin from being degraded as quickly in your body (hence "selective serotonin uptakeinhibitor"), so it increases your serotonin concentrations from what it was before you took the med. If the only problem is that serotonin was too low for whatever reason, it's a wonder drug. But if that's the problem along with other things, you'll get mixed results. And if serotonin wasn't the problem at all, you'll risk getting worse and that's where you can get the "black box warnings"... that antidepressants can cause suicidal behavior, etc.
That's why medication should be used more of a last option, prescribed only by doctors that have been trained in these medications, and people should be much better monitored for changes in their moods. It's only a simple fix if it's a simple problem, and unfortunately that's not the case for most people. And unfortuantely there is no test to find out if your levels of neurotransmitters are at the right level, so it's all subjective testing. Neurotransmitters, like horomones (which are similar to each other in many ways), have powerful effects at very low amounts and are hard to detect and research efficiently. They also are not very well understood by the field of neuroendocrinology in terms of overall effects on the brain and body, and even less is understood on their interactions with each other. And then you take into account that environmental experience on the brain is poorly understood, and that circadian rhythms also affect neurotransmitters and hormones, and those are poorly understood too. Hopefully research will start getting to creating diagnostics based on objective testing (i.e. blood testing, brain imaging, etc.), but at this point, science just isn't there. What is known is very vague compared to other medical sciences, and existing studies conflict because it's a very complex thing to study, isolate, and correct. There just is no reliable test for mental disorder diagnoses or their causes. The best we have is talking to a patient and trying to match it to a set of symptoms that fit a label in regards to mental and emotional issues, which is of course highly subjective and impossibly complex, even done by a professional.
And so really using psych meds at the present time is trial and error, and it needs to not be a first resort as it often is, because not only do meds not always work or treat the actual disorder, they also have the potential to create imbalances and disorders that weren't there before and make a person much much worse. They have benefits for some people, but they also have serious risks, and both doctors and patients need to take that into account when deciding on treatments.
Stereotypes are the epitome of human laziness.
- me
^Good post. However, I get the feeling that it's not so much about the specific neurotransmitter, as it is about how the nervous system adapts to being flooded with a specific neurotransmitter. And this adaptation probably takes a week or two. Who knows?
Also, a ham sandwich would make me a whole lot happier than Zoloft. Just sayin.
