On June 05 2009 03:03 no_comprender wrote: succeeding at addressing my own issues taught me more about the human mind than reading a thousand books or knowing a million mental cases.
No. No they did not. Believing your own limited, subjective experiences give you any sort of reasonable understanding of any topic as complex as this is one of the worst kinds of ignorance.
On June 05 2009 03:03 no_comprender wrote: succeeding at addressing my own issues taught me more about the human mind than reading a thousand books or knowing a million mental cases.
No. No they did not. Believing your own limited, subjective experiences give you any sort of reasonable understanding of any topic as complex as this is one of the worst kinds of ignorance.
Agreed 100%. The anecdotal fallacy is one of the hardest to uproot in people, especially when it is deepseated in narcissism.
I agree with Foucault wholeheartedly even though I'm not too fond to this topic.
But I did take conspiracy 101 and there is a motivation for pharmaceuticals and research institutes to put you on drugs since they make their earnings off of it.
I suggest we look at the history of depression to look beyond what modern medicine can provide us as far as scientific and irrefutable proof. Well from my 10 minutes of googling I couldn't find any wikipedia excerpts to which brag newfound knowledges about, but I sustain the idea below from my intuition so feel free to call me a retard:
Depression wasn't ever treated with drugs in history. It just wasn't considered a disease at all until all the new psychologists from the XX century started saying we're sick. It was said those depressed were just feeling down, which is normal, lots of reasons to be down about in the post-industrial society. But now they have "Major Depressive Disorder". A fraction of these people commit suicide (dare I guess its about 5%), and perhaps just as many do have biological disfunctions which are inevitable regardless of the person's environment, and do need medical support. But for the vast majority, 95%, don't, never did. They're just feeling down, d00d.
My point is, depression shouldn't be diagnosed so easily to 95% of the people, THEY're just milking our moneyz. Profiting from a sick society, will you.
Also I blame the schools and eugenicists but I don't want to go there atm.
Oh yeah, about schizophrenia, man that is such a bullshit diagnose, even worse than depression. I'm a 100% positive that if I went to a psychologist or psychiatrist they'd diagnose me with Paranoid Schizophrenia just because my world view doesn't match theirs. There's so many new diagnoses being invented these days to put us on meds... and they never address the environmental causes!
To the OP: it's hard because you'd have to find a link to people who use antidepressants and don't have some sort of depression. The fact that they're depressed is a gigantic confounding variable.
On June 05 2009 12:21 Yurebis wrote: Oh yeah, about schizophrenia, man that is such a bullshit diagnose, even worse than depression. I'm a 100% positive that if I went to a psychologist or psychiatrist they'd diagnose me with Paranoid Schizophrenia just because my world view doesn't match theirs. There's so many new diagnoses being invented these days to put us on meds... and they never address the environmental causes!
Man, I'm just reading this post, and then I thought of replacing the word rollin' with "trollin' in this video:
On June 05 2009 12:15 Yurebis wrote: A fraction of these people commit suicide (dare I guess its about 5%), and perhaps just as many do have biological disfunctions which are inevitable regardless of the person's environment, and do need medical support. But for the vast majority, 95%, don't, never did. They're just feeling down, d00d.
My point is, depression shouldn't be diagnosed so easily to 95% of the people, THEY're just milking our moneyz. Profiting from a sick society, will you.
You're suggesting that it's not depression unless they commit suicide?...
There are certain criteria, both temporal and qualitative, that are used to make the diagnosis of major depressive disorder. It's not so arbitrary as you seem to imply. And if you think "they're just feeling down", well, I suggest you go to a psychiatry clinic and see the real patients for yourself.
On June 05 2009 12:15 Yurebis wrote: I sustain the idea below from my intuition so feel free to call me a retard:
On June 05 2009 12:21 Yurebis wrote: Oh yeah, about schizophrenia, man that is such a bullshit diagnose, even worse than depression. I'm a 100% positive that if I went to a psychologist or psychiatrist they'd diagnose me with Paranoid Schizophrenia just because my world view doesn't match theirs. There's so many new diagnoses being invented these days to put us on meds... and they never address the environmental causes!
On June 05 2009 12:15 Yurebis wrote: I agree with Foucault wholeheartedly even though I'm not too fond to this topic.
But I did take conspiracy 101 and there is a motivation for pharmaceuticals and research institutes to put you on drugs since they make their earnings off of it.
I suggest we look at the history of depression to look beyond what modern medicine can provide us as far as scientific and irrefutable proof. Well from my 10 minutes of googling I couldn't find any wikipedia excerpts to which brag newfound knowledges about, but I sustain the idea below from my intuition so feel free to call me a retard:
Depression wasn't ever treated with drugs in history. It just wasn't considered a disease at all until all the new psychologists from the XX century started saying we're sick. It was said those depressed were just feeling down, which is normal, lots of reasons to be down about in the post-industrial society. But now they have "Major Depressive Disorder". A fraction of these people commit suicide (dare I guess its about 5%), and perhaps just as many do have biological disfunctions which are inevitable regardless of the person's environment, and do need medical support. But for the vast majority, 95%, don't, never did. They're just feeling down, d00d.
My point is, depression shouldn't be diagnosed so easily to 95% of the people, THEY're just milking our moneyz. Profiting from a sick society, will you.
Also I blame the schools and eugenicists but I don't want to go there atm.
So part of your argument is that depression wasn't treated with drugs in past history, so this must clearly be a phenomenon invented by psychologists looking to make a buck?
It wasn't until very recently that we have been able to really see how brain signals such as neurotransmitters effect things such as mood (even now, our knowledge is very basic). You are correct when you say that major depressive disorder should not be given as a diagnosis so quickly, but this does not mean that the disease itself isn't real, or that the drugs the pharmaceutical companies make are just a scam.
It's not a total scam, I gave it a threshold of 5%. What I'm saying is, it's nowhere as common as they want to portrait it is. Antidepressants and other psychotic drugs are part of a big industry now, and doctors aren't looking at the causes but only at the symptoms, and drugging you whenever possible.
If you don't believe it I don't blame you, I wouldn't believe it either a few years ago; I got no proof or experts backing me up, so whats the point. Just throwing it out there so perhaps it makes sense for you or someone else, some other time.
Also I'm no troll. That's what I believe in, I just don't feel like writing and elaborating too much right now.
On June 05 2009 12:15 Yurebis wrote: I agree with Foucault wholeheartedly even though I'm not too fond to this topic.
But I did take conspiracy 101 and there is a motivation for pharmaceuticals and research institutes to put you on drugs since they make their earnings off of it.
I suggest we look at the history of depression to look beyond what modern medicine can provide us as far as scientific and irrefutable proof. Well from my 10 minutes of googling I couldn't find any wikipedia excerpts to which brag newfound knowledges about, but I sustain the idea below from my intuition so feel free to call me a retard:
Depression wasn't ever treated with drugs in history. It just wasn't considered a disease at all until all the new psychologists from the XX century started saying we're sick. It was said those depressed were just feeling down, which is normal, lots of reasons to be down about in the post-industrial society. But now they have "Major Depressive Disorder". A fraction of these people commit suicide (dare I guess its about 5%), and perhaps just as many do have biological disfunctions which are inevitable regardless of the person's environment, and do need medical support. But for the vast majority, 95%, don't, never did. They're just feeling down, d00d.
My point is, depression shouldn't be diagnosed so easily to 95% of the people, THEY're just milking our moneyz. Profiting from a sick society, will you.
Also I blame the schools and eugenicists but I don't want to go there atm.
Jeez you even say yourself you dont know what you are talking about so why not just stfu.
And lol " I gave it a threshhold of 5%" You said 5% commit suicide.. so you really do think only people who commt suicide are depressed, I see, thank you for the enlightenment I'm still not convinced youre not a troll
On June 05 2009 12:21 Yurebis wrote: Oh yeah, about schizophrenia, man that is such a bullshit diagnose, even worse than depression. I'm a 100% positive that if I went to a psychologist or psychiatrist they'd diagnose me with Paranoid Schizophrenia just because my world view doesn't match theirs. There's so many new diagnoses being invented these days to put us on meds... and they never address the environmental causes!
Man, I'm just reading this post, and then I thought of replacing the word rollin' with "trollin' in this video: IE: No way anyone is believing that.
No he's right. Schizophrenia is a sketchy diagnose, which has been debated immensely. Recently 5 different english psychiatrists were diagnosing a woman suffering from delusion and while her original diagnosis was schizophrenia, she got 1 paranoid schizophrenia diagnose, 1 schizotypal diagnose, 2 manic-depressive diagnoses and I forgot what the last one was.
Basically the diagnostic tools of psychiatry are very vague, and schizophrenia is a vague diagnose.
And yeah, 90% emphasis should be put on environmental causes, since the environment shapes our genetic dispositions.
On June 05 2009 12:21 Yurebis wrote: Oh yeah, about schizophrenia, man that is such a bullshit diagnose, even worse than depression. I'm a 100% positive that if I went to a psychologist or psychiatrist they'd diagnose me with Paranoid Schizophrenia just because my world view doesn't match theirs. There's so many new diagnoses being invented these days to put us on meds... and they never address the environmental causes!
Holy fuck, this thread just reached a new low.
Please read up on the history of psychiatry. Not long ago psychiatry was veeery fucked up, and back then people were like "the doctors know what they're doing, those treatments work for the patients". The treatments were putting people in cold baths for days, depriving them of sleep, scaring them etc etc. Do you really think we have come such a long way from 5-6 decades back, that psychiatrists knows exactly what they are doing, when they never really have had a clue at any point in history.
I think we will look back in 50 years and shake our heads at this mass-prescription of mind altering substances; anti-depressants, ritalin, concerta etc etc. Hopefully mankind will then have realized that society/environment is to blame for psychological issues and that these can be corrected by fixing environmental factors.
On June 05 2009 03:33 Gokey wrote: You've set up the typical straw man argument. No one in this thread has said that serotonin is the ONLY thing causing depression. Depression seems to be the result of a complex interplay between genetic/physiologic and environmental factors. Medications are only one part of the current standard of care, which is why doctors recommend it with other forms of treatment, such as lifestyle changes/programs, psychotherapy, etc. In addition, numerous anti-depressant drugs have direct or indirect effects on other neurotransmitters, such as norepinephrine and dopamine.
Yeah, however patients are often made to both take medicine and get therapy. I've myself had to eat medicine in order to go in therapy, which is ridiculous. Surely they recommend other stuff as well, but not often do they take away medication from the treatment "plan". I know they have effects on these neurotransmitters as well, but I think the whole idea of SSRI is flawed. You can't heal something using medicines that has it's origins outside of the depressed person. It's just masking the symptoms and creating an illusion of well-being. It's a well known problem that peoples problems usually come back once they quite their medication.
On June 05 2009 03:33 Gokey wrote: Your solution to depression boils down to "walk it off". Everyone is different; some people are able to take that first, hardest step by themselves; others need a combination of aforementioned therapies, only one of which is medications.
You may point to individual clinical trials that show ambivalent data on certain medications, but taken as a whole in meta-analyses, anti-depressants have strong evidence to back their efficacy. I find it amusing that you make such an adamant, blanket statement ("Why would you want to get the drug then?") after using the word "probably" in the sentence immediately prior.
Yeah, I know it's easy to speak for everyone and I do make that mistake from time to time. Generalization, we all do it. Anyways, like I said I think the entire medication concept for treating depression/anxiety is going the wrong way about it. What I said above. No anti-depressants do NOT have strong evidence to their efficacy lol. The tests that show that they work have an efficacy of like 10% more than placebo. How is helping 60% of the patients good in any way? And what is the medication actually "helping" with? Let's say someones depressed feelings go away. Good. But what if most of this persons feelings went away, both sad and happy, is that good? No, it's mental lobotomy. Many people report becoming dulled out and numb from SSRI:s.
Taken as a whole, meta-analyses of SSRI-trials (every trial, not only the ones that medical companies choose to show) show that placebo and exercise/lifestyle changes are as good as SSRI for treating mild/moderate depression. SSRI were somewhat better (a few percentages) when it came down to severe depression.
Yeah, the word "probably" was not really intended. I remember reading studies on it but didn't remember exactly what studies. Strike "probably".
On June 05 2009 03:33 Gokey wrote: Sexual dysfunction is a possible side effect that is discussed by every competent doctor with the patient before starting on anti-depressants. This side effect is common knowledge and is one of the things that are mandatory to be documented in patient charts; I am not sure how you want it to be "more widely debated". For most people who are severely depressed, they can't function even at a basic level in their daily lives, much less thinking of their sexuality.
Possible side effect? I don't know anyone who has been on SSRI and hasn't gotten sexual dysfunction. Actually the dysfunction is more like impotence if you're on a normal dose of an anti-depressant. Shit just doesn't work. Why would a medicine with such a serious side-effect even be used for treatment? It boggles my mind. Not mentioning SSRI provoking panic attacks in people who never had them before, they make you sweat, gain weight, tremblings, etc etc.
Yeah but like 90% of the people (stop saying patients please, it's stigmatizing and unnecessary) being prescribed don't have severe depression, but mild/moderate. There has been an change in indication for diagnoses, which means that more and more symptoms are being associated with depression. Even feeling mildly down and having headaches can give you a mild depression diagnoses nowadays, that some doctors will prescribe you anti-depressants for as treatment. Wtf indeed.
On June 05 2009 03:33 Gokey wrote: As stated by numerous people in this thread, medications are only one of the many treatment modalities recommended by doctors for people with depression. You have a very one-dimensional and inaccurate view of the medical community's approach to depression.
I don't think medication should be a treatment option for depression unless it's so severe that the person is suicidal, can't get out of bed, isn't eating anything, doesn't talk etc. Then medication can be used IF the person is supervised.
My view on the medical communitys approach for depression treatment is that medication is always there. Surely they can tell you it's good to go jogging and eat healthy but they'll still tell you to take that pill daily.
One more thing that is often grossly overlooked in depression treatment is vitamins/minerals. Go look on PubMed for research if you're interested. B-vitamins, especially B6/B12 are sometimes used for treating depression. Same with magnesium and fish oil, which seem to work not only for depression but also anxiety, hyperactivity (fishoil has recently been approved as treatment against ADD/ADHD) and other neurological issues.
Many vitamins/minerals are "natures own" calming, soothing, feeling-happy remedies.Remember that they control a vast number of bodily/brain functions.
Unlike the case with children, in whom antidepressants have generally failed to show they are superior to sugar pills in short-term trials, the drugs have a track record of working in adults. A recent federal study showed that while the drugs do leave much to be desired, treatment provided in the best care settings helped two-thirds of depressed patients recover.
These concerns recently led the FDA to warn that children should not be prescribed Paxil, which is commonly used to treat adults with ADHD. And last year, the Committee on Safety of Medicines in Great Britain made the decision that all SSRI medications, besides Prozac, should not be prescribed for new children diagnosed with depression and that they are contraindicated for children under age 18
Blech. You have adolescents where their brains are running with an undeveloped prefrontal cortex - running on impulse - and then you throw some vaguely understood medication into the mix and do so with a cavalier "what could go wrong" attitude. Antidepressants are great but I'm positive that everyone agrees with the idea that doctors should be a little more cautious when handing them out to kids. With a brain acting irrationally by default, you'd think it's a pretty dangerous time to turn to medicating the problem as the de facto response. There is too much we still don't understand. Antidepressants represent a 50+ billion dollar industry so I'm sure they won't miss the lost profits.
Let's not forget though that it's not just about suicide. There are more concerns with anti-depressants as well; side-effects, hard withdrawal symptoms. And the essential question: Do they really help that much? I say no, they don't. The fact that a person eats a pill might make them think that they are being helped, and that explains why placebo almost has the same efficacy as SSRI medications.
Depression isn't just an isolated event happening inside a person. Environmental factors lead up to it in combination with possible genetic predispositions towards depression. I mean, we really don't know how anti-depressants affect the brain long-term either or what the medications really do.
I don't like this guinea pig approach to the whole shebang.
On June 05 2009 12:21 Yurebis wrote: Oh yeah, about schizophrenia, man that is such a bullshit diagnose, even worse than depression. I'm a 100% positive that if I went to a psychologist or psychiatrist they'd diagnose me with Paranoid Schizophrenia just because my world view doesn't match theirs. There's so many new diagnoses being invented these days to put us on meds... and they never address the environmental causes!
Holy fuck, this thread just reached a new low.
Do you really think we have come such a long way from 5-6 decades back, that psychiatrists knows exactly what they are doing, when they never really have had a clue at any point in history.
Yes, we have indeed come a long way. There were indeed a lot of mistakes made in the field of psychiatry a few decades ago, and it has received its share of backlash, of which I am sure have been illustrated in the books you have read.
The field of research and medicine has been growing exponentially with the development of countless new techniques and technologies in recent times. The amount of new literature being published is astounding. And never before has federal regulations and peer-review scrutinization been stronger. There is also a very strong and powerful shift towards evidence-based medicine in all medical education and literature.
So, yes... Yes we do have reason to trust the research and data. And the overall data does show efficacy of the medications in depressed persons. Developing these different modalities of treatment will ultimately be much more powerful than your singular dogma - "well, just exercise more and make more friends".
On June 05 2009 12:21 Yurebis wrote: Oh yeah, about schizophrenia, man that is such a bullshit diagnose, even worse than depression. I'm a 100% positive that if I went to a psychologist or psychiatrist they'd diagnose me with Paranoid Schizophrenia just because my world view doesn't match theirs. There's so many new diagnoses being invented these days to put us on meds... and they never address the environmental causes!
Holy fuck, this thread just reached a new low.
Do you really think we have come such a long way from 5-6 decades back, that psychiatrists knows exactly what they are doing, when they never really have had a clue at any point in history.
Yes, we have indeed come a long way. There were indeed a lot of mistakes made in the field of psychiatry a few decades ago, and it has received its share of backlash, of which I am sure have been illustrated in the books you have read.
The field of research and medicine has been growing exponentially with the development of countless new techniques and technologies in recent times. The amount of new literature being published is astounding. And never before has federal regulations and peer-review scrutinization been stronger. There is also a very strong and powerful shift towards evidence-based medicine in all medical education and literature.
So, yes... Yes we do have reason to trust the research and data. And the overall data does show efficacy of the medications in depressed persons. Developing these different modalities of treatment will ultimately be much more powerful than your singular dogma - "well, just exercise more and make more friends".
On June 06 2009 07:20 Gokey wrote: Yes, we have indeed come a long way. There were indeed a lot of mistakes made in the field of psychiatry a few decades ago, and it has received its share of backlash, of which I am sure have been illustrated in the books you have read.
The field of research and medicine has been growing exponentially with the development of countless new techniques and technologies in recent times. The amount of new literature being published is astounding. And never before has federal regulations and peer-review scrutinization been stronger. There is also a very strong and powerful shift towards evidence-based medicine in all medical education and literature.
So, yes... Yes we do have reason to trust the research and data. And the overall data does show efficacy of the medications in depressed persons. Developing these different modalities of treatment will ultimately be much more powerful than your singular dogma - "well, just exercise more and make more friends".
I'll second this.
It's not as though doctors (well, good doctors, anyway) aren't aware of the limitations of modern psychiatry. The problem arises when people miss the big picture - that the mind is a system that we can understand to a certain degree and whose operations we can influence to a certain degree with external pharmacological treatments - and instead extrapolate from the admittedly very valid fact that we still don't understand what we're doing very well that it's all got to be bullshit.
So yes, we don't really know exactly what it means that in a certain region of the brain are found certain cells that respond primarily to a certain neurotransmitter subtype. Sure, we can say that, OK, if X neurotransmitter binds to Y G-protein coupled receptor on Z type of neuron, there's a complex A that is formed at the GPCR that activates enzyme B which mediates the concentration of factor C within the neuron, which somehow seems to have to do with subjective feeling D. It doesn't tell us anything concrete about how subjective reality is formed. Most psychiatric drugs don't have a readily identifiable mode of action. So what if an SSRI boosts serotonergic activity, or if an antipsychotic diminishes the activity of dopamine? What we're interested in is that suddenly, some people who were suicidal weren't anymore, a few remained the same, and maybe a very small minority started hearing voices and could be considered worse. People have subtle differences in neurochemistry, and much of psychiatry is finding the diagnosis and treatment that works. Treatment does not necessarily have to be pharmacological, as talking to a therapist, eating different foods, or simply going outside and taking a walk all affect brain chemistry. However, for a lot of diagnoses, the available drug treatments can bring about more sustained improvement in a shorter period of time than any combination and regimen of non-drug treatments. Old-school psychoanalysts had to admit, as much as they didn't want to believe it, that some of their patients did better on a pill than they ever had with decades' worth of expensive weekly psychoanalysis sessions. This caused a revolution in psychiatry as these drugs were discovered from the 1950s onwards, and is the reason why drug treatment is so prominent today.
The fact that we have this ad-hoc, heuristic approach to psychiatry is the reason why some (for example, Scientologists, never mind that L. Ron Hubbard once saw psychiatrists as potential allies only to publicly turn on them once they decided he was full of shit while privately taking psychiatric drugs for his entire life) can claim that "there is no definitive scientific test for mental illness". Again, this misses the point. We can agree that normative thinking is bullshit, but it's a standard. You get diagnosed with a mental illness if you fit the symptoms of one to the degree that it's a detriment to you. What's actually going wrong behind the scenes to cause the same external symptoms may be quite different from one person to another, but for most groups of symptoms (i.e. mental illnesses), the things that are going wrong are similar enough to justify collectively labeling them "depression" or "schizophrenia" or what have you. It's even more evidence for the same when certain classes of drugs only work on certain illnesses.
As for the actual topic of the thread, I've been on an SSRI a couple times - tired old Celexa/citalopram, repatented as the active S-isomer and rechristened Lexapro. My anecdotal experience with it is pretty much par for what you'd expect from an SSRI. It made depression somewhat more bearable by causing apathy, it came with anhedonia and some sexual dysfunction, and it was much more of a bitch to withdraw from than benzodiazepines or opiates. The first time I went through withdrawal involved a month of shitty feelings when I was tapering off it followed by another month for my brain to get back to normal. For the second time I decided to stop taking it cold turkey, which led to 5 days without sleep followed by the same month for my brain to get back to normal. My ex-girlfriend was also on Lexapro; she's one of those people for whom SSRIs causes suicidal ideation and definitely should not have continued to take it, except that she never talked to her psychiatrist after the initial appointment and I eventually tapered her off with Prozac (the SSRI with the longest half-life) so her withdrawal was cake.
Why would my experience be pretty much par for an SSRI? Well, it seems that increasing serotonergic activity causes a compensatory downregulation in dopaminergic activity, causing those lovely side effects of apathy/anhedonia and sexual dysfunction. Makes all sorts of sense when you look at it that way. Apathy/anhedonia is actually the desired effect of SSRIs if you ask me - depression questionaire scores improve because you may still be depressed, but you're not actively depressed.
Now to joke around a bit. If "addiction" wasn't an undesirable side effect according to the medical community, I'd think that opiates could serve as wonderful antidepressants. The next best would probably be MAOIs or low doses of amphetamines. Of course, SSRIs are the safe, boring, just-as-dependence-inducing front-line class of medications here in the real world. Doctors avoid calling it MAOI/SSRI "withdrawal" and instead call it "discontinuation syndrome". I can see the reasoning, though. Our stupid monkey brains just can't deal with drugs that self-reinforce very well.
EPT
