Since this is a science free thread, not that science has many definitive answers when it comes to how the brain works, lets remind people that blaming the victim of a brain related disease is about as ethical as blaming a victim of any genetically related disease or condition. You cant free will yourself out of out of balance brain chemistry. Pharma actually helps millions of people deal with depression. In fact, isnt blaming big pharma for the uptick in mental awareness a symptom of paranoia? 
Isn’t saying Big Pharma isn’t interested in getting as many people as possible on as many drugs as possible to increase their profits a sign of delusion.
How can taking drugs help situational depression? Isn’t changing the situation the real answer? The answers I go was drugs help cure the depression so you can change the situation and that taking prescribed drugs is better than going on street drugs!
People take painkillers for the physical pain suffered from an injury or illness. Injuries and illnesses often resolve over time, but this fact doesn’t stop people from treating their symptoms so they can function better in the interim
Lots of people fall into depression after suffering a job loss. The depression keeps them from applying for jobs and presenting their best in interviews…which only exacerbates their depression. Now, it is all well and good to scold someone for being a lazy ass. But does it do anything? If encouraging that person to get therapy and take medication works better than tongue-clucking, why shouldn’t we be for it?
I don’t have the kind of job that puts up with emotional or mental defectiveness. When the phone rings, I am expected to be articulate, clear-minded, and calm. Before I started taking meds, I wasn’t reliable in these areas and I suffered because of it. Therapy helped my self-confidence, but it didn’t help my thought problems at all. If I had been averse to taking medication, I would still be doing data entry shit and hating my life.
A lot of people hate their lives but they also refuse to take medication because they don’t want to be a slave to Big Pharma. But then they wind up being a slave to Budweiser, Yellow Tail, Philip Morris, Frito-Lay, and their weed guy. While being a giant pain the neck for everyone around them. How is that any better?
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It might be bleed over from all of the recent attention the VA and military has given mental health, with even Congress demanding something be done to lower the number of veteran suicides which is currently just under two dozen per day! When the government is pouring so much resources and funding into treating and understanding mental health, I think it’s natural for the civilian and commercial sectors to be affected. Just a thought.
Comparing anti-depressants to pain killers is ludicrous. Pain killers do not take four to six weeks to have an effect and four to six months to have a full effect. If I had gone the drug route, what was I supposed to do until they kicked in.
I know someone who is a smart person and I enjoy talking to her. She is on disability, takes five drugs a day, yet is a slave to Phillip Morris and Frito Lay, smoking and eating up a storm. Yet when I told a “counselor” that my method of dealing with depression is to get a cup of coffee and take a walk, she told me I was self-medicating and should be in rehab! When I told her those drugs made me suicidal, she informed me “That’s a psychological effect. That’s invalid.”
I have a friend who pops a Xanax to help her calm down before she does any public speaking.
Sixty years ago it would have been socially acceptable for a man in her position to take off the edge by smoking a cigarette and pouring himself a drink.
To help me take the edge, I devote two hours a day to exercise and watch a lot of TV.
All of these coping measures wage a cost.
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Big Parma does not want anyone to cope with mental illness any other way than taking prescription drugs. Mental illness is always caused by living clean and sober and can only be helped by their miraculous “medications” that have absolutely NO side effects whatsoever, work instantly, and always help everyone that takes them.
Or so they would have you believe.
I’d rather be a slave to the 7-eleven coffee bar than Big Pharma. As I tell people “You don’t want to know me without coffee. I don’t want to now me without coffee.”
Psychiatric pharmaceuticals are not demonstrably safer than street drugs either. Nor less habituating. They probably do have better quality control and a lower risk of precipitating a hostile police response, although in the latter case not by as large a margin as you may presume.
I’m sorry you had such a bad experience with a clearly ignorant therapist. How she could have been unaware something so widely known is beyond me. And of course, antidepressants are not a cure-all: they’re only one possible–and often effective–tool. That doesn’t make them useless or an evil product of the big, bad pharmaceutical industry. I’ve known people who were suicidal until they got on antidepressants.
I’m unclear how being a tobacco addict and junk food eater is tied to that poor woman’s being too depressed to work. Are you saying that the woman would not be depressed if she quit smoking and eating junk food? It’s great that drinking a cup of coffee and going for a walk helps you. Kudos to you for figuring out what works for you that doesn’t require meds, and I’m sure you know how fortunate you are that those were sufficient coping techniques. They’re not for most people.
As for situational depression, it’s a no-brainer that getting out of the situation is the solution, not medications. Sometimes people can’t get out of the situation, such as people who have chronic, incurable diseases. Or the situation is one that will take a lot of time and therapy to get out of, and the depression interferes with getting out. And sometimes GP’s who, due to a severe shortage of mental health professionals, have become the de facto dispensers of meds, medicate for situational depression. That doesn’t mean, however, that a significant percentage of people on antidepressants are on them when they don’t need to be.
It seems like a lot of the bashing of Big Pharma comes from people who have had bad experiences with it. But every solution has a long line of people who were either burned by it or not helped by it.
I am close to someone who has a number of mental health and neuropsychiatric issues. She is highly functional and doing the damn thing, as the youngsters say. She takes a multi-pronged approach. She takes prescription drugs on a “as needed” basis. She is a heavy weed smoker and drinks quite a bit. She also sees a therapist. Is she a slave? I mean, I guess you could say she is since she is putting money into many entities’ pockets. But if spending money for useful services is the definition of a slave, then we are all slaves. The coffee addict is no more virtuous than the Wellbutrin user. Both are taking a mind-altering substance.
Ideally, at the first sign of mental unwellness, we would all be able to take a time-out so we can regroup and make the lifestyle changes needed to return back to equilibrium. How many of us have the ability to do this, though? Even those of us with paid sick leave and good health benefits aren’t so lucky. So naturally we look for stop gap measures and bandaides. If someone is suicidal but it will take them four weeks to get an appointment with an psychologist covered by their network and another six weeks for talk therapy to make some headway, then it makes perfect sense for that person to take an antidepressant in the interim. Make it easier for people to get help through non-medical interventions and maybe people won’t run to the pharmacy so often. But we need to accept that even under ideal conditions people are going to still run to something. All the scolding and sanctimonious lecturing in the world won’t stop people from drinking, smoking, and eating their pain away.
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I would never gainsay someone for taking what gets them through what they gotta get through, and that includes psychiatric medication.
I’m opposed to the pharma + psych establishments continuing to make claims that aren’t rooted in reality about these drugs, but as long as it’s with fully informed consent I wouldn’t criticize anyone for taking them. They obviously work well for some people some of the time at a minimum. It’s also firmly established that for other people they do an unalloyed harm.
As someone who’s suffered from depression almost all my life, I applaud the openness and awareness of mental health issues making it less of an issue to admit you’re suffering from depression or stress and getting the necessary help.
Everyone has the right to express your opinions, but please keep in mind that not everything is a scam or overhyped. Depression and other mental issues is real and serious, and just because you don’t know personally know someone who suffers from it (I’m really good at hiding my depression), doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Help is available
Speak with a counselor today
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
1-800-273-8255
International Suicide Hotlines. Note that all the lines aren’t just for severe depression, but there if you just want to talk.
https://ibpf.org/resource/list-international-suicide-hotlines
Last year, there were four notable celebrity suicides due to depression, two of them, Sulli and Goo Hara were well known Kpop stars. Goo’s suicide was especially shocking because after her friend Sulli’s death she stated in a live Instagram message: “I will live hard and work hard for you.”. Months later, she took her own life. As I said, those of us who of suffer from depression are good at hiding it.
Since their tragic suicides, a number of Kpop stars are being allowed to take a break due to anxiety, stress and overwork, something that prior to last year wasn’t allowed by the agencies due in part to pressure from fans. Prior to last year, unless they physically or mentally broke down on stage, Kpop artists were expected to keep up their hectic schedules which often means strict diets (gotta look good!) and little or no sleep for days during their promotions.
It’s also good to acknowledge that we live in an extremely stressful society which seems more or less engineered to induce crippling depression, anxiety and PTSD in even the most stable of personalities. I think we’d all be taking a lot fewer drugs if there was a massive shift to a better work/life balance, people could afford to live on any job’s salary and getting an infected hangnail does not mean an automatic choice between death and bankruptcy. Bad living conditions lead to bad mental states and rather than get all judgy judgy about how our fellow people choose to handle their stressors maybe start working to make the ambient shit level a lot lower?
And when the next mass killing occurs people will be yelling “Why didn’t someone reach out to them!!!”:smack:
IMO, the more said about mental health issues and alternatives and lifting the stigma of opening up about it and getting help, whether medication or just talking to someone over the phone or in person.
Edit: My family lived by the motto: Don’t make lingyi mad!, not because of any danger to them, but the damage I did to myself. Cutting, punching walls, banging my head against the wall and with a brick. But only my ex girlfriend managed to get me to see a doctor and get the help needed to make it through the past 25+ years without major physical harm to myself.
I’m in the closet except on this forum about my mental issues (I think about and plan my suicide every single day!), but hope that reducing the social stigma of coming out will help others.
I cant disagree with a word of this. While on the other hand…
This is the death-knell of an endorsement on a post about a theory involving pharmaceutical medicines and mental health.
As our understanding of our minds and bodies improves as does our ability to diagnose and provide methods of treatment.
The mind if the final frontier, medically speaking, and it appears to be the most mysterious/difficult to diagnose when it goes wrong. We used to just drill holes in people’s heads and hope for the best. Now we know better.
I don’t think it has to be any more complicated than that. We care about people’s mental health more now because we have greater capacity to care, both technically and ethically.
Which would be me. But my beef was not just with the pharmaceutical industry ( I refuse to use the phrase Big Pharma and I wish it would go away) but the entire process.
It was a little over 20 years ago. I was physically and mentally healthy, well-adjusted, running my own business and at the top of my game.
Then a bunch of bad stuff happened all at once. My sister was killed rather horrifically in a fire and my fairy tale romance with a gorgeous millionaire crashed and burned. I went to the doctor because this stuff was keeping me up at night and the lack of sleep was killing my concentration. I would like to note for the record that I never had anything remotely resembling thoughts of self-harm or feelings of worthlessness. My only symptoms were sleeplessness and lack of concentration. I was still as full of myself as ever:D:
So she prescribed an anti-depressant and gave me the trope about it taking 4-6 weeks to work. I took one 10mg Paxil. Immediately, I felt like I’d snorted a gram of cocaine and dropped a quarter hit of acid. I was ecstatic, euphoric in a high energy trippy sort of way. It worked in the sense that I wasn’t depressed anymore, I guess. But it didn’t help the “I can’t sleep” thing. And the thought “that nothing was supposed to happen for 4-6 weeks” occasionally worked it’s way through the euphoria.
I called the doctor, expecting to be told to stop taking the drug. But instead I got cheerleading, I was told to keep taking it and the effect would change. So I did. And it did. After a few weeks I plunged into what was probably my first REAL depression.
So she put me on another drug. Same thing, a couple of weeks of euphoria and a plunge into depression. I went through the cycles with Zoloft, Prozac and Lexapro. Then she switched me to Wellbutrin which sucked everything remotely positive out of my head and made me an angry vicious and violent person. Within a week I was on the verge of losing my job and my relationship with my family.
I threw it away and stopped going back to the doctor. There are two things I know for sure. One is that there was absolutely nothing medically wrong with me when I first walked into the doctors office and two is that it took years to regain my emotional stability. I was still way more emotionally labile than I used to be for a long time.
My miracle drugs turned out to be yoga and meditation, although I really had to make an effort to haul my ass up and do it for the first few months. I was amazed at how absolutely curative it was, I guess I had expected that it might help me cope. But I was totally unprepared for how it restructured my thought patterns and made me well.
I just wish I hadn’t waited for 10 years after the medical experiments to try it.
I do recognize that these drugs might work for some people. But, within the medical profession and society in general there is a general reluctance to admit that they frequently don’t work and suggesting that someone might be better off not taking them is considered dangerous heresy.
And, IMHO — “takes a several weeks to work” and “you might feel worse before you feel better” are BIG red flags when I hear them used in regard to a natural / holistic therapy and I still can’t believe how many people buy it without question when they hear it from a doctor.
I had a similar experience, Ann, I took one dose of Paxil and spent the next two days absolutely convinced I was on the verge of dying. It’s not like I’m inexperienced with drugs, either, I’ve taken all kinds of legal, illegal and other drugs and I know how to separate myself from the experience until it wears off but dayum, that shit was not fuckin’ around. I concluded that this class of drugs was unlikely to be helpful to me.
On the other hand, I’ve known quite a few people who react just fine to them and the bipolar people in my family are absolutely helped by taking lithium and that starts regulating them within days, not weeks or months. My daughter was major league pissed off when she had a bad reaction to Wellbutrin (made her incredibly itchy all over) because the salutory effects to her head space were nothing short of miraculous and she’s never yet found another psych med that works as well for her.
I figure the difference is that my depression and anxiety are mostly a result of major trauma rather than brain chemical imbalance whereas the bipolar/ADHD people in my life require a very different method of regulation. The ADHD kids are learning how to use Adderall very sparingly during times when focus is very important instead of taking it every day at a large dosage. Like anything else, different people react differently to psych meds and a little bit of experimentation and adjustment goes a long way to finding a regimen that works. It’s disingenuous to claim that psych meds “don’t work” and equally so to insist they “always work.” Body chemistry differs, and a smart person learns their own body and mind and uses observation to establish what works for them. Anyone who just goes to a family practice doctor, gets a generic scrip at a standard dosage and expects that’s just gonna fix their shit is living in a la la land. Psych meds should be used in conjunction with therapy and dispensed by a mental health professional who can monitor physical and mental response to the regimen.
Ann Hedonia, yep, that’s a horrible experience. You went to the doctor looking for help with sleep and concentration problem and ended up with a host of other problems.
My own negative experience with the medical establishment has instilled me with the belief that most psychiatric meds should only be considered when you’re in an emergency situation or when other strategies just aren’t feasible for you. I believe this not because I think meds are “lazy” or inherently more dangerous than the other substances we take to make life easier, but because I believe meds are always going to be a blunt instrument. They may help one symptom but in the process create news ones. I went through like five psychiatrists because almost all of them couldn’t appreciate the “bluntness” of the meds they were giving me. I’d tell them that such-and-such was making me feel like crap, and rather than course-correcting, they would double-down on their choice to prescribe me such-and-such by telling me to just “hang in there”. A couple told me that I wasn’t even feeling the way I was feeling or that the side effects were due to something else besides the meds. On multiple occasions I heard “That’s not a known side effect of that drug”. And because I was afraid of coming across as a “difficult” patient, I wouldn’t argue with them. But inside, I would want to scream “YES IT FUCKING IS! IT IS ON THE FUCKIN’ SIDE EFFECT LIST ON WEBMD! FUCK YOU AND YOUR WHITE COAT AND YOUR STUPID CLIPBOARD!”
But while I’m a huge advocate of therapy, therapy was also excruciating for me at times. Many of my therapist’s prescriptions were no more effective than the meds I took, and some of them also made me feel like crap. Like yoga. For four years I would dutifully go to yoga class because my therapist was such a huge advocate. Overall, it was a positive experience, but it took a long time for me (more than a year) to not feel miserable after each class. I stuck with the classes because I did feel physically better, but psychologically I was in the terlet. I remember coming home after some classes feeling super depressed because I was sad about my performance in class. And then I’d feel sad that I was sad, since gurus tell you aren’t not supposed to care about such trivial things. And I felt like I couldn’t tell my therapist about those feelings because she was such a big believer in it and surely she would shame me for not being zen enough. However, she ended up not giving me a hard time once I told her I didn’t want to do it anymore.
So my journey has taught me there is no quick fix and that yeah, sometimes it actually does get worse before it gets better…since you have to try a bunch of shit that probably won’t work until you land on the thing that does work. I think if we weren’t so constrained in our healthcare choices, then this process could be less painful. Like, I was very fortunate to have health benefits that afforded me a crazy amount of visits with my psychotherapist, and I was lucky to have a psychotherapist willing to charge me a reasonable fee once I went over the allotted number of sessions. I was also lucky that I liked my psychologist right away. If I had had to shop for psychotherapists the same way that I had had to shop around for psychiatrists (waiting months before I could get into someone’s appointment book), I probably would have landed in someone’s mental hospital before it was all said and done.
In retrospect, I see several reasons why I was given the medications that I was given.
This was in 1999, IIRC. The SSRI drugs were blockbuster medications and were being heavily advertised. Some psychologists and doctors were stealthily promoting the idea that these drugs were good for everybody and could make you “better than well”. I know that had a lot to do with why I so eagerly accepted the prescription and I suspect it had a lot to do with why my doctor prescribed it so easily.
The other reason just really goes to the way we view disease, wellness and medication.
There was absolutely nothing biologically or medically wrong with me when I first went to the doctor. All I needed was a couple of weeks worth of sleeping pills.
But it is seems pretty much verboten to give out medication to someone without a diagnosis. This leads to a lot of over-diagnosis. Because you can’t go to the doctor and say “Sometimes I have low energy days”, can you give me a little something.”
So that patient may manage to get an ADHD diagnosis.
And now I’m going to rag on the pharmaceutical industry a bit. While they are just doing what any private enterprise must do, trying to get as many people as possible to use their products, that really isn’t in the public interest. And they have been instrumental in guiding the diagnostic criteria for these medications.
Which is extraordinary loose. It’s usually a short yes/no quiz that sounds like it came out of a woman’s magazine. And if someone has decided before their doctor visit that they want this medication, the quiz makes it ridiculously easy.
I think these medications have helped lots of people with serious conditions. But I think they have been inappropriately marketed to people with less serious conditions and that marketing falsely minimized the risks and overstated the effectiveness of the drugs for less serious conditions.
And I want to clarify something. When I expressed my skepticism about “gets worse before it gets better” and “takes several weeks to work” I was not referring to the healing process in general. I was specifically referring to people that make those claims with regards to the effects of a single medication.
Because I could sell you pretty much anything as a cure for the flu if I could get you to believe that it takes two weeks to work. And lots of conditions, including mild depression can sometimes be self-limiting.
I have done therapy twice. I had one horrible therapist and one really good one so I can appreciate those challenges.