How long do you think antidepressants have been on the market? Wellbutrin was approved in 1985. Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil are more recent. I’ve spent most of my life in a world where antidepressants didn’t exist. I don’t have to speculate what the world was like before antidepressants. I grew up there.
Imagine the toothache.
For cardiologisty reasons I don’t quite grok. 
(I will bring it up at his next cardiology appointment, though. Thanks.)
You folks are aware that life expectancy has been increasing over the last century? Maybe medicines are partly responsible? People used to tough it out - and died young. Didn’t a signer of the Declaration of Independence (or was it the Constitution?) rode horseback for days to attend, while dying of cancer?
No, they just used alcohol. (Or other drugs) I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there’s a large history of alcoholism in my family.
Trust me, anti-depressants aren’t “happy pills”. (Although I sometimes call them that, tongue-in-cheek). They’re “make me myself again” pills.
Our bodies can be messed up, by things like diabetes, epilepsy, asthma, etc. Why is it so hard to believe that our brain chemistry can’t be as well?
Or think of all the common disease that people died from back in the day that we take for granted – tuberculosis, tetanus, whooping cough, etc. Back before vaccinations, or antibiotics.
Why should we “tough it out” just to prove some moral superiority? I tried “toughing it out”, and my family finally dragged me to a therapist.
Clearly my own sleep meds aren’t working; I meant to say antidepressants.
Speaking from the physician’s office side of things, double-blind testing wih placebos means we don’t know when we’re giving the real thing or not (especially if we’re also delivering an additional known treatment with it), so your argument there doesn’t make much sense. Similarly with the monitoring groups; they collect the data and oversee the study until it ends. Furthermore, many important drugs start phase III testing with the high possibility or almost assuredness that the FDA is already planning to audit their data. That means not only looking at the company’s records, but also picking some of the study sites and poring through everything down to the patients’ own medical records.
Sure, tons of money is wasted every year on drug research. If a drug fails, that’s years or decades of effort wasted and millions of dollars down the drain. But that’s what happens when early results seem promising but the weight of the data shows otherwise. And it does happen. Offhand I’d say maybe 10-20% of the studies I see that get to phase III testing (that’s where you’re supposed to be settling on a dose and proving the effectiveness) and actually get off the ground end up failing.
I’m fully behind physicians using their experience to prescribe drugs, but then again, that’s what you’re talking about with off-label prescription of “antidepressants” above, isn’t it? One of our own physicians is actually doing research on uses for an old, FDA-approved drug for something completely different as a novel new treatment for an eye problem that has only laser treatments as its sole treatment option. Unfortunately since private grant money is hard to come by, even for an exciting idea, he’s really limited in his research scope. We’re doing a 15-subject study as a “proof of concept”, which the FDA approved doing, and hope that will spur more funding after publication.
Missed the edit window:
However, he didn’t discover the drug itself. He just noticed a new use for it when a patient taking it for one thing showed a dramatic improvement in that eye condition, and then worsened after going off the drug. (He did another test where he had the patient restart the drug and go off it again, with similar improvement/worsening.)
That’s why we need medical researchers working in labs, figuring out chemical interactions, analyzing plants, etc. It’s wasteful in terms of time and money, but damn the complexity of our bodies for that, not the companies. (Caveat: I’m sure there are plenty of parts of medical research where budgets are being padded and people are slacking off, just like everywhere else.)
I guess I’m unusual in that I’m in my fifties and have zero problems with the usual things. My heart, cholesterol and BP are all great with no medication required. I do take Omeprazole for GERD which I think is somewhat common.
My other prescriptions are somewhat unusual and for less common issues, including one that’s not normally carried in pharmacies and has to be special ordered. I’ve actually run into supply problems for that one at times.
Not really. His quote here reminds me of a red-faced child, fists balled up in frustration because his sibling got something she didn’t deserve and it’s not fair. Dalrymple seems upset by the idea that there should be people walking around experiencing happiness they didn’t by-God earn. (I also find it astonishing for a psychiatrist to hand-wave away clinical depression by conflating it with “unhappiness” this way.) His simplistic and moralistic view of how society should work isn’t one I subscribe to.
I missed this first time through.
Gosh, this guy seems to be both self-aggrandizing and mean.
Maybe it is just his writing style, but golly, I sure wouldn’t want him as my therapist.
[QUOTE=JoelUpchurch]
If you had bothered to read the article, you would see that the anti-depressants were prescribed by doctors who have no training to diagnose depression, hidden or otherwise. You follow this with a lot of meaningless blather about how all our modern conveniences are making us depressed.
[/QUOTE]
Whoops, I missed that you were referring to the article you quoted a few posts earlier rather than your personal experience. I do think my “meaningless blather” is as useful as your assertion that most people who take antidepressants don’t have anything physically wrong with their brain and that people “coped better” before they were available.
Wait, a psychiatrist is upset that people who come to him say they’re depressed rather than merely unhappy for ordinary reasons? Perhaps people who are unhappy don’t go see psychiatrists to complain about it. :dubious:
A dirty secret, at least the more expensvie ones, the prescribing Ddoctor gets a cut of the prescription price.
No they don’t. :dubious:
Actually results from randomized trials where the the doctors and patients don’t know what they are taking turn out to be wrong 25% of the time and non-randomized trials are wrong 80% of the time. Keep in mind that most medical research is non-random trials.
In the real world medical research is not conducted by Vulcans. It is conducted by people with kids in college and mortgages underwater. They are not indifferent to the results of their research. Do you have an evidence that medical researchers are significantly more honest or less prone to self-deception than the people who were signing off on the Collateralized Debt Obligations a few years ago.
So you think the problems of a woman whose boyfriend is beating her can be solved by medication? It is obvious that you are dealing with some mental issues, but I don’t think antidepressants are going to help.
Frankly a lot of the reactions remind of people who say religion has turned their life around. They get pretty indignant also when someone suggests that God had very little to do with their changes. The difference is that we have actual studies that indicate that antidepressants are often no more effective than placebos.
To address the Op, in my time, I have never seen as many people addicted to prescription drugs as the temporal present in America. It is an epidemic and it has surpassed one of the greatest mortality points in recent History. More people die from overdoses than the historically largest point of needless but understandabe mechanical death death. Auto accidents. I feel the present death rate is much more avoidable.
If you read the article, then you realize that he was talking about people whose life sucks and don’t really need a chemical explanation about why they are depressed.
They are depressed because they got knocked up by a jerk who left them or they have a boyfriend that beats them every day. There isn’t any problem with their brain. Their brain is accurately reporting to them that their life sucks.
Taking antidepressants to fix their unhappiness is like dealing with high pressure reading from a boiler by adjusting the meter.
There are people who are actually depressed without a good reason, but they are a small part of the population.
Wow.
OK, I have to chime in here.
I just had my left hip replaced last Tuesday. I was in the hospital 1 night and part of a day.
In the hospital they gave me 2 doses of Demerol, that made my stomach turn over and die.
In the 4 days since leaving, I am getting by on ibuprofen and aspirin with a total of about 6 individual acetaminophen/codeine #3 tablets, taken one at a time not two like they allow.
I don’t like my body’s reaction to drugs and go to great lengths to avoid them, the pain, while bad is better then the sickness and dizziness.
I normally take no prescription medications except antibiotics.