I only mentioned one study that was mentioned earlier in the thread, but there are actually dozens on this point. Instead of listing perhaps a reference to this Newsweek article might and you could try check the books and papers mentioned in the article.
The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch
Since Hentor the Barbarian claims to know Dr Kirsch, maybe he would like to comment on the book? I assume he has already read it.
In any case, none of this relevant to my original query asking if there was actual research that indicates that depression can actually cured by antidepressants at the biochemical level or do antidepressants treat the symptoms? I wasn’t even asking if antidepressants work at all. Hentor was the one that started talking placebos. I just didn’t want to deal with anecdotes, because of documented placebo effects.
So you are saying that your question about placebos was entirely rhetorical? This is the “Great Debates”, so you can do that. Do you actually want to answer my original question or continue to attack me for asking it?
A refresher:
Clarification: Cure means a permanent fix. Treatment means that it alleviates the symptoms, but you have to continue taking the treatment. My mother had to take insulin and it worked, but she was on it until she died. A cure is like setting a broken bone. You set the bone, put a cast on it, the bone heals and you the take cast off.
BTW, I took logic in college and your reference to Dr Kircher is what is called the appeal to authority fallacy.
Like radiation therapy, which has been a staple of cancer treatment for generations? If people have severe problems and face crappy odds of surviving, many of them will take a drug that could hurt them if it also might help them. They should do so in an informed way and drugs shouldn’t be on the market if the harm far outweighs the good they can do, but “it has side effects!” doesn’t make it bad. Everything has side effects. What if a drug for depressions helps 20 or 50 or 100 or 500 people for every one who has suicidal thoughts?
You do realize that most people do not commit suicide when they are at the bottom, it is when they are climbing out of depression that they are at the highest at risk.
I would be interested in seeing a cite for that. Based on suicide statistics, I haven’t seen any evidence antidepressants have any effect on the suicide rate up or down and the idea that feeling better makes you more suicidal seem counter intuitive.
Of course, “increased thoughts of suicide.” are one of those anecdotal things, that I’ve already expressed my opinion about. At least losing or gaining weight can actually be measured, even if we can’t prove the medication caused it.
I was mistaken, that study related to bipolar disorder, however.
Jick, H, Kaye, J A, and Jick, S S, (2004), ‘Antidepressants and the Risk of Suicidal Behaviours’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 292, (3), 338
At the worst point in my (Clinical) depression, the idea of suicide was exhausting. The idea of breathing was exhausting. I was literally too exhausted to commit suicide. Getting pills, finding a knife, buying a gun…meh. Too much work. I’d probably just screw it up anyway. It’s not that I wanted to live, I was just too depressed to make myself die.
The riskiest stage for me was when the meds had begun to kick in, so I was not so utterly exhausted, but they were not fully effective, so my outlook on living was still grim. Luckily, I had good people keeping a close watch on me.
And I was essentially “cured”. 6 months of Prozac 15 years ago. Done. Have I gotten depressed since then? Sure, of course, in the colloquial “got the blues” sense. But I’ve not been Depressed again since then. (I’ve had a little harder time with my Anxiety Disorder - not been medicated since then, but there have been a few times I probably should have been. Right now is one of them, actually. I’m trying to ride it out, but if it doesn’t ease soon, I’ll go see a doctor.)
I’m not sure where you got this idea that people are on meds for Depression forever. Most aren’t. Some may need to be, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but plenty of us are on them for a discrete period of time and then we’re better.
More people have been cured of Depression by drugs than have been cured of Diabetes by insulin, that’s for sure!
I’m at a bit of a disadvantage since this paper is behind a paywall and I’ve learned the hard way it is isn’t prudent to base anything on the summary of a paper. You often find caveats that weaken the conclusion or demolish it. In this case, I can’t even look over their math. As they point out themselves, this studies disagrees with previous studies, which is odd, since all they are doing reanalyzing previous studies and are coming to the opposite conclusion. It might cause one to wonder if the reasons Dr Gibbons came to the opposite conclusions is that he only used the first 6 weeks and excluded all the long term data. This tends to reduce their results to the level of faster than light neutrinos until their results are independently confirmed.
Well, what you actually did was claim that another poster had failed to read a link that actually failed to support your claims.
Now, there may actually be other studies that support your contntions, but I see no particular reason to wander through an Op Ed piece of many pages that does not ever seem to actually provide citations for the claims that it makes about various studies.
If you have actual citations that anti-depressants don’t work, that is fine, but you might want to refrain from accusing others of not reading text when reading the text demonstrates that you have not.
Holy crap. Why are Antidepressants legal? I downloaded this study and glanced at it. I saw 8.5 and said that doesn’t sound that bad, but then I saw the per 10,000. They are reporting a suicide rate of 85 per 100,000. The suicide rate for the general population is around 11 per 100,000. I kept checking the math figuring I must be misreading it . Antidepressants increase the chances of suicide by a factor of 7. I figured 10% or 20%, not 700%
Yes it is a pity we didn’t have this discussion a few weeks earlier when it was free, I have the full study but didn’t want to use any information you don’t have access too, it doesn’t make for a very good debate.
Your linked meta analysis was also based on 6 week trials, that is a function of the FDA and not of either of the study. The big difference is that your linked study by Kirsch was using the various study results, he had no access to the patient level data.
The text for JAMA is free after 6 months after publication I think but that is…well 6 months from now. I am not finding any non-meta studies claiming that those drugs function the same as placebo I would appreciate any links you have.
Is that is really what you draw from the material?
Did you know that hospitals that include hospice care have a rate of morbidity several times higher than hospitals that do not? We really need to shut down those hospitals that that provide hospice care; they are a menace.
So to revisit this study seeing as the math was questioned in the one I provided. All of the drugs show improvement over placebo and the confidence intervals aren’t going crossing zero.
I may be wrong here but it seems that really all this does is show that the drugs aren’t as effective as he wishes, every single one of them out preformed placebo.
Please go back to post 146 and read the part where Hentor said I was lying about other posters saying that they were permanently cured after taking antidepressants.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JoelUpchurch
I then posted a reference to post 96:
It is obvious from the hair comment that Hentor is carrying over an argument from the Zimmerman thread over to this thread. If that is permitted by forum rules then I apologize, but it doesn’t seem fair to other posters.
In any case Hentor already posted that he had actually misunderstood my comments about insulin.
Actually, I would strongly recommend that you do so.
I do know Dr. Kirsch. I studied under him at the University of Connecticut. He was very influential in my training.
I have no idea what you would like me to say about the book.
This is full of completely false statements. First, you didn’t ask that, you stated that antidepressants don’t “cure” depression, and insulin doesn’t “cure” diabetes. You also stated that others had made claims in this thread that antidepressants do “cure” depression.
You have not supported your claim about what others have said. You have not clarified your implications that something that works as a successful treatment is somehow undesirable.
Finally, I did not start talking about placebos. The first time I mentioned placebos is in my response to you, where I quoted your statement about placebos.
I didn’t ask any question about placebos. You did. I’m not attacking you. I’m asking you to clarify your statements, and I am requesting that you stop making false claims about what I’ve said, and about whether I have read or have not read material here.
Wow, you have an annoyingly overblown and wholly unearned pedagogic tone.
And my original response holds. If a treatment reduces depression, then it is an acceptable treatment. If it does so better than placebo, it is presumed to have an active medicinal quality. If it doesn’t permanently end depression, it is no less a valid treatment, just as taking insulin is no less a valid treatment for diabetes.
It’s Dr. Kirsch, and if I had made claims about placebos versus antidepressants based on my knowing Dr. Kirsch, you would have a point. But I did not. I was responding to your assertion that I did not read the linked article. You would do well to keep track of your claims in order to avoid repeatedly misstating and misrepresenting your role in these discussions. It is quite frustrating.
Now, this is just outright silly. Maybe you should do more than just glance at it. There’s no rate in that article of 8.5 in the Jick et al. paper. I have no idea where you got those numbers. A search of the entire article reveals that the figure “8.5” only appears as the percentage of the control group who were between the ages of 50-59. So, in a nutshell, what the hell are you talking about?
The study itself is a study of the rate of suicidal behaviors over durations of time after starting medications among people receiving three types of medication in contrast to people receiving dothiepin. It doesn’t even include data that would allow for the conclusion you want to draw.
Furthermore, let’s pretend for a second that you didn’t just make up these figures wholecloth. Why would you compare the rate of suicide in a group of people receiving antidepressants to the rate of suicide in the general population? People receive antidepressants to treat depression. People with depression are more likely than people in the general population to commit suicide. It would be exceedingly foolish to compare the rate of suicide among people being treated for depression with the rate of suicide in the general population and come to the conclusion that treatment causes suicide.
And you still have not shown that anyone said they were cured by taking antidepressants.
Which describes being successfully treated using Paxil, but says nothing about being cured. This is the distinction you dragged into the thread, and your example goes against the assertion you were making. AGAIN: Did anyone here claim to be cured by taking an antidepressant or not?
I’m commenting on your frustrating tactic of making suggestions about others for which you have no knowledge or basis in fact. You have no idea if I’ve read a linked article. You have no idea if I’ve had my hair cut short. This is just a silly thing to do, over and over again, and in this case it was not only wrong, because not only have I read the work, it was foolish because I was intimately familiar with the line of theory and research that preceded it. I’m also familiar with the body of research surrounding that line of inquiry, and the evidence that moderates the implications of Dr. Kirsch’s work.
Nope. You stated that insulin does not “cure” diabetes. I’ve asked you multiple times to explain “so what”? Why does it matter that insulin does not cure diabetes? It’s certainly a very successful treatment; it keeps blood sugar levels within normal range and dramatically reduces the incidence of very undesirable outcomes. So, explain why it matters that insulin doesn’t cure diabetes?