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Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

madinamerica.com

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Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#111

Post by Alex3917 »

adrice727 wrote: post #107
ma2rten wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am quoting from your link: "The serotonin hypothesis of depression has not been clearly substantiated. Indeed, dogged by unreliable clinical biochemical findings and the difficulty of relating changes in serotonin activity to mood state, the serotonin hypothesis eventually achieved “conspiracy theory” status, whose avowed purpose was to enable industry to market selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to a…

Johann Hari covers a lot of the history of antidepressants in "Lost Connections." Per the studies he covers in the book, most of the benefits are placebo effect. The remainder is somewhat of a mystery. Whether you give someone a medication that increases the level of serotonin in their system (i.e. an SSRI), or that decreases the level of serotonin, the effect will the be same. Replace the drugs targeting serotonin w…

> Replace the drugs targeting serotonin with drugs that target dopamine and you can expect the same effect.

Anything, drug or non-drug, that has any effect on the senses will have roughly the same effect. E.g. hot therapy, cold therapy, meditation, float therapy, aromatherapy, massage, acupuncture, etc. There's nothing at all special about serotonin, it just happens to sit at the intersection of several different areas of pseudoscience and a lot of marketing dollars. The research that lead to the monoamine hypothesis in the first place was faked.

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#112

Post by chillacy »

kryogen1c wrote: post #71
dwaltrip wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you believe she is lying about doing much better after quitting her meds and trying other treatments such as meditation and group therapy, the article is not complete bullshit. That being said, I would not be surprised if there is truth to what you said about that book.

> Unless you believe she is lying about doing much better after quitting her meds This is an unscientific and inaccurate. The placebo and nocebo affects are real with actual health effects. Sometimes drugs don't make it to market because they have positive effects less effective than placebo.

The new drugs coming to fda trials, Psilocybin and MDMA, have a huge non pharmacological component to them. The resulting experience and effect is vastly different when administered in a soft lit cushy room with relaxing settings vs a clinical lab. In that it’s only effective in the right “set and setting”. It almost looks like a strong placebo effect amplifier.

Both compounds work with the serotonin system in the brain. I’m wouldn’t be surprised if SSRIs had a similar caveat, where life circumstances and personal narrative are another factor in the effectiveness of the drugs.

Another lesson from these new drugs is that the results are delivered and pretty durable even long after the drugs leave the patient, which has interesting implications as to how it induces these changes (again not strictly pharmacological).

Which is all to say that science is still learning more, and I hope will bridge the huge gap between pharmacology and psychology.

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#113

Post by subcosmos »

tomnipotent wrote: post #98
op00to wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct - Serotonin is not the only factor. That still refutes the author's hypothesis that mental illness is some sort of personality defect.

Our society considers it a personality defect because people suffering from mental health issues have behavior that deviates too far from the average. It wasn't that long ago that people thought cancer patients were contagious.

Viral infections are thought to contribute to 15-20% of all cancers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267909/

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#114

Post by Alex3917 »

thomasfedb wrote: post #94
baumgarn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're stepping into a fallacy here. Of course every thought process is bound to biological processes in the brain. So we can see this as some sort of biochemical mapping of our understanding and perception of the world, and our social status in it. Why should the solution to a negative outlook be to mess with the chemistry alone, through drugs? You can just as well ask the other way around, what kind of worl…

> Why should the solution to a negative outlook be to mess with the chemistry alone, through drugs? Well perhaps because it works? > We identified 28 552 citations and of these included 522 trials comprising 116 477 participants. In terms of efficacy, all antidepressants were more effective than placebo, with ORs ranging between 2·13 (95% credible interval [CrI] 1·89–2·41) for amitriptyline and 1·37 (1·16–1·63) for r…

> all antidepressants were more effective than placebo

Comparing them to placebo isn't appropriate, you need to compare them with an active placebo and only look at studies that continue longer than two years. Of which there are all of like 2 studies.

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#115

Post by subcosmos »

Alex3917 wrote: post #111
adrice727 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Johann Hari covers a lot of the history of antidepressants in "Lost Connections." Per the studies he covers in the book, most of the benefits are placebo effect. The remainder is somewhat of a mystery. Whether you give someone a medication that increases the level of serotonin in their system (i.e. an SSRI), or that decreases the level of serotonin, the effect will the be same. Replace the drugs targeting serotonin w…

> Replace the drugs targeting serotonin with drugs that target dopamine and you can expect the same effect. Anything, drug or non-drug, that has any effect on the senses will have roughly the same effect. E.g. hot therapy, cold therapy, meditation, float therapy, aromatherapy, massage, acupuncture, etc. There's nothing at all special about serotonin, it just happens to sit at the intersection of several different are…

There is something special about serotonin - throughout evolution, it has been an important part of regulating social emotional processing in animals and humans. It strongly regulates the function of the salience network in the brain, alterations of which are associated with anxiety disorders.

Like other neurotransmitters, serotonin is specifically synthesized in a specific brain region, the raphe nuclei. (Dopamine is from the substantia nigra)

Brain circuits have lots of overlap but they definitely have specialization. Case in point, genes associated with serotonin processing have SNPs for depression-like illnesses.

Sapolsky gives one of the better lectures on the specific features associated with abnormal serotonin, dopamine, or neuropinephrine signaling, and their associated symptomology. Ultimately it's the job of the psychiatrist to figure out what's out of balance based on behavior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#116

Post by rhizome »

baumgarn wrote: post #75
op00to wrote: post #47

This article is absolute bullshit and quite frankly dangerous. It seems to me this woman was emotionally vulnerable and taken in by a snake oil huckster masquerading as a doctor. > Shortly after I started seeing him, my new doctor had me read the book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. Robert Whitaker's theses in that book have repeatedly been scientifically disproven. It's anti-science drivel. > The pharmace…

I think you're stepping into a fallacy here. Of course every thought process is bound to biological processes in the brain. So we can see this as some sort of biochemical mapping of our understanding and perception of the world, and our social status in it. Why should the solution to a negative outlook be to mess with the chemistry alone, through drugs? You can just as well ask the other way around, what kind of worl…

I find it quite frankly disturbing that the solution to such a learned insecurity should be just drugs.

Who besides you is saying "just drugs?" From what I've read, the greatest success comes from drugs and therapy.

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#117

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

odiroot wrote: post #87

I'm a bit worried how many people on social media and Internet in general (also here) are fighting some personal war against antidepressants. This is not helping and may cause a lot of suffering to some people. We're in some wacky second generation New Age where everything illogical is the the obvious solution, just for the sake of breaking with the old. There's really many people for whom literally no amount of talk…

As someone who spent a good amount of time on an SSRI, I get where they're coming from. The people who prescribed them to me seemed to think I was fine, and saw no reason I should try to get off them despite personality changes and what I would term "an inability to experience". It was as though I was only able to observe my own life from the outside.

The problem with SSRIs isn't that they can't be useful, it's that the medical industry is full of people who don't seem to know how to use them. They just wanted to throw a pill at the problem and get me out of their office as fast as they could to extract maximum profit out of my visits.

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#118

Post by shoulderfake »

curun1r wrote: post #76
op00to wrote: post #47

This article is absolute bullshit and quite frankly dangerous. It seems to me this woman was emotionally vulnerable and taken in by a snake oil huckster masquerading as a doctor. > Shortly after I started seeing him, my new doctor had me read the book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. Robert Whitaker's theses in that book have repeatedly been scientifically disproven. It's anti-science drivel. > The pharmace…

> Which basically says that when we deplete the body of certain neurotransmitters, people get depressed Your statement represents a logical fallacy. I can also prove that depleting a car of gasoline causes it not to run, but fixing the fuel situation won't make all non-running cars functional. Just look at the more recent research that shows a connection between our microbiome and mood disorders to see that depressio…

The entire medical profession is medication-first... my brother was diagnosed with MS and none of the many doctors he talked to mentioned ANYTHING regarding diet. Meanwhile as soon as you do your own research you find out that diet is your primary means of battling it. I was also diagnosed with depression few years ago, these fucking monkeys instantly gave me some ssris...I wasn't depressed. I had a sleep problem that wouldn't go away and had anxiety but they gave me those pills first and foremost. I didnt take that shit, but you get my point.

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#119

Post by bigmit37 »

loceng wrote: post #104
op00to wrote: post #47

This article is absolute bullshit and quite frankly dangerous. It seems to me this woman was emotionally vulnerable and taken in by a snake oil huckster masquerading as a doctor. > Shortly after I started seeing him, my new doctor had me read the book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. Robert Whitaker's theses in that book have repeatedly been scientifically disproven. It's anti-science drivel. > The pharmace…

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with anything the author said, nor any references she makes to books or otherwise, however that's such a shallow/basic view of the brain you're putting forward as a counter-point. The brain and physical-mental-emotional-spiritual body are far more complex than a single physical lever being pulled and a single affect happening; neurotransmitters are the transaction layer, the currency,…

Would you be able to share how you were able to solve your problem and what the actually underlying cause was? Just a brief overview.

I’m currently on SSRIs and they actually do help me sleep, but it’s not really helping with the underlying problems.

As for SSRIs they are transformative for some people, and science doesn’t really understand the mechanism. They seem to think that there are secondary effects that are the reasons for the effectiveness of SSRIs on some people.

However, doctors seems to be too quick to prescribe SSRIs. I’ve read horror stories about people with some sort of iron-ferretin deficiency as their underlying problem and they were prescribed SSRIs instead of getting a simple iron test which would have pinpointed the cause of the symptoms.

These days you really need to do your own research and bring up all these points to your doctor.

Re: Recovering Emotions After 24 Years on Antidepressants

#120

Post by rhizome »

Alex3917 wrote: post #69
op00to wrote: post #47

This article is absolute bullshit and quite frankly dangerous. It seems to me this woman was emotionally vulnerable and taken in by a snake oil huckster masquerading as a doctor. > Shortly after I started seeing him, my new doctor had me read the book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. Robert Whitaker's theses in that book have repeatedly been scientifically disproven. It's anti-science drivel. > The pharmace…

> Robert Whitaker's theses in that book have repeatedly been scientifically disproven. The book doesn't even have a thesis. Good job not even reading enough of the Wikipedia article to plausibly pretend to have read it. Also, did you even read the link you posted? It says exactly the opposite of what you're claiming it says. The conclusion is literally, "Simple biochemical theories that link low levels of serotonin w…

Hasn't it been decades since a pure serotonin theory was tenable?
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