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Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

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Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#71

Post by cududa »

wk_end wrote: post #31
hinkley wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The serotonin model of antidepressants just doesn’t pass a sniff test. Something else is going on there. How they say they should work would mean they work in the first dose and possibly that don’t require tapering off. But that’s not what happens in the real world. If we understood what’s really happening we could target pathways better.

How antidepressants work doesn't seem especially germane to a discussion of antipsychotics?

Antidepressants can exacerbate symptoms/ trigger episodes in patients with undiagnosed schizophrenia and bipolar, so it is pretty relevant

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#72

Post by cududa »

calibas wrote: post #52

I have a theory. Antipsychotic medications just need to make the person more "manageable" to be considered effective. It doesn't need to eliminate the psychosis directly, it could just make the person more sedated, and it would appear to be "working" properly.

That's not really your own theory, that's like, the specific goal of psychiatric treatment? You can't "cure" schizophrenia or bipolar, the goal is to manage it.

My dad developed severe mental illness later in life, destroyed his life, and never found a regiment that worked for him before his death (undiagnosed congenital heart condition is what ended up getting him).

I think anyone who has schizophrenia or bipolar (and their loved ones), would happily take medically "managed" psychosis over the hell of unmanaged psychosis

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#73

Post by cududa »

wheelerof4te wrote: post #65
Pixie_Dust wrote: post #38

My Schizophrenic friend tells me the difference between schizophrenics and normal people is that normal people can hear their own thoughts whilst schizophrenics can hear other peoples. Serious point, maybe schizophrenic symptoms are cause by a disruption in REM sleep. As in the suffers are experiencing a waking dream. Some time back they did an experiement on students and kept them awake for days-and-nights on end. E…

That's because their brains were rebooting when their body senses low activity. Kind of like sleep function on laptops. Otherwise, the brain cells would "overheat".

This analogy is wrong on so many levels.

Human sleep would be more aptly related to garbage collection and indexing - neither of which occur when a laptop sleeps. When a computer overheats it throttles performance and sometimes shuts down.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#74

Post by FeteCommuniste »

whats_a_quasar wrote: post #56
m_0x wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance and prejudice, but how are you not a danger to the people that surround you? Or is schizophrenia a spectrum very much alike as autism?

Schizophrenics are less violent than the general population. In general, schizophrenia is not dangerous to others around, even untreated. People who are in a psychotic episode act oddly, which can scare others, but the perception of danger comes from that erratic action, not from actual danger.

"Individuals with schizophrenia are 4 to 7 times more likely to commit violent crimes, such as assault and homicide [4,5], and 4 to 6 times more likely to exhibit general aggressive behavior, such as verbal and physical threats [10,11], compared with the general population."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6852683/

That isn't to say that schizophrenia necessarily causes the violent behavior: the two variables might not have any causal relationship at all. But the correlation is there.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#75

Post by ChrisClark »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #64
robinduckett wrote: post #18

I know someone who has diagnosised but untreated schizophrenia. She was admitted to the hospital after she started having thyroid problems and they also administered schizophrenia medication while she was in. The change in her behaviour was positive and dramatic and allowed her to start accepting help after being scared that men in white coats would take her away if she ever let on about her illness to anyone. Now sh…

[flagged]

> Now she has been out of hospital for a while, unmedicated

You're wrong, it obviously worked. Might want to check into your own beliefs about why the doctors are trying to sap all your bodily fluids.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#76

Post by kayodelycaon »

Pixie_Dust wrote: post #38

My Schizophrenic friend tells me the difference between schizophrenics and normal people is that normal people can hear their own thoughts whilst schizophrenics can hear other peoples. Serious point, maybe schizophrenic symptoms are cause by a disruption in REM sleep. As in the suffers are experiencing a waking dream. Some time back they did an experiement on students and kept them awake for days-and-nights on end. E…

Many things can cause psychosis, so it's difficult to draw cause and effect out of the data.

I've experienced severe psychosis. For me, it was a merging of reality and imagination. I always knew what was real, but my brain couldn't filter and ignore the unreal. I would act as if imagination was reality though I knew it wasn't.

Several people I've talked to have said similar things.

I think of dreams as the result of rebooting the brain mid-defrag. It's chaotic in some way. My experiences with psychosis was far too structured and self-consistent to be a dream.

My theory is there is an active component to psychosis that doesn't fit in with REM sleep as a cause.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#77

Post by crooked-v »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #64
robinduckett wrote: post #18

I know someone who has diagnosised but untreated schizophrenia. She was admitted to the hospital after she started having thyroid problems and they also administered schizophrenia medication while she was in. The change in her behaviour was positive and dramatic and allowed her to start accepting help after being scared that men in white coats would take her away if she ever let on about her illness to anyone. Now sh…

[flagged]

Medication only works while you take the medication.

Do you also object when taking a few aspirin doesn't make all headaches stop for the entire rest of your life?

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#78

Post by kbelder »

retrac wrote: post #44
aatd86 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might miss the point slightly, moving too far the discussion on the other side. It's perfectly normal to wonder how can one administrate something when one doesn't understand it. Especially when there can be such debilitating effects. In clinical settings, things are way less clear than you make it seem. All psychosis are not equal and even all diagnostic of a same patient are not equal. There is a lot mo…

> It's perfectly normal to wonder how can one administrate something when one doesn't understand it. Especially when there can be such debilitating effects. A theoretical/principled understanding of how a drug works has never been required for useful medicine to happen. For example, we don't know how general anaesthesia works. We don't know why some people have extremely bad reactions to certain anaesthetics (and the…

It isn't required for useful medicine, but it is useful for required medicine.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#79

Post by toasted-subs »

rybosworld wrote: post #6

It's amazing how far the medical world has come in treating ailments of the body, but we've made comparatively little headway in ailments of the brain.

There's a million reasons why. And I can't get into it without being called a quack.

And yes, washing hands is common practice now.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#80

Post by crooked-v »

aatd86 wrote: post #13
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #2

Situation normal. Consider the discovery of valproic acid: "Valproic acid is a carboxylic acid, a clear liquid at room temperature. For many decades, its only use was in laboratories as a "metabolically inert" solvent for organic compounds. In 1962, the French researcher Pierre Eymard serendipitously discovered the anticonvulsant properties of valproic acid while using it as a vehicle for a number of other compounds…

Normal might be a strong word. It messes with the brain which is the core. Goes to show a lot of clinical medecine is about short-term relief and not necessarily about real health. If you really look at it with unbiased eyes, between elective surgeries and what not, it's not really about curing any true dysfunction sometimes. Perhaps too many times. We just go with the flow but, heck, MDs are not even necessarily hea…

You've gone off on an unrelated tangent here. "Situation normal" in this case means that, as with lots of drugs, we only poorly understand the mechanism by which they actually work, and that new discoveries can completely change our understanding of how to use and improve on them.
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