81–90 of 131 posts
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They Inhibit the Reuptake of Seratonin Selectively. What should we call them?
If they do something else as a side effect, but it turns out that's the main effect, it might be worth renaming them.
So I've tried half a dozen antipsychotics, here are my 2 cents: The only things those drugs did to me were making me comatose, poop my pants, sleepy, dumb and hungry. You can't be declared psychotic or paranoid, when the only thing you can do is sleep, drool, poop yourself, and make 3 words sentences, so lazy doctors think these drugs work. But they don't, there was zero change in my beliefs, fears, anxieties, I was…
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For example, magnesium can interact with medications. I can't actually take it because there isn't a safe, reliable time in my daily medication schedule for it.
The study used a mouse model where amphetamine is used to simulate schizophrenia. Obviously, it's not guaranteed to map to real humans having real schizophrenia. That doesn't mean it's a useless result, but everyone should remember that research is an accumulation of decades of many little pieces of information. This is another clue, not a "nail in the coffin" of old theories. The ultimate evaluation of medication is…
While everyone should be keenly aware the limitations of taking experimental results in mice and extrapolating to humans (aka, they often don't ), doesn't that mean what we really have, is a bunch of well tested medication for meth addicts? Which; if there was a way to get meth addicts off meth, would be a boon?
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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.
So, not that wrong as you might think.
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.
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The anaesthetic agent is not a drug that one is supposed to take for the remaining of their life and has no observed side-effects in general. It's also treated with the utmost care and in most interventions, if there is a choice to do without, the patient is offered the choice. There is a lot more consent involved. So it's not the same thing. To answer your other question, yes, neurotransmitter levels can be measured…
> The anaesthetic agent is not a drug that one is supposed to take for the remaining of their life and has no observed side-effects in general. This is notably untrue. General anaesthesia is associated with higher risks of dementia. Especially the older the person being treated. While there's some disagreement here - short term cognitive decline is inarguable as a side-effect (called post-operative cognitive decline)…
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> 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.
If a remedy consistently has poor results, it's a bad remedy. Simply saying "it works for the ones that are righteous" is absurd. If you break it down that's generally what people are saying, but usually use words like lazy, stupid, crazy, addict, etc.
If most patients can't or won't follow a treatment maybe it doesn't work so well.
> Might want to check into your own beliefs about why the doctors are trying to sap all your bodily fluids.
This is very insulting, and demeaning, not to mention untrue. At no point did I imply doctors are trying to sap me of my "bodily fluids". I've never believed anything close to that. A leach sucks body fluid, so I guess it's a bit like that, but metaphoric.
You seemed to care about your friend. I don't see the point in blatant bigotry towards mental illness.
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Were any of the fMRI studies validated? I thought all related research was discarded.
I looked and didn't see any such news. Do you have any links?
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.1941
The citation is:
Weinberger, D. R., & Radulescu, E. (2020). Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging All Over Again. JAMA Psychiatry. DOI:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.1941
The article is a follow-up editorial on an older (2016), more substantive critique of MRI methods in psychiatry, which is also worth digesting slowly:
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2015.1...
The citation is:
Weinberger DR, Radulescu E. Finding the elusive psychiatric “lesion” with 21st-century neuroanatomy: a note of caution. Am J Psychiatry. 2016;173(1):27-33.
The situation is about as bad as it can be: there are so many potential sources of confounding in MRI studies that they simply cannot be trusted to say anything about the basic cellular elements of brain tissue in either healthy or diseased patients. All they can validly talk about is themselves; in other words "rather than referring to differences as evidence of brain structural abnormalities, they should be called differences on MRI measurements."
This is without getting into other hugely problematic aspects of MRI studies in mental health: tiny samples; failure to replicate; and most interesting to me, the fact that experimental subjects (i.e. the people in the study "with ADHD" or schizophrenia or whatever) are not screened for psychiatric medication use, which, because medications can shrink brain tissue, can make it look like the condition is affecting brain structure when in fact the drug is. (So another source of confounding, then.)
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You’re correct overall, and I know what you mean. But to offer a small and somewhat provocative nitpick: these (the psychoses or any other so-called mental illness) aren’t “ailments of the brain”, as they’ve never been shown to be. None has any demonstrated underlying pathology, much less a clinically useful one.
You sure? Schizophrenia is directly linked to dopamine. So is ADHD, but in the opposite way (not enough dopamine). Both were demonstrated on fMRI. Psychosis is a physical issue in the brain (too much dopamine making the brain fire when it shouldn't) that's solved by administering dopamine antagonists (= antipsychotics).
It's like trying to diagnose and treat a political crisis by observing telephone connections. We see stark changes in telephone use in a crisis. If we meddle with the telephone exchanges we might improve or harm various types of event. It's not really about the telephone calls though, we are just hacking at the messaging of an external event we are ignorant of.
A conspiracy theory induced panic might be superficially "solved" but cutting all the the phone lines. We have not identified or solved the cause though and people don't find life without telephones (dopamine) worth living so they plug them back in (quit their anti-psychotics).
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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?