None of those drugs helped me personally in the 90s (Prozac, Zoloft, etc). What helped me personally was talking about my problems with other humans only to the learn we all are "crazy,(aka totally normal)" and the majority all deal with something similar. Anxiety, OCD, insecurity .. all are parts of the human condition we all deal with throughout our lives.
Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
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Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#212When I was a teen I was put on Prozac because I threatened to commit suicide.
The drug absolutely destroyed me. Within a few days of taking it, I was in a bizarre state of delirium where I would sleep something like 18 hours a day. When I wasn't asleep I would gnash my teeth at my parents. At school I would lash out at my classmates and randomly punch the walls of my classroom. I was taken off the drug after about five days but I didn't fully recover.
To this day, my emotions are severely blunted. I still have complete anhedonia and avolition. I can go on a roller coaster and feel not a shred of an adrenaline rush. Nothing. I struggle maintaining relationships with people because I have no innate "desire" to do so.
The drug is absolutely evil and should never be given to minors.
Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but strong disagree here. I have had a lot of Spinal and sleep issues. I have read almost all new literature on this niche subject and I have brought to my spine doctor some new therapy and treatments they had literally no idea about. Those treatments have changed my life. As an engineer I read a lot of deep technical paper as my day job. Medical papers are comparatively relatively simple. The most complex part…
I think it's good to read papers and be curious. It's also good to work with your doctors (as you seem to have done), have a discussion, and mutually agree on a plan of treatment. Experts don't know everything. But they probably know some things you don't, and can think of questions you might not to have even thought to ask. As the saying goes, "you don't know what you don't know". Experience matters. There's also a…
Cherrypicking is bad, but worse is reading a paper and thinking you understand what it says, when you don't actually understand what it says. Or thinking that a paper and its data can be observed neutrally as a factual and accurate statement for what work was actually done.
My experience in journal club- basically, a group of grad students who all read a paper and then discuss it in person- taught me that most papers are just outright wrong for technical reasons. I'd say about 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 papers passes all the basic tests, and even the ones that do pass can have significant problems. For example, there is an increasing recognition that many papers in biology and medicine have fake data, or manipulated data, or corrupted data, or incorrectly labelled data. I know folks who've read papers and convinced themselvs the paper is good, when later the paper was retracted because the authors copied a few gels into the wrong columns...
Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#214> treating depression Most of the "treatment" is apparently just telling people to stop feeling sad [0], or giving them drugs [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/thanksimcured but no one bothers to take the time out to sit down and figure out WHY they feel sad and FIX THAT FOR THEM. That takes too much work. Sometimes depression is this vague feeling that this world is just wrong. That Damocles' sword of mortality. The nagg…
If someone is sad for a specific, identifiable and tractable reason, then they are experiencing a categorically different phenomenon to someone who just feels sad all of the time regardless of their life circumstances.
One of the key diagnostic criteria for melancholic depression - what we might lazily and inaccurately call biological or "real" depression - is mood unreactivity. Someone with severe melancholic depression could win the lottery one week, lose all of their family in a plane crash the next, and feel literally nothing about either event.
Some people with atypical depression (or normal sadness that has been mis-diagnosed as depression) can respond rapidly and dramatically to a change in their circumstances. For many others with depression, there is no external why - something has gone fundamentally wrong in the functioning of their brain. Trying to help those people with talk therapy or exercise or companionship would be as futile as using those things to treat hepatitis or gangrene.
Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I hope you do realize that this comment thread is linked to an article that includes the words "Prozac no better than placebo" in its headline?
Yes, I do. I don't consider articles in the regular press to be even remotely worth looking at due to their high rate of inaccuracy. Here's the paper that the article refers to: https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356%2825%2900349-X/f...
Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to our pediatrician there are no known long-term effects of juvenile Prozac use. The effects may exist, but if they do they are of sufficiently low significance as to not have been detected yet. Interestingly the one possible effect she's aware of is that there may be a correlation with not growing as tall physically as one might otherwise. The data is not conclusive, but it gives me something to blame for…
This is one of the most shocking things I have ever read. There is a black box warning for Prozac: ‘Warning: Suicidality and Antidepressant Drugs Increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults taking antidepressants for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders’ Read the package insert: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2011/01... T…
This is such a blatant misrepresentation of the parent post that it feels almost bad faith.
The subject was specifically about long term brain chemistry changes.
People committing suicide after taking it, while incredibly sad, is completely unrelated.
Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide a source for that theory having been debunked? I agree that data has been found that is at odds with the various neurochemical theories but am not aware of the neurochemistry link as a whole having been definitely debunked.
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I'll take this sincerely, and ask you, is this really something you've a continuing curiosity about? I have a suspicion you understand what is taking place, but for whatever reason, are not expressing so directly. Are you asserting there is nothing more to discuss after one parses the search results for “chemical imbalance debunked”. The parent is quite clearly, at the minimum, meeting their parent's level of input, which essentially amounted to "this thing is debunked". As an onlooker and after a quick skim of the search query you suggested, I am still not exactly clear on what "neurochemistry issue [theory]" entails. What would help, is a more clear underpinning for what is being discussed, which your parent is suggesting, through question, before attempting to respond. I appreciate this personally!
Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homicidal?
Yep. My dad recounted that in 1989, he had to restrain her because she (then age 40) had a psychotic episode described as a "murderous impulse" just after starting a brand new "wonder pill", Prozac. This was quite uncharacteristic for a tiny, docile woman who is often described as "sweet" and "nice" who never had any psychiatric symptoms before or since except a couple of brief times of situational depression. There'…
It is highly likely that your mother was misdiagnosed as suffering from unipolar depression when she was in fact suffering from bipolar disorder. A sudden switch to mania is a common outcome, even in cases where the patient has no previous history of mania. It is crucially important to take a comprehensive history to rule out bipolar disorder, but many general practitioners (and some psychiatrists) reflexively prescribe SSRIs whenever they see a depressive episode, even where there is clear evidence of a personal history of hypomania or a family history of mania.
Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the most shocking things I have ever read. There is a black box warning for Prozac: ‘Warning: Suicidality and Antidepressant Drugs Increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults taking antidepressants for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders’ Read the package insert: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2011/01... T…
Note that the black box warning has nothing to do with long-term effects of the medication. It was added specifically because kids were killing themselves within weeks of starting the medication. > This is one of the most shocking things I have ever read. Good grief. I hope you're exaggerating for effect.
I'll raise my hand in agreement. This thread is definitely one of the most disturbing sub-threads I've ever read on HN.
Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
#220I was very young when my mom started Prozac but do remember how angry and sad she was before compared to after. Years later there was a time when me and my sister noticed our mom was acting a bit strange -- more snappish and irritable than usual, and she even started dressing differently. Then at dinner she announced proudly that she had been off Prozac for a month. My sister and I looked at each other and at the sam…
> my 7-year-old son just started half that dose This is horrifying.
No, it's not.
Medicine is advancing. We're increasingly able to understand and adjust dysfunctions that cause major, negative quality of life impacts. These dysfunctions have always existed, we're just getting better at finding ways to help people work through it.