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Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

theguardian.com

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Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#461

Post by brendoelfrendo »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #409
brendoelfrendo wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I can tell you've got a chip on your shoulder about this and are probably a conspiracy theorist, so I'm not going to argue anymore.

Maybe chip on their shoulder, but the claim of conspiracy theorist is completely unwarranted. The impression you give off is that you decided upfront their sources are bad and you're going to knee-jerk reject their evidence no matter what.

I think their rhetorical approach to this subject is bad and I have no respect for someone who tries to lead someone to a conclusion while being circumspect about their own biases. This is the internet; one should assume negative intent in these cases.

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#462

Post by staticman2 »

ryeights wrote: post #329
blastersyndrome wrote: post #212

When 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 fi…

I don’t want to discount your experience, but attributing a lifetime of symptoms to 5 doses of SSRIs (when you were already exhibiting an unstable mental state) seems extreme.

I've seen a post like this before on reddit.

We know SSRI's really do cause permanent sexual dysfunctional in a small minority of people, small enough that this side effect doesn't come up in traditional FDA tests.

If a side effect is extremely rare it would be impossible or at least impractical to prove in a population.

Grandparent could be right or wrong about how the drug affected them, maybe their brain suffered from other issues and the timing of the medications was purelycoincidental, but if they are correct, your dismissive response is exactly what we'd expect given when they are saying sounds unusual/ improbable.

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#463

Post by conartist6 »

robertakarobin wrote: post #459
conartist6 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't mean to second-guess your choices. There's clearly some very interesting issues here, and my experience is as someone who never felt they had any serious issues with mental health. But I do think that we have this culture where everyone is expected to be OK all the time. Do you worry at all that your son cues in to his parents relationship with the drug? I mean, say it was me, and I knew my parents too…

Prozac doesn't define me. It's just something I take to address a health condition, like an iron supplement for low iron levels or amoxicillin for strep throat. My kids learned about it because they saw me taking a pill every day and asked what it was. No biggie. To be clear, Prozac is not a "feel-good" pill, it's a "gradually feel more stable" pill. It makes my lows less debilitatingly low and more manageable -- my…

That's fair. Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#464

Post by DANmode »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #442
DANmode wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stopping back in, because I unironically came across someone's almost-surely AI assisted summary that does a better job than I have summarizing the processes being discussed: == === Why the Sick Get Sicker Most people think illness progresses because of pathogens, toxins, or genetics — but the deeper truth is that tension, stress, and breathing patterns control the trajectory of health more than anything else. When t…

Please don't do this.

Please don't do this.

You've contributed nothing curious to this thread whatsoever, just threw some doubt in, then buggered off during the replies – more or less communicating "stuff I can't directly or completely refute is AI slop".

That's....disappointing.

I saw this textpost made by someone else, and literally thought of you, JumpCrisscross.

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#465

Post by amluto »

jacobgkau wrote: post #130
kstrauser wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If a kid has diabetes, would it be horrifying to treat it? Why would it be different for a neurochemistry issue that makes the same kid tired and sad all the time?

Because the problem's not a "neurochemistry issue" (that theory's been debunked and the "chemicals" in play have never been known), and the solution is "no better than placebo."

…so what?

There’s an interesting theory lately [0] that the antidepressant effect of SSRIs is actually unrelated to its effect on serotonin. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that this is completely true: serotonin has nothing to do with depression, increasing serotonin levels is useless for treating depression, and everything everyone has ever claimed about chemical imbalances causing depression is flat-out wrong.

If so, pharma companies should probably try to develop different drugs instead of new SSRIs. But it does not follow that a patient with depression ought not to take an SSRI. That would be like saying that taking aspirin for aches has been completely debunked because there is no connection between aches and aspirin’s anticoagulant effect.

[0] See, for example, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/trkb-bdnf-and-depr...

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#466

Post by DANmode »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #441
Modified3019 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not quite following the previous conversation here, but your comment brings to mind that one theory of a possible “function” of depression, is as a “sickness behavior” to help isolate a sick animal from others to protect the group. A sheep or cow getting sick and going off on its own is a common thing. I’m not sure if it has a technical name or if it’s been rigorously studied, but it’s a common observation which…

> but your comment brings to mind that one theory of a possible “function” of depression, is as a “sickness behavior” to help isolate a sick animal from others to protect the group. A sheep or cow getting sick and going off on its own is a common thing It's one explanation of the phenomenon. I'm not remotely convinced by it, but that doesn't mean I think it's untrue. What I do think we can conclude is that we have no…

> we have no evidence depression is caused by infection

Besides talking to patients and reading case files.

You can wait another decade or three for someone to spend the money on a specific study that meets your individual criteria (I'm sure very high), for doing obvious things like:

1.) Treating known infections, testing for others,

and

2.) Addressing nutritional gaps, as well as tracking circadian/endocrine, and nervous symptoms (which often intertwine with depression symptoms!)

but I will not wait.

I'd prefer to no longer be depressed, and/or unwell.

So I'll do the obvious things – even if they're not obvious to you, yet.

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#467

Post by BigGreenJorts »

heavyset_go wrote: post #451
hintklb wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue I see is that the anxiety pill is a way to treat the symptoms, not the cause. Do you think that there is a way to treat the underlying cause and not the symptoms?

Beyond obvious tumors/lesions/clots/abnormalities, we are not even close to being able to identify the cause of organic anxiety or mood disorders even if we wanted to. We can say certain behaviors, experiences, illnesses and some genetic identifiers can trigger the conditions, but not the underlying cause. We can say things like some therapy and medication can help with the illness, but not the cause. Not to triviali…

> Not to trivialize therapy, but for many illnesses, not just mental, a portion of it can be described as ways of learning to live with the illness, not necessarily treating the underlying cause.

Yeah, I feel like it's fair to describe the cognitive behavioral model. We're not necessarily looking for the cause of these thoughts and beliefs, tho they may come up, we're simply going to challenge them at face value and reinterpret the situation.

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#468

Post by tcj_phx »

flatline wrote: post #95
tcj_phx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > SSRIs never help because of boosting serotonin. > That's a hell of a claim, which could use some evidence. My experience with the chatbots is that they start with the conventional marketing tropes, but if you ask pointed questions they'll dig into the actual research. This thread started with a generic question about why ECT seemed to help some patients. It had a really good reasoning about why SSRIs are still th…

The chatbot is great as a first-line of research for many things, but something like this needs to be backed up by actual research to make a concrete claim. It will absolutely fabricate falsehoods or misrepresent truths based on an unknown number of stochastic factors behind any response. Shame on your for propagating a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that every reader must go verify for themselves if they want to substantiate…

The SSRI's have always been terrible drugs. Apparently the trials before their approval found increased suicidality. Another response to this thread shared how his/her mother was given a "murderous impulse" with Prozac in 1989 [0].

Because this class of drugs was so heavily promoted for such a long time, the side effects have always been swept under the rug.

My comment above proposed that the 11yo girl's depression could actually be caused by precocious puberty. Another possibility is that she's a poor methylator (#MTHFR) who's poisoned by fortified flour and other sources of shelf-stable provitamins.

I haven't yet found a comprehensive SSRI-truth resource that makes SSRI advocates pause their advocacy, so I just shared the chatbot link. This was supposed to provide the father enough of the background terms and anti-SSRI thinking for him to search for his own resources.

Someone else posted a link to "The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence" [2022] at Nature [1]. This is okay, but it still dances around the core issue: whether ECT and Serotonin-enhancers sometimes benefit people because of how the brain responds to brain damage.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002561

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008211

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#469

Post by blastersyndrome »

tartoran wrote: post #410
blastersyndrome wrote: post #212

When 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 fi…

How long were you on Prozac? The way you describe your experience it makes it sound like you were affected long term. Are you still on it or any other SSRI? Hope you eventually rediscover/redevelop your emotional functionality.

I took it for one week.

I haven't taken any antidepressants since.

Re: Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

#470

Post by mvdtnz »

robertakarobin wrote: post #108

I 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…

Sorry but giving a 7 year old prozac is psycho behaviour.
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