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The psychiatric drug crisis

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Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#31

Post by sillysaurus2 »

unono wrote: post #28

Hackers can make huge money in psychology/psychiatry (both prescientific fields). Life logging and it's analysis - quantified self. Positive psychology would be the better angle to play it, unregulated, big money in the self-help culture. Mobile apps are the right medium for it. There was recent doc on it 'Monitor Me' by bbc horizon. edit: to replyers, it didn't want to post links for everything, so google 'monitor m…

I'm trying to understand what you're saying, but honestly I have no idea what you just said. Would you clarify your meaning?

edit to reply to your edit: no, you'll have to do much better than that if you want to actually communicate with people and not be ignored or dismissed as crazy. Would you please spend at least 10 minutes typing an explanation of (a) what are you talking about, and (b) why is it valuable?

Maybe I should point out that your edit seems to assume that most people understood part of your original comment. Actually, I think nobody understood any of it. So you'll have to rewrite what you originally said. (One strategy would be to make your comment longer and more thorough, and don't assume that anyone understands what you're saying unless you've explained it thoroughly, even if it seems obvious to you.)

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#32

Post by rjbwork »

unono wrote: post #28

Hackers can make huge money in psychology/psychiatry (both prescientific fields). Life logging and it's analysis - quantified self. Positive psychology would be the better angle to play it, unregulated, big money in the self-help culture. Mobile apps are the right medium for it. There was recent doc on it 'Monitor Me' by bbc horizon. edit: to replyers, it didn't want to post links for everything, so google 'monitor m…

Could you elaborate a bit? You lost me after life logging.

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#33

Post by anigbrowl »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #5
eksith wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just obscene! All that markup over just the label. I understand that it takes R&D to develop new drugs, but the amount of profit sought by drug companies is stomach churning.

Obscene? What's the "correct" markup? I sell digital, single-player video games. My manufacturing cost is zero and markup is infinite.

The correct markup is cost + opportunity cost, known in economics as 'normal profits'.

Your manufacturing cost is not zero at all. You have significant fixed costs; your marginal cost is zero, or so close to it as to be negligible. Your average fixed costs fall with each copy sold, but unless you consider your time and labor entirely worthless you have to sell quite a few copies before you break even.

Also, since your game is a discretionary expense, there's no significant opportunity cost to the non-purchaser, whereas the opportunity cost to someone who eschews or can't afford to purchase medication might be the person's life.

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#34

Post by kirubakaran »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #20
FrankenPC wrote: post #16

Maybe humans are just...unhappy? By that I mean as a race, we are inherently unstable (see: entire human history) and for a long time we kept it together by forming very tight family and community bonds. We had central, realistic, and tangible goals. We had an invisible friend (religion). As science has systematically stripped all that away (for the better mind you...), nothing has filled those needs. We don't need m…

http://blog.wilshipley.com/2005/05/on-being-crazy.html is a very insightful read on that subject, from a successful but unstable person. Is mankind only so smart because if we get any smarter, we cease to function correctly? Maybe it's just not evolutionarily advantageous to be smarter than we are; it makes us mopey, and we end up cutting our ears off when we're trying to woo girls, which rarely results in offspring.

Disproof : Richard Feynman

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#35

Post by jes5199 »

md224 wrote: post #26

Fun Fact: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, the class of drugs used to treat depression and anxiety disorders by increasing the availability of serotonin, have a mirror opposite: Tianeptine ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine ), which acts as a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Enhancer. Incredibly, this drug has also been effective at treating depression . That's right: two classes of drugs with polar opposi…

I've been meditating on this fact for a while. (I take an SSRI, and I believe that it helps me, but I would love to know why.)

I think one possible understanding of depression is that it is a feedback loop - it's a sort of standing wave or Nash equilibrium of patterns of thought causing patterns of behavior causing patterns of sensation causing patterns of emotion that cause patterns of thought, etc. And, perhaps, that just by changing any random variable(s) in that loop (mucking with reuptake, or cognitive behavioral therapy, or any of a whole bunch of other possible changes) has a probability of disrupting the equilibrium and suspending the depression.

It's not clear to me how to test this hypothesis, though.

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#36

Post by xxpor »

md224 wrote: post #26

Fun Fact: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, the class of drugs used to treat depression and anxiety disorders by increasing the availability of serotonin, have a mirror opposite: Tianeptine ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine ), which acts as a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Enhancer. Incredibly, this drug has also been effective at treating depression . That's right: two classes of drugs with polar opposi…

Both are effective on the same people? Otherwise, it kind of makes sense. If depression is just an imbalance, it may be that there is either too much serotonin or too little.

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#37

Post by jrockway »

angersock wrote: post #30
md224 wrote: post #26

Fun Fact: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, the class of drugs used to treat depression and anxiety disorders by increasing the availability of serotonin, have a mirror opposite: Tianeptine ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine ), which acts as a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Enhancer. Incredibly, this drug has also been effective at treating depression . That's right: two classes of drugs with polar opposi…

The molecule looks somewhat obscene.

It might want to get that chlorine looked at.

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#38

Post by jes5199 »

xxpor wrote: post #36
md224 wrote: post #26

Fun Fact: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, the class of drugs used to treat depression and anxiety disorders by increasing the availability of serotonin, have a mirror opposite: Tianeptine ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine ), which acts as a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Enhancer. Incredibly, this drug has also been effective at treating depression . That's right: two classes of drugs with polar opposi…

Both are effective on the same people? Otherwise, it kind of makes sense. If depression is just an imbalance, it may be that there is either too much serotonin or too little.

unfortunately, we don't have good data on which drugs are effective on the same people versus on different people. The clinical trials just aren't set up that way, and there hasn't been a concerted effort to gather that information from the general population.

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#39

Post by bdclimber14 »

I think it's relevant to point out the potent anti-depressant effects many people experience with natural supplements such as sam-e and 5htp. It's unfortunate that these drugs are rarely prescribed (in the U.S.). Few clinical studies have been done on these and there is little economic motivation for drug companies since these are un-patentable substances.

Re: The psychiatric drug crisis

#40

Post by mathattack »

kyro wrote: post #23

Good riddance. Psychiatry by and large is a sham field. Physicians who practice it love seeing themselves as artists who are experts in identifying the subtleties of human behavior. That's their way of saying there's very little underlying science guiding their practice. Many of the diagnoses given are pulled out of thin air and made to justify a patient's admission, or to appease a patient's desire to feel as if the…

Let's play the devil's advocate here... I've known people who have lost their marbles once they stopped taking their meds. Are we rally saying that their grip on sanity was a placebo effect? Or are we saying that we're just treating the symptom? If it's just the symptom, who cares, as long as the drugs help people?

For context, I'm not on any psychiatric drugs, have never been on any, and think they're largely being abused by American society. But the extreme cases suggest to me that they have a use.

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