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Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

blog.ncase.me

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Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#281

Post by DauntingPear7 »

ghusto wrote: post #161
isoprophlex wrote: post #43

Because it's common to hate on antidepressants, I've always personally had a bias against them. For the past 15-20 years, november thru february are basically a writeoff due for me due to seasonal affective disorder. Cold showers, exercise, no alcohol, strict sleeping rituals. Vitamin d. I can still sleep 11 hours and feel like reheated cat shit. Enter citalopram. "It will take up to six weeks to dial in" they said.…

The hate on antidepressants is not because they're not effective, but rather that they're abused by psychiatrists. Ideally, a professional will prescribe them as a necessary helper to becoming (more) mentally healthy whilst tackling the root cause. Most of the time however, it's more of a "here, take these indefinitely". It's like if we took sleeping pills every time we had trouble sleeping. Having said that, I just…

Yeah some people pop a melatonin every night before bed

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#282

Post by welshwelsh »

isoprophlex wrote: post #43

Because it's common to hate on antidepressants, I've always personally had a bias against them. For the past 15-20 years, november thru february are basically a writeoff due for me due to seasonal affective disorder. Cold showers, exercise, no alcohol, strict sleeping rituals. Vitamin d. I can still sleep 11 hours and feel like reheated cat shit. Enter citalopram. "It will take up to six weeks to dial in" they said.…

How do you know it was the SSRI?

To cherry-pick a quote from a review of SSRI studies:

>the magnitude of symptom reduction was about 40% with antidepressants and about 30% with placebo.

That tells me that antidepressants have some effectiveness, but placebos work shockingly well. You can give someone a sugar pill with no medical properties whatsoever, and a good portion of people will recover, likely crediting the pill for their recovery.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#283

Post by ncasenmare »

isoprophlex wrote: post #43

Because it's common to hate on antidepressants, I've always personally had a bias against them. For the past 15-20 years, november thru february are basically a writeoff due for me due to seasonal affective disorder. Cold showers, exercise, no alcohol, strict sleeping rituals. Vitamin d. I can still sleep 11 hours and feel like reheated cat shit. Enter citalopram. "It will take up to six weeks to dial in" they said.…

Hi, author of the blog post here! Thank you for sharing your experience with antidepressants, I'm really glad it worked for you & made your life better.

I did mention the following at the end of the "antidepressants" section, but reading your comment convinced me to move it further up. The intro now reads:

> The "standardised effect size" of antidepressants on depression, vs placebo, is around 0.4. (On average; some people respond much better or much worse.)

Also, I wasn't expecting my article to do well on Hacker News; thank you everyone for the comments & critiques! I'll edit the blog post as I go along, to refine it in response to your comments.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#284

Post by weird-eye-issue »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #231
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find scientific papers on Google if you know how to use it.

You can find scientific papers on a lot of search engines, not only Google. The problem with that is, that you still need to know how to interpret any results and statements within the supposedly scientific papers. If you are not a statistician, you might overlook methodology mistakes. If you are not an expert in the matter of the paper, you might not realize some side condition, that makes some statement or result o…

Another overly verbose worthless comment from you. Why do you continue spewing text like this as if you're actually helping anybody?

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#285

Post by ncasenmare »

josalhor wrote: post #41
r1ch wrote: post #4

Please do not take 5000mg/day of Vitamin D. The author confuses IU and mg which is very dangerous.

I also noticed that. Opened issue: https://github.com/ncase/blog/issues/4

Hi, author of the blog post here! Yes thank you for catching this awful typo, it's fixed now! I did write "4000 or 5000 IU of Vitamin D" everywhere else in the article -- main text, conclusion -- just my luck that the one place I mess up is right at the very start.

(Do not take 5000 mg, that's 200,000,000 IU. You'd have to chug dozens of bottles per day)

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#286

Post by [deleted] »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #247
citrin_ru wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you view a world at a certain angle there is always something to worry about: 1. World in not perfect, it doesn't confirm to how we want it to be (and could not even in theory given that different people want it to be different) 2. The future cannot be predicted with 100% accuracy so even if all is perfect today you can worry that it will turn bad in the future. When looking at the same reality one persons sees th…

> A depressed person would tell that most people around him are wrong and are optimistic only because they don't understand how bad all is. Or because of a legitimate chemical imbalance or some other cognitive issue they can’t control alone. Right?

[deleted]

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#287

Post by chickensong »

ghusto wrote: post #161
isoprophlex wrote: post #43

Because it's common to hate on antidepressants, I've always personally had a bias against them. For the past 15-20 years, november thru february are basically a writeoff due for me due to seasonal affective disorder. Cold showers, exercise, no alcohol, strict sleeping rituals. Vitamin d. I can still sleep 11 hours and feel like reheated cat shit. Enter citalopram. "It will take up to six weeks to dial in" they said.…

The hate on antidepressants is not because they're not effective, but rather that they're abused by psychiatrists. Ideally, a professional will prescribe them as a necessary helper to becoming (more) mentally healthy whilst tackling the root cause. Most of the time however, it's more of a "here, take these indefinitely". It's like if we took sleeping pills every time we had trouble sleeping. Having said that, I just…

> I have the impression that's exactly what people do in the USA?

It's not a great idea to make general assumptions about such a large and diverse country. Some drugs may be over prescribed, I have no idea if Ambien is one of them, but trying to fit 340 million people across 50 states into the same box isn't going to be very accurate.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#288

Post by freedomben »

staticassertion wrote: post #228
chasil wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I have a yearly physical, my GP will ask if I have feelings of depression. I know this road leads to SSRIs at the very least, so I always reply in the negative. The parent comment hints to me that this might be a mistake. I do not want to become accustomed to an antidepressant, so perhaps my course of action was correct. I was measured low on Vitamin D, which I've hopefully corrected, and I haven't always…

> I know this road leads to SSRIs at the very least, so I always reply in the negative. Seems odd. Your doctor can't force you to take anything. If they say "do you want to try X?" just say "No". Not giving your doctor full medical context seems like a mistake - for example, maybe depression would be indicative of another issue, or maybe people who are depressed really shouldn't take a specific medication. To each th…

Agreed. A friend of mine is a primary care doctor, and it's remarkable how often people come in for depression and after examination and labs it turns out their depression is heavily influenced by other issues, especially low testosterone or hypothyroid. A lot more people have issues with these than most people realize. There have also been people he has seen who were reporting depression, often where nearly every anti-depressant had been tried, where getting treatment for ADHD massively improved their case and was life changing. As much as people like to hate on Adderall nowadays, for people with ADHD it is miraculous.

Getting treatment for "depression" doesn't always mean SSRIs etc. Sometimes it means treating the underlying condition(s) that are having downstream affects. I would suggest everyone gets their Testosterone levels checked among other common things.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#289

Post by bamboozled »

buddhistdude wrote: post #191
bamboozled wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love coffee so much, I'd prefer to deal with the anxiety, and I do suffer from it.

Or the addiction just makes you think that this is good for you when actually you'd feel better without it?

It's the smell, texture and taste of coffee I love, not really the caffeine. I tried decaf, doesn't taste the same.

Re: Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

#290

Post by marcd35 »

ncasenmare wrote: post #283
isoprophlex wrote: post #43

Because it's common to hate on antidepressants, I've always personally had a bias against them. For the past 15-20 years, november thru february are basically a writeoff due for me due to seasonal affective disorder. Cold showers, exercise, no alcohol, strict sleeping rituals. Vitamin d. I can still sleep 11 hours and feel like reheated cat shit. Enter citalopram. "It will take up to six weeks to dial in" they said.…

Hi, author of the blog post here! Thank you for sharing your experience with antidepressants, I'm really glad it worked for you & made your life better. I did mention the following at the end of the "antidepressants" section, but reading your comment convinced me to move it further up. The intro now reads: > The "standardised effect size" of antidepressants on depression, vs placebo, is around 0.4. (On average; some…

Thank you for the blog post! I live in New England and always had the winter blues, always just assumed it was because of the weather but never acted on it.

About a week ago, there was a reddit post claiming it's actually geographically impossible for anyone where I live to produce enough Vitamin D naturally from the sun alone, due to the shorter days and lower angles throughout the day. I had no idea.

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