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Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

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Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#61

Post by wheelerof4te »

TeaDrunk wrote: post #50
m_0x wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance and prejudice, but how are you not a danger to the people that surround you? Or is schizophrenia a spectrum very much alike as autism?

Schizophrenia can be more or less severe. A schizophrenic with very mild symptoms, a stable life, access to food and shelter, no unhandled trauma, etc. can function and even thrive without medication. The disease can also get better with age. Consider: you can hear voices and choose not to respond to them. You can have delusional beliefs and not act on them. There's no functional difference between talking with your…

On point. Many people know that they have this problem and can act before it manifests in reality, through action.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#62

Post by wheelerof4te »

pixl97 wrote: post #21
BurningFrog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also think of "the brain" as a collection of 10-20 separate organs, rather than one super complex one.

While true, the complexity of each organelle in the brain is still much higher than that of the typical organ elsewhere in the body. That and there is a high degree of connectivity and feedback between components where the API is completely and totally undocumented. It's not that you don't know what the known API calls do, you don't have any clue on how many API calls there even are. Accidently emulating one of these…

I just love the programmer's analogy here.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#63

Post by throwaway60707 »

copperx wrote: post #36
throwaway60707 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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?

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#64

Post by P_I_Staker »

robinduckett wrote: post #18

I know someone who has diagnosised but untreated schizophrenia. She was admitted to the hospital after she started having thyroid problems and they also administered schizophrenia medication while she was in. The change in her behaviour was positive and dramatic and allowed her to start accepting help after being scared that men in white coats would take her away if she ever let on about her illness to anyone. Now sh…

[flagged]

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#65

Post by wheelerof4te »

Pixie_Dust wrote: post #38

My Schizophrenic friend tells me the difference between schizophrenics and normal people is that normal people can hear their own thoughts whilst schizophrenics can hear other peoples. Serious point, maybe schizophrenic symptoms are cause by a disruption in REM sleep. As in the suffers are experiencing a waking dream. Some time back they did an experiement on students and kept them awake for days-and-nights on end. E…

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".

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#66

Post by faeriechangling »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #24
hinkley wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "serotonin model", actually called the monoamine hypothesis, hasn't really been taken seriously in the field for decades, except by naysayers like yourself who continue to use it as a strawman.

I see patients still take it seriously because of the heavy marketing of Zoloft in particular.

The drugs are literally have serotonin in the name.

I still hear people regularly refer to mental health problems being due to a "Chemical imbalance", often as a way to defend their use of pharmaceuticals and dismiss the efficacy of any other intervention. It's that they see people justify a non-falsifiable in the efficacy of the current course of treatment. It's that it's hard enough to convince people who have been on SSRI's for decades and are doing badly to take a month to ween off them, a month to see how things go, and a month to get back on them. If they believe their brains are fundamentally broken without evidence it's just about impossible.

It's that when a sixth of American women have taken anti-d's in the past month, and the most popular explanation as to why is they have broken brains that need to be treated with medicine, as if their problems must all be due to some genetic issue or whatever, I find it abhorrent.

I don't know, it pisses me off that these drugs are popular largely due to a mythology and how difficult they are to stop more than they're efficacious is all (not that they are not efficacious). It's not that psychiatrists don't know this theory isn't true, I'm well aware the theory has been well known to lack support for a long time in medical circles, it's that they don't effectively inform their patients.

Medicine should stop calling them "SSRIs" if the SSRI part is a tangential side-effect, better educate patients on the fact that medicine doesn't really know why the drugs work, or even if a given patient will respond to them better than placebo. Governments should ban pharmaceutical advertisements because they make people sick and misinformed.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#67

Post by AmericanChopper »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #57
AmericanChopper wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hasn't really been taken seriously in the field for decades, except by naysayers like yourself who continue to use it as a strawman. …and by basically the entire general public. Big pharma did a great job on the “depression is a just a chemical imbalance…” awareness campaign, but absolutely dropped the ball on the “actually we were wrong about that” campaign, so that’s still what most members of the public tend to…

Can you name one topic of bleeding edge research on which the general public's understanding is not either outdated, oversimplified, or both?

The reason it’s outdated in this case is because the pharmaceutical industry invested so much money and time into selling Prozac to the public, for a treatment that was ultimately ineffective, and then of course invested no money at all into correcting the public’s subsequent misunderstanding. So unlike what you’ve claimed, this isn’t a concept taken seriously only by naysayers who want to use it as a strawman. It’s a concept many members of the public generally believe to be true, because the experts spent so much time and money telling them it was.

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#68

Post by cududa »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #24
hinkley wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "serotonin model", actually called the monoamine hypothesis, hasn't really been taken seriously in the field for decades, except by naysayers like yourself who continue to use it as a strawman.

I mean this without sarcasm, but congratulations on your deployment the phrase "strawman" being one of the only uses I've ever seen that makes sense, and not using it as cop out to avoid responding to a valid metaphor/ anecdote

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#69

Post by PawgerZ »

hinkley wrote: post #51
astrange wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and psychiatrists never believed it was "low serotonin" at all, or at least claim to have never believed it. For ADHD, stimulants actually do treat it by fixing "low dopamine"… in specific areas of the brain. But "low dopamine" is also a description of Parkinson's disease. But SSRIs don't work like stimulants do; they take a lot more than half an hour to take effect. We don't actually know how SSRIs work in the…

The fact we still called them SSRIs is the part that gets me. But I suppose until we know how they actually work we can’t just call them “thingy”.

They Inhibit the Reuptake of Seratonin Selectively. What should we call them?

Re: Schizophrenia drugs may have been off target for decades, study finds

#70

Post by astrange »

PawgerZ wrote: post #69
hinkley wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact we still called them SSRIs is the part that gets me. But I suppose until we know how they actually work we can’t just call them “thingy”.

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.
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