Antidepressants Called "The American Burka"

My sole medication is half a pill prescribed for high blood pressure, (taking a whole one gives me muscle pain and dizziness), though I've thrown away several prescriptions over the past two years. The last is some kind of anti-depressent. No, I won't take this damn pill, I'll just find some other way of dealing with this rash I get now & then on my scalp, which I think is shingles but it does cause headaches. The neurologist Rx'd pills for migraines, a third doctor Rx'd nerve damage pills for neuritis (!). I didn't take any of those, thank you. I do have common sense.

I worked for 2 G.P.s when my kids were very young. One of them cared for all the women and welfare patients. Each one got a Rx for birth control pills, water pills, diet pills and something like Valium - each add'l pill of course causes a side effect treated by the next pill.

I think there's a problem with docs over-prescribing anti-depressents.

you REALLY REALLY cant read wolrth a damn, can you



are you an airline paseenger? you want your plane piloted by someone grounded for a year and now flying with a "special" certificate? nope i don't

Why even bother responding to Disabled51? If you've ever seen any of his rants on other threads, you realize that this is a hostile racist xenophobic moron, a troll of the first water, not too different in style from our own Waterboy. Ignore him. After a while he's bound to go away.

Waterboy is still here, thus blowing your theory out of the water.

You seem to be having trouble waking up today....best get some coffee in you before you try again

the guy makes a se3ries of mistakes, won't adimit to any of them, instead blames all on someone called waterboy, and also thinks i said that pilots on antidepressants are all blacks and all foreigners, and you think COFFEE is gonna solve his problems?

coffee can't hurt i guess but i think he's deep into alszheimers territory

Where did you see me say, or imply, that waterboy is NOT here? I think you're the one who needs to heed the call to reveille.

Insurance companies didn't want to pay for talk therapy because having a patient pop a pill was cheaper for them. Physicians loved this approach too because any licensed doctor, not just a psychiatrist, could prescribe one of the newer anti-depressants because they had fewer side effects than the older tricyclic anti-depressants. Prescribing pills keeps patients returning to see you on a regular basis to have meds evaluated and renewed, so physicians have income benefits from writing these scripts. And the pharmaceutical companies are delighted to keep bringing out more anti-depressants, marketing them in TV commercials, and ringing up profits.

So, the popping of anti-depressant pills, has made a lot of folks happy. Unfortunately this rarely includes the people actually taking these pills.

As has already been pointed out in this thread, these medications are largely ineffective for treating mild-moderate depression, the conditions for which they are most often prescribed. They have effectiveness only in treating major depression, which accounts for the smallest number of cases of depression in the general population. Because they don't do much for the less severe depressions, physicians keep upping dosages, and adding more pills in combination, often making the patient suffer side-effects, without actually addressing the cause of the depression or helping the patient to deal with it more effectively--which would require that the patient be referred to a therapist.

Psychopharmacology, which is really an alliance of the pharmaceutical industry and biologically oriented psychiatrists, has also tried to convince everyone that all depression is a bio-chemical event, caused by changes in brain chemistry. The simplicity of this is that, if depression is biologically caused, a pill is the only solution to reverse the process and alter mood. The problem is, there really isn't strong evidence to support this hypothesis, except possibly in cases of Major Depression, including Post Partum Depressions and Bi-Polar Disorder.

Mild-Moderate depressions may not be caused by any chemical imbalance in the brain, although some chemical changes may take place after a person has been feeling depressed for a while. However, it may not have been chemical change that produced the depression in the first place, and medication might not be necessary, or even appropriate, to treat it.

A woman who suspects her husband might be cheating, or whose husband leaves her for a younger woman, and who reacts with an appropriately depressed mood, is not likely to be depressed because of her brain biochemistry. A woman who feels she is bypassed for a promotion at work, or who loses her job, or who has trouble meeting her mortgage payments, is not likely to be suffering from a biologically based depression. A woman who has lost a child, or a spouse, or a parent, is not the victim of alterations in her brain chemistry which cause her to feel depressed, nor is a woman whose husband neglects or abuses her. Most women who become depressed are reacting with appropriate unhappiness to life events or dissatisfactions in their life situations. Pills will not alter these events, nor will they change anyone's life for them.

Just to give a woman a pill, without helping her to understand or change the sources of her dissatisfaction, or helping her to accept certain inevitable losses, really isn't treating her depression. For that, you do need talk therapy, or even support groups. It isn't that the pills won't do any good, because they might help her to sleep or eat a little better, or to feel a little less anxious, it's just that they aren't addressing what's really bothering her.

I really don't like comparing medication to keeping a woman in a burka. I just don't think it's a good analogy. Not appropriately addressing a woman's complaints, with more effective treatments, is more akin to ignoring her, and not taking her distress seriously enough. And this doesn't just go on with depression. Women complain of anxiety-like episodes, and sometimes panic-like attacks, where they have chest tightness, difficulty breathing, and sometimes nausea, but rarely are women given full cardiac workups to rule out underlying medical problems which could account for these same symptoms. Cardiac problems, and even heart attacks, can present quite differently in women then they do in men, and often the woman's problems may be attributed to anxiety before all other causes are ruled out. Giving her anti-anxiety medication may leave a quite serious medical problem undiagnosed and untreated.

We might see a little progress in the future in terms of providing psychotherapy, and not just pills, in treating depression. Insurance carriers now have to provide treatment for mental illness on a parity with treatment of medical disorders. That should mean that more people will be able to get non-medical treatments for depression, anxiety, and a host of other problems.

forget it, I am not feeling like giving a remedial course on logic today.

thats half of it, the other half is that drug companies have corrupted the mental health field as much as the medical field. They and their money are deeply involved in writing guidance on treatment plans. Too many of the experts who tell the others what works and does not work have much of their career financed by the drug companies.

I agree, hawkeye. In particular, the financial collusion between psychiatry and the drug companies has been an abomination. The amount of money given to doctors to induce them to peddle certain drugs to patients is quite large.

A positive sign is that much of this is now starting to be disclosed. Pfizer has now disclosed payments it has made to doctors, as well as payments it made for clinical trials. Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/business/01payments.html

Psychiatrists aren't likely to easily give up a lot of the perks and income they've been getting from the drug companies, nor the income they have been getting from their patients simply by writing a lot of prescriptions for them. Most psychiatrists are not extensively trained in doing psychotherapy, and the bio-chemical bandwagon has made many abandon any pretense in that direction. But, if they have to confine themselves to treating mainly psychotic disorders, and major affective disorders, the groups who truly require medication, they won't make much money, and psychiatrists are already at the bottom of the earning scale for medical specialists. So, it will be interesting to see what happens if conflicts of interest are really enforced, and they have to decline some of the money big pharma throws at them.

One trend I have noticed, is that more and more people are suddenly being diagnosed with Bi-Polar disorder, even though these people do not really meet the full diagnostic criteria for that condition. It's one way to expand the patient pool, and people with that diagnosis are treated with multiple medications. Similarly, children are increasingly being branded with similar labels, and are being treated with psychiatric drugs originally intended only for adult use. It raises some rather troubling questions about what's going on.

I have zero faith, and I MEAN zero, that disclosure will do anything meaningful to combat the corruption. It is meant to be a stalling act, to make it look like we are doing something when we are not. Maybe in a decade or two we will be ready to roll up our sleeves and deal with the problem.

God damn.

some of you need to take some Valium yourselves and get over the stupid attempts at jabs at each other

Hawkeye, I think the medical profession is starting to deal with the problem. They really have to, as a matter of ethics. The public exposure has made it something they can't ignore because it reflects so badly on the medical profession. They really have been pimping for the drug industry, and, in psychiatry the situation has been particularly bad.

I don't have much faith, but I have some, that the situation might improve.

I think that the lines of power, the way the industry in incentivized, and that fact that our political system is broken all mean that disclosure will have little effect. Reform of medicine on a major scale is needed, these token sops to reform are meaningless.

I would like to be proven wrong.

Think what you want. It has nothing to do with the image they used which is one of shielding.

Do you want to bet that the burka originated for the same reason that Muslim men wear head coverings and beards? To protect the face from the wind driven desert sands.

Hey, I know that Valium is not an anti-depressant but I didn't make an issue of it

how come 18 months, there's no instant stopping? withdrawal symptokams, likr with heroin or what?

i heard heroin use ca n be detercted decades after it's been stopped, may be the same goes for speed?

Firefly spoke to what I've read, at some length, but I don't save links to all that interests me.

I have read that stopping antidepressants cold can be a big problem and that tapering is recommended. I'm not a professional involved with them, or a patient, have just read about difficulties.