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Re: Incomplete recovery gaining attention

Posted by glenn on June 10, 2000, at 16:38:45

In reply to Incomplete recovery gaining attention, posted by JohnL on June 10, 2000, at 5:40:44

> Just thought I would share some information from my pdoc meeting a couple days ago.
>
> My pdoc is head of psychiatry at two different institutions. And he has pretty much phased out private practice. As a result he spends most of his time in conferences, meetings, consultations, research, and stuff like that.
>
> He acknowledged that antidepressants are indeed wonder meds. He says 80% of patients who try 2 different antidepressants will improve. But he says recent focus has been on the recognition that of those 80% who improve, a substantial proportion of them do not indeed recover to complete normalcy. Or normal baseline as he called it.
>
> But of course, scientific controlled studies have proven that for a long time. That's because success in controlled studies is usually based on a 50% improvement of symptoms. Fine, but what about the other 50%? Yikes. I like the scientific studies that use stricter criteria. But even with those, success is dependent on each person's unique chemistry.
>
> This is why I believe that there are multiple chemical imbalances that can cause depression, and that low serotonin is just one of them. Obviously if doctors focus on serotonin meds--as evidenced by the universal popularity of SSRIs--then a whole lot of other guilty chemistries are being ignored. And thus considerable--yet incomplete--recovery. Antidepressants as a class only address three of ten possible causes.
>
> In my case for example I experienced substantial improvement on any serotonin antidepressant. Yet I was still left with this crippling anhedonia thing. I never recovered to baseline. As it turns out, the chemistry guilty with me was not low serotonin, NE, or dopamine, but rather malfunction of something in the NE/dopamine relationship. My robust response to Ritalin was the tip-off, as my pdoc phrased it. Or, as I call it, an important clue. All along antidepressants were merely masking the symptoms of depression, but not fixing the cause. Adrafinil ended up being the molecule that hit a bullseye and fixed the problem right at the heart of the source.
>
> Anyway, no real point here. Just wanted to share what we talked about in case anyone's interested.
> JohnL
john, i bought the dr jensen book and found it to ber excellent, much better than the other books i have bought, so thanks for the tip, i may at some point go to see this man if i cant sort myself out, im at about 50-60% better but to me thats not enough, just one question, do you know if serotonin excess can cause depression, its about the only thing dr jensen doesnt mention, i know it can cause the serotonin syndrome but this always appears to me to be being described as a temporary state soon put right, for me serotonin reuptake inhibitors make me much worse very quickly, in zolofts case after 3 hours!
glad to hear the adrafinil is your key
glenn


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poster:glenn thread:36813
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000610/msgs/36861.html