Posted by utopizen on December 1, 2002, at 19:57:11
In reply to Re: How psychiatry ruined my life » utopizen, posted by Mr Cushing on December 1, 2002, at 19:42:12
My doctor will prescribe anything for me as long as it's not a benzo. He'll even give me 2 SSRIs at once, which is very risky, as we have seen in other posts.
As for "addicting" neither SSRIs nor benzos are such. SSRIs are also not habit forming, they simply are hard to withdraw from. There's a certain amount of chemicals your body gets used to after awhile, and you need to wean off the drugs that fire these chemicals slowly.
If you get up quickly from a chair, you may feel light headed. Your body was use to sitting and breathing and absorbing oxygen in a certain way, and you quickly changed that. So your head feels like it's blacked out and you can't see anything for a second or two.
So were you addicted to the habit-forming seating position? Of course not! Addiction requires increasing tolerance and accompanies withdrawl. SSRIs do not produce tolerance, although they may stop working. Withdrawl of a med is not the sole criterion for determining a drug's addictiveness.
Just because withdrawl effects are uncomfortable or less comfortable than other drugs does not mean that the drug was habit forming or addictive. Klonopin is habit forming because over time a patient may need a greater amount to receive an equal benefit. This is tolerance, a thing SSRIs lack.
And it's impossible to compare street drug withdrawls with licit drug withdrawls objectively-- these ratings depend on the practioner completing the survey, and as a result is not objective. It's like ranking the intelligence of different species- you just can't do it.
poster:utopizen
thread:130130
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20021127/msgs/130163.html