Posted by on-the-wave on February 3, 2004, at 8:57:40
In reply to Joseph Glenmullen, MD and Prozac Backlash..., posted by Adam on April 11, 2000, at 18:55:35
"Furthermore, they suffer few, if any serious
side-effects.""For me SSRIs were more or less of no use therapeutically, caused cognative as well as
sexual deficiencies, and distressing weight gain."Were these "cognative and sexual deficiencies, and distressing weight gain" not serious
side-effects.If these SSRI's had little benefit on you, were you even depressed, more likely in discord with the disproportionate public acknowledegement of your own personal self-opinion.
I suffered serious depression for about 20 years, took luvox and effexor. The effexor i took for 3 years. Much of what occured to me during those three years of effexor nearly destroyed my life, my marraige and my family.
I thank only jesus christ and an extremely astute psychologist who saved me and my family.
One of the most important statements macmullen makes is about the wearing off effects and the wash out during withdrawal.
Effexor is extremely effective, for about 2 - 6 months. whereafter one is faced with rapidly diminishing returns and a downward spiral of incresed dosage and increasingly severe backlashes.
This is all before the withdrawal, which is a demon all on it's own.
If macmullen has written this without personal experience of use of SSRI's and withdrawal, i find it absolutely amazing, and entirely accurate.
With respect to peer acceptance, my personal limited experience is that most p-docs do not know very much about SSRI's, their long term effects or even fully understand their short term effects. It is generally accepted that this area of pharmacology is not very well understood and when combined with the emotional and psychological quagmire of anxiety and depression, the result, purely from it's unpredictability, is dangerous to say the least.
poster:on-the-wave
thread:29656
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040131/msgs/308825.html