Posted by Tennisplayer on September 17, 2007, at 22:55:10
In reply to Re: News - Antidepressants Vindicated? (nm), posted by Tennisplayer on September 16, 2007, at 6:44:09
I hope I am not double posting. I could not find my previous post. Having just finished withdrawal from cymbalta, which I eventually learned was the cause of my sleeping almost 16 hours a day, losing interest in life, and becoming more depressed than I have ever been in my life, I don't feel that antidepressants are vindicated. Also having seen the thousands of posts by people who have ended up with more harm from a lot of these psychoactive drugs than good, I am skeptical of antidepressants' value except as a short term option when people are seemingly suicidal(and then they should also have psychiatric and/or psychological counseling long term). I recommend anyone who is interested in a viewpoint written by psychologists who are not part of the PharmaceuticalIndustry/National Psychiatric Association complex, (some of whom have billions of dollars to be lost if their antidepressants don't continue to sell at the record rates they have been) to read the book "Your Drug May Be Your Problem" by Dr. Peter Breggin and Dr. David Cohen. Just read it, and feel free to disagee with it and put it down or whatever, but just read it. I would like to read a comprehensive book that takes the other viewpoint--that chemical/pharmaceutical treatment of mental illness, and espeically depression, is more helpful to people than it is harmful. Please tell me the name of one if you know one. Studies conducted and paid for by the pharmaceutical companies themselves are not going to be unbiased. Even the National Institutes of Health has great amount of funding from pharmaceutical companies and it would be hard for some of their studies not to be biased. I am not saying that psychiatrists in general don't care about the welfare of patients--I know they do, and I know that they are also helpful and needed badly by people. Likewise I don't think the drug companies are deliberately trying to hurt patients--I think they are trying to help them and still make money, which there is nothing wrong with. But, now that patients can actually share what has happened to them with the use of various antidepressants on thousands of health forums, the trend is ever clear that the antidepressants cause a lot of problems and physical impairments that don't always go away even after the drug is stopped. I am not talking about the tendency to lead to suicide. That is just one issue. And while we can't prove that children or teens were saved from committing suicide by taking antidepressants, we certainly know for a fact that some of them have committed suicide after taking antidepressants, at least one young person in a clinical trial committed suicide while taking the drug (this was a control person with no previous history of depression). Thousands of patients post on the health forums and blogs, saying that their suicidal thoughts went up after starting certain antidepressants. Adults, who are better at handling those tendencies, dont fall victim to them as much as children or teens do, but they still produce the same toxic, unhealthy problem in any human being, not just children or someone under the age of 19 say. It doesnt make sense that the cut off would magically stop at age 19. We have been told through advertising that it has been proven that a chemical imbalance is the cause of depression, when ther is no proof of that anywhere. It is just a theory. But we, and physicians trust the drug companies and believe whatever they tell us. They are bombarding us with advertisements all the time that act as if some of the theories their medication is based on are fact, when they are not. If the antidepressants worked, and did improve depression, it wouldn't make that much difference whether there was proof of the theory or not. But they don't work longterm. Instead they produce dependency, physiological impairments that are often permanent, even after going off the drug, and sometimes even increase depression and tendency to suicide. Thanks for letting me throw out my ideas. tennisplayer
poster:Tennisplayer
thread:781684
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070911/msgs/783624.html