Posted by blueboy on July 18, 2008, at 10:59:59
In reply to Re: Want to stop meds ... should I?-flzcnclu?? » blueboy, posted by Lou PIlder on July 17, 2008, at 12:58:04
[...]
> > > I changed my meds a bit in February, but something else happened in Feb as well. I attempted suicide and ended up in a coma. My psychiatrist doesn't know if my remission is the results of the meds I am on ... or the coma.
[...]
> > But when AD's work, their effect is sometimes characterized by an initial suicide attempt. That makes me tend to think that the AD is at least partly responsible for your relief from depression.
>
> blueboy,
> You wrote,[...sometimes characterized by an innitial suicide attempt...].
> I am unsure as to if there is or is not a correlation with the aspect of an AD working with an attempted suicde.Could you post here any facts to support the statement in question? If you could, then I could have the opportunity to respond accordingly.1) A psychiatrist who had been practicing for over 30 years told me this. In fact, he said that in his experience "the most dangerous time for suicide is the weeks after a good drug treatment is started". His theory to explain it was that the patient would be activated enough to carry out a pre-existing tendency, but that was just a hypothesis.
2) A lot of AD's now carry a black box warning about suicide attempts, especially for teenagers. There is a definite "official" perception of a significant increase in suicide risk early in AD treatment.
3) Her pdoc thought that the meds might be the cause of her recovery.
4) She is taking the meds and is feeling enormous relief from depressive symptoms.
There isn't a lot of research on the hypothesis, largely due to the doctors' reactions of immediately discontinuing AD treatment after a suicide attempt. Even more, there is a disinclination to run a trial where patients who have started an AD treatment and then attempt suicide are continued on the AD, to see if they attempt suicide again. The possibility of lawsuits and ethical sanctions are too high.
5) Researchers have seen clues, however, that the phenomenon occurs. E.g., in Science Daily, "New UCLA Study Disputes Antidepressant/Suicide Link" (University Of California - Los Angeles (2005, February 7). There, Dr. Julio Licinio, a professor of psychiatry and endocrinology at the David Geffen School of Medicine and a researcher at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, who has been studying the problem for decades, stated:
"When people start antidepressant therapy, the first symptom to be alleviated is low energy, but the feeling that life isn't worth living is the last to go. Prior to taking SSRIs, depressed people may not have committed suicide due to their extreme lethargy. As they begin drug therapy, they experience more energy, but still feel that life isn't worth living. That's when a depressed person is most in danger of committing suicide."
6) If her suicide attempt was in fact tied to the onset of AD treatment, it means that the drug was doing *something* directly affecting her depression. Since she first attempted suicide and has since experienced a major remission of symptoms, the facts strongly suggest that the suicide and recovery are steps in a series of events.
poster:blueboy
thread:840049
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080718/msgs/840444.html