Posted by hyperfocus on May 19, 2010, at 17:48:45
In reply to Interesting article? What do you think?, posted by Laney on May 9, 2010, at 11:38:40
I can't understand how Robert Whitaker is allowed to completely misstate the facts about how depression and drugs works. His descriptions of how psych drugs work are very naive. He says stuff like psych drugs are 'stimulating' and hence can cause bipolar mania...and that drugs can convert unipolar to bipolar depression and cause cognitive problems over time. That's not really how it works. The guy clearly has very limited knowledge about psychiatry and psychopharmology and is just cherry-picking statements and studies to support his thesis. I can easily count a dozen people on PB who could right a better book than him.
Remember in the film Sixth Sense when the wife was taking Zoloft after her husband died?
My takeaway from this article and the ones posted in this thread is that people with TRD, bipolar, psychotic depression or depression co-morbid with anxiety, dissociation, etc. must be separated from people experiencing depression after a traumatic event. It's doing a disservice to everybody and just skews the data too much to keep the two groups of people together. When you try to do an empirical study you end up with absurd conclusions like in the Mercola and Newsweek article. I'm pretty sure in many people you can treat an acute episode of depression with lifestyle changes and counselling and most of all, healing time, effectively. For these people prescribing ADs may not be the best course of treatment and can cause more problems due to side effects and hitting the wrong receptors. But people with chronic, serious depression need drugs, and all of the studies show that the right drugs can help people like us.The 2nd thing is that I don't think we've got to a point where depression and other non-psychotic mental illnesses are accepted as real diseases. When I hear doctors like Mercola talking about willpower and control I get mad because they're basically saying that all people with depression can just snap out of it.
poster:hyperfocus
thread:946874
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20100514/msgs/947970.html