Posted by baseball55 on September 22, 2015, at 21:12:34
In reply to Re: Young people on SSRI's commit more crimes? » baseball55, posted by hello321 on September 22, 2015, at 18:07:12
I think it comes down to how one feels about science in general and psychiatry and psychiatric drugs in particular. I have had mostly wonderful interactions with psychiatrists (I know I may be unusual) and I have seen a lot, because I have been hospitalized a lot (including for unilateral and bilateral ECT). My experience has been that they want very badly to help, care very much, but are only able to offer drugs or treatments that are often not effective. This is not their fault. They don't design the drugs anymore than primary care doctors design the often useless drugs they prescribe. If you want to think about a medical speciality that routinely lies about or overstates the effects of or manipulates patients into taking dangerous drugs that are just barely helpful - I give you -- ONCOLOGISTS! I know it is the thing on p-babble to diss p-docs, and I know there are a lot of mediocre doctors out there (as in any medical specialty) but I have great respect for p-docs. I believe they do their best with a very limited armament of drugs. The good ones, whom I have seen, do therapy and the therapy in itself often does more good than the drugs.
I have also had a fairly good experience with psych drugs. Not that they've always worked, but when they didn't, I have had no bad side effects and no discontinuation syndromes. The drugs that worked best for me had the most disturbing side effects (AAPS which caused unbelievably rapid weight gain). My p-docs were always upfront about the risks.
But science itself. Is not anecdote. You may have had a bad reaction to drugs, or you may have had bad things happen while or after you took drugs. Your reactions may have been due to the drugs, or may have just happened contemporaneously with your taking the drugs. Correlation is not causation. This is why studies need to be double-blinded and replicated, a basic tenet of medical science, the so-called gold standard for medical research. Look at RX list on side effects - 2% report memory problems, but so do 1.8% of people on placebo. This is the kind of thing you find all the time. Sometimes things just happen.
Then there's the issue of the validity of medical research, given the undue influence of the pharmaceutical industry. This is a problem and the information doctors are using is often unduly influenced by studies paid for by drug companies. But at this point, most SSRIs are.generic and have been studied to death by independent researchers. To imagine that there are studies out there showing a correlation and possible causality between murder and SSRIs that have been suppressed by Big Pharma just isn't credible to me.
Finally, yes, crime is strongly associated with poverty and also with race. Young black men are miserable, harassed by police, incarcerated for nothing, discriminated against in jobs, grow up without the example of working fathers. My heart breaks for them. But what does this have to do with SSRIs? For that matter, how many of the many mass murderers in recent years -- all young men -- were on SSRIs?
> Baseball, the things I write about often take into account my
experience. This is only an sectoral experience, but I have experienced homicidal thoughts induced by a few psychiatric treatment. I feel like these thoughts I felt were the result of more intense helpless emotions the treatment caused. Basically a worsening of depression caused by treatment.
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> You see it on the news often, more crimes being committed in cities with a high poverty rate. Poverty can obviously lead to helpless and hopeless, emotions.
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> But I also think if you look at the areas of the brain these treatments alter, these areas are described as playing major roles in aggression, irritability, impulse control and pretty much any emotion we experience in our lives. I believe it for every benefit a psychiatric med can have, there is also an opposite negative reaction that can occur. I have experienced this myself on more than one occasion with treatments being a huge benefit at first, only to have them start having the opposite effect. I think what causes this for me are certain compensatory actions in the brain that adjust after chronic treatment. I've taken treatments that have brightened my mood, increased libido, motivation and energy. Some treatments that even helped my problems with movement. But after too long, the effect of treatment reversed and the opposite. Mayb my brain is just sensitive to psych treatments. But I doubt I'm the only one with such a sensitive brain.
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> But if one just looks at the list of negative effects the treatment is recognized to have on mood. Look at what the parts of brain these meds affect and the role they play in emotions. Such as aggression that I listed above. And I feel a picture is painted for anyone wanting to understand the possibilities of what they can lead to (good or bad).
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> And if these chemicals affect what goes on in parts of the brain that affect aggression, irritability and impulse control, what human actions can these emotions sometimes play a role in? Crime in general, right? One crime in particular is homicide. And knowing this, one would have expected "studies" that have been already replicated over and over to have been released after all the time these treatments have been on the market. Why aren't there any? Or are these studies already done and replicated, but just haven't been released for our viewing for certain reasons? And if studies do get released, you have to know who did them and what their conflicts of interest are. But you still can't really trust them when it comes down to it. You can really only trust yourself. Next in line, hopefully you can trust your family and maybe friends. But I myself don't need anymore info on the possibility of homicidal thoughts from treatment because of my experiences with it, I know it's possible.
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> Also, knowing that these chemical treatments affect the brain areas in that play a role in the emotions that are precursors to crimes, it might be good to require proof that they can't actually result in crime behavior. Rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt. It is after all, a one size fits all approach to altering these brain areas and the emotions they have a role in. "One size fits all" might be good for bandaids used for a paper cut on a finger. But not with the human brain.
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poster:baseball55
thread:1082509
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20150901/msgs/1082833.html