The Latest Review of the Reviews
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The world just gets more meta every day. And the mainstream media has to find more strained metaphors to try to explain things. Hence this odd lede from MSN.com:
Modern antidepressants have been blamed for deadly shooting rampages and violent suicides. At the same time, they’ve been hailed as miracle drugs that transform baleful Eeyore-types into bouncing Tiggers.
Eeyore? Tigger? I guess they’re trying to dumb things down.
While MSN puts study conclusions this way:
Now the latest review of the research claims that the effects of the drugs are only marginally different from those of placebos or sugar pills.
the study itself say it like this:
Drug–placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.
Miracle Drug, Poison or Placebo?
liz | 3:43 PM | Uncategorized
I saw that article. Yeah, the dumbing down of medical concepts and medical language is disturbing. Dumbing down medicine also makes it easier for people in the medical industry to sell a medical treatment and convince the public that the treatment is necessary, beneficial, safe, and/or good.
I’ve seen me off drugs, so has my family. It’s not pretty and they out number me when it seems to me to be a good time stop taking them.
Granted it took a few long long long years to get the right combo for me. I still get depressed sometimes severely on drugs, but I don’t get psychotic features while on them.
They work for some people; they don’t work for others. This isn’t surprising because we don’t really know how they work anyway.
I have to be manacled and water-boarded before I’ll even take a Tylenol for a headache. I’m no fan of heedlessly popping pills but I take my medication because without it I would ruin the lives of everybody around me if I didn’t. In short, my pills work for me and I consider myself an extraordinarily lucky nutter to be able to say that, because I know the struggle too many bipolar people have finding a med regimen that works in the long term. My mother has never been that lucky. Multiple ECTs at 16 jangled her brain badly and her personality changed – becoming more aggressive – as a result. Medications that might have worked for her nowadays don’t and I suspect, though I can’t know for sure, that that’s because her brain was permanently altered. I guess alteration might constitute damage.
I myself missed having to have ECT because she advocated vociferously for me. Then we found after a few weeks medication worked.
It’s possible that newer medications don’t stand a chance of working on patients whose brains have been that assaulted in the past by other cruder treatments and medications. Or even failure to act.
I am reading the comments above with interest. My mother tried to get me to sign a piece of paper stating I would always take medication.
Now, I know that many of my behaviors she wanted to avoid were actually caused by the new medication or from the side-effects of withdrawal from medication.
There a many studies out their today that talk about how you can cope without meds. But you can’t just quit meds.
You have to take it as seriously, more seriously than just popping the pills that the psych-docs give you.
It is really hard work.
But we know for 30 percent of the population the psych medicines just don’t work. If you are in the 30 percent you would do well to see how others have succeeded using nutrition, supplements, and other means of support systems.
If the Wellbutrin XL I take religiously every morning didn’t work, I wouldn’t be paying $150 per month for the 30 pills. That’s $5 per day, and I don’t take a large dose, I only take 150 mg which I think is half what most people take.
With no health insurance, out of pocket.
So it strikes me as strange that people somehow overlook this fact that we wouldn’t be using the stuff if it wasn’t working.
At age 45, I am starting my life over in a sense, because of the increased dopamine levels. I’ve been on Wellbutrin 2 years without any hitches. The only side effect is weight loss, which comes in handy in my case as I’ve lost 25 pounds because of the Wellbutrin and I need to lose even more. Now what that means to an uneducated layman like myself is that the reason for the overweight was the lack of dopamine. But even the PhDs probably havn’t thought of that hypothesis, because they aren’t using the stuff. Brain chemistry the root cause of obesity? My guess is it is at least one of the factors.
The post actually made me laugh, perhaps because it is sort of true for me since I purposely crop dust with being just a tad hypomanic, preferring that to the alternative of being grounded. If I mention that in any bipolar support forums I get accused of all sorts of denial and of ruining my life and more, but again I am the only one who knows what is best for me. I aint stupid. AFter laughing at the eeyore – tigger post, I realized that yes Tigger is a bit hyperactive so it’s just more mental illness bashing once you get past the humor.
I vote for wonder drug. And I’d pay $1,500 per month for the pills — $50 per day — if I had to. Probably double that if I could afford it.
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