Anti-depressant scandal

To me the challenge is that we know greed, academic stubborn-ness, and likely to some degree the negative influence of the materialist-atheist faith have compromised medicine to a certain degree. However it seems to me this can just as easily - and has - influenced New Agers and others in the alternative medicine community (with materialist-atheist replaced by varied belief systems).

Even those with the best intentions can be erroneous about the efficacy of their practice. For example even when one person may successfully use psychic healing, their attempts to teach others may not be reality based. There's been suggestions, for example, that the only successful students of Bengston's healing method are people who've been near him physically rather than anyone learning the technique on their own.

Even if we leave out psychic healing or Psi in general, this seems to be a Scylla/Charybdis situation where we have a compromised medical research community and a compromised alternative medicine community.

However, the alternate therapy crowd don't try to shut down alternative (pardon the pun) views. I mean if Bengston's technique works, but only with him around - well that is still worth knowing.

I think what I object to is the attempt to claim that conventional medicine is the only reliable source of help.

Psychiatry has a really terrible history, revealed in this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Desperate-Remedie...0674265106

David

From my reading, it was basically just that psychiatric drugs known to target serotonin pathways in the brain in certain ways were effective (in some cases) in alleviating depression. The "scientific" inference followed from that observation. I am not, though, an expert in this field, so don't take that as gospel.

Of course, the mystery is why these drugs stopped being effective as compared to a placebo.

Of course, the mystery is why these drugs stopped being effective as compared to a placebo.

SSRIs are not ineffective!  They are only designed to give a boost so that the patient feels OK enough to work out their problems.  People get depressed because they are not dealing well with real issues, not because they lack serotonin or because of any mysterious magic or dark spirits.  They need to work out a way to make things work for them, and in the meantime SSRIs are a really good help, but the particular type that will be helpful differs from individual to individual so it takes some trial and error.    Your problem David, is you have  the blindest biases  against anything mainstream and because of that, your opinions are worthless.

However, the alternate therapy crowd don't try to shut down alternative (pardon the pun) views. I mean if Bengston's technique works, but only with him around - well that is still worth knowing.

I think what I object to is the attempt to claim that conventional medicine is the only reliable source of help.

Psychiatry has a really terrible history, revealed in this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Desperate-Remedie...0674265106

David

But I think there is a difference between being open to alternatives versus having different standards for conventional medicine vs alternative medicine.

Obviously there are things in the latter like prayer that cannot cause physical harm from trying, and even a psychic healing session may only put you out a certain amount of cash. However there are also aspects of alternative medicine that can be incredibly dangerous, with one danger being a person is wasting time when a conventional treatment would be their best pathway.

The other issue is too harshly judging conventional medicine while giving too much of a pass to mavericks and potential charlatans offering questionable alternatives?

SSRIs are not ineffective!  They are only designed to give a boost so that the patient feels OK enough to work out their problems.  People get depressed because they are not dealing well with real issues, not because they lack serotonin or because of any mysterious magic or dark spirits.  They need to work out a way to make things work for them, and in the meantime SSRIs are a really good help, but the particular type that will be helpful differs from individual to individual so it takes some trial and error.    Your problem David, is you have  the blindest biases  against anything mainstream and because of that, your opinions are worthless.

Can't we talk about these issues with a bit less passion? Since we are discussing two links that Sci put up, wouldn't it make more sense to discuss the issue in those terms. I have really done nothing more that discuss Sci's links!

Plenty of people take SSRIs for years, or even decades. Maybe they do give an initial boost, but in general I don't think they are used in that way.

This NHS link about Sertraline doesn't give the impression that the drug is designed to give someone a quick boost.

https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/sertraline/...ertraline/

Part of the problem is that Big Pharma loves drugs which are used long term - for obvious financial reasons.

You scoff at me for talking about lack or otherwise of Seratonin, but SSRI stands for Selective Setatonin Re-uptake Inhibitor. This means they are designed to leave more Seratonin active in the brain.

Brian, I don't doubt for a second that people can suffer enormously from depression, or that depression is a real disease that sometimes kills people. I think at least some people are more prone to depression than others.

This is a forum about the mind in its broadest sense, so is it invalid to discuss treatments for depression unless one is a doctor or medical researcher in this area? Should those of us that are not qualified simply tell people to ask their doctor? One of the problems is that doctors don't all agree. I don't want to upset you, but if you feel up to it, I'd recommend the link I gave so Sci:

https://www.amazon.com/Desperate-Remedie...0674265106

This illustrates (heartbreakingly) just how arrogant and awful psychiatrists have been in the not too distant past.

But I think there is a difference between being open to alternatives versus having different standards for conventional medicine vs alternative medicine.

Obviously there are things in the latter like prayer that cannot cause physical harm from trying, and even a psychic healing session may only put you out a certain amount of cash. However there are also aspects of alternative medicine that can be incredibly dangerous, with one danger being a person is wasting time when a conventional treatment would be their best pathway.

The other issue is too harshly judging conventional medicine while giving too much of a pass to mavericks and potential charlatans offering questionable alternatives?

I can't possibly deny that there is a balance here, and I don't doubt that my own experiences as a patient inevitably colour my views.

However, conventional medicine starts with all the cards stacked in its favour. It is almost the only thing that is taught to medical students, and the legal system is stacked in its favour.

Besides, this isn't an advice forum for people with medical problems, it is a forum that tries to explore non-materialistic phenomena. As such, I find it enormously revealing that a whole class of drugs that used to compare favourably with a placebo, now seem to fail!

[Laird]

I find it enormously revealing that a whole class of drugs that used to compare favourably with a placebo, now seem to fail!

Do you mean anti-depressants? If so, on what do you base the idea that once they compared favourably with a placebo and now don't?

Do you mean anti-depressants? If so, on what do you base the idea that once they compared favourably with a placebo and now don't?

I should qualify what I wrote to exclude severe depression.

Here is one of many discussions about this:

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news...an-placebo

Sci's original link in this thread, covers the related issue - that there are no research findings to justify the belief that low Serotonin causes depression!

https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/08/psy...n-lawsuit/

I was just going to add one detail for Brian. Drugs are tested for safety before they can be prescribed, and researchers often trawl through drugs that have passed safety trials to see if they have positive side-effects. This is why Ivermectin  was tested for possible use in treating COVID-19. I won't get into the on-going row about whether it worked or not - the important point is that drugs often have side effects, and sometimes they turn out to be useful if they are known to be safe, they can be deployed at once. Therefore if Brian or others find SSRI's useful to provide a short term boost - as he describes - then I am not talking against that either.

[Laird]

Oh. I must have misunderstood what you meant. I thought you were saying that the objective reality had changed. You instead, though, seem to be saying simply that the (re)interpretation/(re)analysis of the research on the (unchanged) objective reality has changed.

The helpful delusion: Evidence is growing that mental illness is more than dysfunction, with enormous implications for treatment

Justin Garson

In later work, Nesse argued that depression is sometimes the brain’s evolved signal that something in a person’s life needs to change, such as a harmful relationship, an unrealistic career plan or a goal that needs to be re-evaluated. What that means in practice is that it’s not always best to bombard depression with medication. Sometimes, it’s better to figure out what depression is trying to say. The theory that depression is an evolved signal doesn’t ignore the fact that depression often has a tragic outcome. Nesse and Williams’s core point was that we can no longer take the dysfunction paradigm as the silent default when treating depression.

I wondered if anyone else grasped how subversive this book was to contemporary psychiatry’s disease mentality. I also wondered if anyone else in history had advocated a similar point of view. Of course, before Charles Darwin, doctors wouldn’t have had the language and concepts of evolutionary biology to express their ideas. Instead of saying that depression is an evolved adaptation, they might have expressed themselves in other ways.

I kept digging through the annals of psychiatry, rifling through old books and articles to find others who’d had a similar insight. Take Philippe Pinel, the head of the Bicêtre and Salpêtrière mental asylums in Paris during the French Revolution. Historians remember Pinel as someone who helped introduce the ‘moral treatment of the insane’ to France, but they often overlook his other radical ideas, such as that some intense episodes of manic psychosis, which he called accès de Manie, had a healing power – after such episodes, he observed, chronic patients were often ready to be discharged.

As I did this research, a vision began to unfold before me. What if you could tell the story of psychiatry, from the ancient Greek doctors to today’s geneticists and neuroscientists, in terms of a profound schism? This schism isn’t the one we often read about, between proponents of a more psychoanalytic ‘mind’ versus more biological ‘brain’ point of view. It’s a clash between those who see purpose in madness – I call it ‘madness-as-strategy’ – and others who see only pathology and disease, or ‘madness-as-dysfunction’. And what if this historic battle is coming to a head today?