Reddit reviews Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
We found 10 Reddit comments about Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I had a similar situation when I was in college, I dealt with panic / anxiety attacks for about a year. No supplement or drug really worked for me, plus I hated the idea of using them as a crutch.
The first step for me was to realize that the panic / anxiety attack wouldn't kill me and that no matter how shitty the felt, they wouldn't last for more than a few minutes to a half hour. The more I worried about the next panic attack, the more likely they seemed to happen.
For me they were completely random at first... Random places, random times. But then some subconscious part of my brain associated that panic with certain situations - If earlier I had one in a certain restaurant, I'd be freaked the fuck out whenever I went there again. Rationally, I knew it made no sense that I was feeling panicky, and it frustrated me to no end, but it's tough getting that animal part of the brain to STFU and settle down. So, back to what worked for me...
Regarding the meds, you might want to check this book out. I found it interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452417/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301733513&sr=8-1
Good luck, try not to stress about those exams too much, and remember that it'll get better.
The class of antidepressants you're talking about are SSRIs (Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor). SSRIs increase the levels of serotonin in the brain by reducing it's reabsorption rate. Initially it was believed that depression may be a function of serotonin levels in the brain. While these two events may be linked, they're not causal of one another. As a result of this, SSRIs are largely ineffective at treating depression. So much so, that placebo is more effective than SSRIs in all but the most depressed individuals. Anyway, back to the suicide part - Large studies of depressed people show a marked spike in psychosis and suicide for people taking SSRIs as a whole. You can even dig through GlaxoSmithKline's short-term trial data and find that when giving paroxetine (an SSRI) to otherwise healthy volunteers, 3 of 271 had "hostile events" compared with 0 in 138 for placebo. One basic problem with linking suicide and psychotic behavior in SSRIs, is that pharmaceutical companies are quick to frame the behavior as a symptom of the disease and not as a side effect of the drug, for legal reasons, even though they list it as a side effect on the box. Robert Whitaker makes these points far more effectively than I could in his book, "Anatomy of an Epidemic" which I highly recommend.
tl;dr - There is no evidence to suggest that people kill themselves on SSRIs because they get less depressed. There is some evidence to suggest it's the drugs themselves, but it's still up in the air. What's not up in the air is that current generation antidepressants are not very effective at curing depression.
If you enjoyed that talk, you'd likely enjoy books from Irving Kirsch and Robert Whitaker. If you don't have a dozen or more hours to read both of these books, the NYBOOKS writeup is pretty good (and might convince you to spend the dozen hours, as it did me). Lastly, if your schedule/lifestyle better accommodates listening to an mp3 rather than reading a book, I cannot recommend highly enough a talk from UW School of Public Health senior lecturer Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, "Is America Driving You Crazy?" [10mb mp3 or low quality YouTube video].
For those who are too lazy to click the NYBOOKS writeup above, here's a brief excerpt that gets at some of the good stuff:
>For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.
>Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FDA reviews of all placebo-controlled clinical trials, whether positive or negative, submitted for the initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. This was a better data set than the one used in his previous study, not only because it included negative studies but because the FDA sets uniform quality standards for the trials it reviews and not all of the published research in Kirsch’s earlier study had been submitted to the FDA as part of a drug approval application.
>Altogether, there were forty-two trials of the six drugs. Most of them were negative. Overall, placebos were 82 percent as effective as the drugs, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D), a widely used score of symptoms of depression. The average difference between drug and placebo was only 1.8 points on the HAM-D, a difference that, while statistically significant, was clinically meaningless. The results were much the same for all six drugs: they were all equally unimpressive. Yet because the positive studies were extensively publicized, while the negative ones were hidden, the public and the medical profession came to believe that these drugs were highly effective antidepressants.
>Kirsch was also struck by another unexpected finding. In his earlier study and in work by others, he observed that even treatments that were not considered to be antidepressants—such as synthetic thyroid hormone, opiates, sedatives, stimulants, and some herbal remedies—were as effective as antidepressants in alleviating the symptoms of depression. Kirsch writes, “When administered as antidepressants, drugs that increase, decrease or have no effect on serotonin all relieve depression to about the same degree.” What all these “effective” drugs had in common was that they produced side effects, which participating patients had been told they might experience.
>It is important that clinical trials, particularly those dealing with subjective conditions like depression, remain double-blind, with neither patients nor doctors knowing whether or not they are getting a placebo. That prevents both patients and doctors from imagining improvements that are not there, something that is more likely if they believe the agent being administered is an active drug instead of a placebo. Faced with his findings that nearly any pill with side effects was slightly more effective in treating depression than an inert placebo, Kirsch speculated that the presence of side effects in individuals receiving drugs enabled them to guess correctly that they were getting active treatment—and this was borne out by interviews with patients and doctors—which made them more likely to report improvement. He suggests that the reason antidepressants appear to work better in relieving severe depression than in less severe cases is that patients with severe symptoms are likely to be on higher doses and therefore experience more side effects.
If you believe your mind to be strong enough I would suggest shedding the first.
Anatomy of an Epidemic
>The lack of psychoactive influences makes for smoother sailing.
I would almost disagree. Once in a while, bending reality teaches you more about reality. If you dont want to jump into acid/mdma there is always ether. If you find ether, never talk about it, there is a social stigma.
I think this would be a good time to post these :)
NPR To The Best of Our Knowledge This episode is called Anxiety but is much broader than that. Very interesting info. Particularly pay attention the second segment.
Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker Very good book. Mirrors my experiences and my observations of others experiences.
"In 1998, he co-wrote a series on psychiatric research for the Boston Globe that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service."
Robert Whitaker's info(from his website)
Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker is a relavant read. It chronicles the rise of psychotropic drugs over the past 50 years and suggests that long term outcomes for schizophrenia, bipolar, and depression may be worse for those on SSRIs and antipsychotics. He mostly pulls from clinical trial data, literature and patient anecdotes but it's very readable.
He argues that the neurotransmitter deficiency model that so commonly cited as the biological cause of depression by pharma isn't strongly supported by the scientific literature. For example, there's no strong correlation between serotonin levels in the brain and depressive symptoms. Evidence for dopamine model for schizophrenia are equally lacking. Our understanding of the biology of mental illness is far behind other disease areas and the drugs we have may target mechanisms that are not at the root cause of the illness.
Whitaker goes as far as suggesting that psychotropics may wreck havoc on brain chemistry and may be partly responsible for the rise in long term mental illness over the past few decades.
I haven't read or otherwise studied Dr. Mate enough to say for certain, but he seems quite reasonable and well-informed in the interview I linked, and has excellent ratings on his books (including the one on ADD), which would seem unusual if he was as unreliable as you claim he is.
I would also note that there has come into being significant financial incentive for schools, doctors, and many scientists in the US (via a $40 billion annual psychotropic drug tab and additional money for schools if children are diagnosed/on ADHD drugs) to attribute ADD to biological causes instead of psychological ones, ones even though the biology of human children would not seem to have changed so much in the past 30 years or so to explain the huge upsurge in ADD/ADHD diagnoses in that time frame. I can only imagine it would be much more appealing for many parents to attribute the poor school performance and other problem behaviour of their children to biological factors instead of poor parenting as well.
When I said psychopaths were severely abused I actually meant serial killers (I mis-typed), though the amount of child abuse present in the world (see again http://board.freedomainradio.com/forums/t/23711.aspx ) would seem to cover the 4% of psychopaths quite well.
While I have heard intelligent people promote both sides of this topic, here is an interview with someone who has studied the topic in some depth (see his book here), and has come to the opinion that ADHD drugs are vastly over-prescribed, and are doing a lot of harm in the scope they are currently used in.
From the book description:
Robert Whitaker discusses his book 'Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America'
In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation's children. What is going on?
Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix "chemical imbalances" in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals.
Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long-term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness?
This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit?
By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public?
In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.
I hate Scientology and all they stand for, but I also hate how any position they hold has become strong evidence that the position is worthy of ridicule, and that all critics believe in aliens.
It's given the pharmaceutical and psychiatric industry the opportunity to deride criticism of drugs as nonsense that arose from members of a deeply unpopular cult, rather than criticism that arose from their own research.
Such as this study, in which researchers note that “in the era prior to pharmacotherapy, poor outcome in mania was considered a relatively rare occurrence . . . however, modern outcome studies have found that a majority of bipolar patients evidence high rates of functional impairment.” In their discussion of this deterioration in outcomes, they concluded that “medication-induced changes” may be at least partly responsible. Antidepressants may cause a “worsening of the course of illness,” (which is supported by many other studies) while the antipsychotics may lead to more “depressive episodes” and “lower functional recovery rates.” Drug side effects, they added, may “explain the cognitive deficits in bipolar disorder patients.” Or this study where Harvard researchers observe that “prognosis for bipolar disorder was once considered relatively favorable, but contemporary findings suggest that disability and poor outcomes are prevalent.” They note that “neuropharmacological-neurotoxic factors” might be causing “cognitive deficits in bipolar disorder patients.”
Scientologists also opposed lobotomies back when they were the standard and even if they did so for the wrong reasons I'm sure most people here would agree with that stance and would not volunteer to be lobotomized.
I highly recommend this book if you want to get a look at the 50 years of history and research that my doctor never informed me of when I was put on anti-depressants and anti-psychotics.
>Anti-psychotic medication? With out it good? or with it good? Well again it's deeper than that. With out any medication it's bad all around
http://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing/dp/0307452417
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_an_Epidemic
>If there were no financial motivations
Hippy dream world. And I like hippies.
>If they are meaningless then why not give every t-ball player a first place prize?
Why does XBox have Achievement points and PS3 trophies? STRAWMAN, why do you say first prize. If you get a prize for everything you finish, and there are 100 tasks, not everyone gets the same AMOUNT of prizes.
A MUST read: Anatomy of an Epidemic, by Robert Whitaker