Anti-depressants thought to be placebo?

[docs20]

On 15/9/2020 at 8:48 PM, neutralempty said:

@docs20  I am sorry, but this line of thought is the reason why Psychiatry is hated, especially by former patients ( or victims rather ).

Any long term use of psychiatric drugs is damaging to the person.

With Inhibitors, if you are lucky to achieve any positive effect ( especially SSRIs), it comes with addiction and serious side effects, and short term ( couple days ) use seems to be useless.

Neuroleptics are effectively used only as means for schizophrenic humans to get some sleep and not for more than couple days, that should be it, outside of that, the rest is basically useless other than for it's own sake to stay somewhat normal during addiction. The inhibitors only "normalize the neurochemistry" they destroyed in the first place.

Consider this:

The patient goes to the psychiatrist with a mild "condition". Gets prescribed SSRIs, takes them couple weeks, feels at first numbed, which seems to be better than depressed in the beginning, but then gets depended on them and experiences serious side effects. The psychiatrist of course not able to see or listen to the patient, assigns this to his "mental illness", and stigmatizes him and takes his credibility, even though the patient realizes the symptoms are different and only occured since the psychotropics. But that's unfortunately how many psychiatrists make their money, whether through ignorance or malice is irrelevant at the moment.

This is a very typical outcome in the field of psychiatry, i have seen many people report this to me, i have seen it in people close to me and their friends, there are even communities of ex-psychiatry victims formed.

It's absolutely undeniable at this point.

His ( person in following video ) experience and way of getting there is not exceptional:

In my opinion, we will do better without them, it's absolutely thinkable to live without psychiatric drugs, maybe besides a situational, short term use of neuroleptics.

And I don't even know what alternatives you are talking about, but the ones i have information on, are reported to do better than psychotropic treatment.

 

I am sorry to disagree strongly, but i see psychiatry as psychological, ethical and systemic problem, but i am open for improvement. <3

Dude, I'm sorry to say that it's so clear that you have never met a really damaged psychiatric person, or if you did, you interpreted the situation in a weird fashion, same goes with baring to study these drugs other than with some Youtube video taken out of context. 
Even with all side effects life of most people without the drugs that you mentioned is total shit. And I speak as soon-to-be doctor and as a patient who struggled with OCD which SSRIs improved a lot. The thing is that sometimes they missused, but they're not like a tool to get ridden of, because as I said in my previous post  the alternative of not having them is far worse. We need something reliable to try to control the symptoms and get the patient with a decent headspace to do psychoteraphy, inner work, shadow work and whatever, and that space is not the space where you believe that your bed is talking to you about how shitty you are and how society is governed by aliens or when you are so obsessed about something that you don't want to be thinking about like maybe how many bacteria there are on your hand.

SSRIs seem to produce addiction, only because often if you don't go deep with psychoteraphy and about changing you life, you get back with the depression, but it's not like for withdrawal like with heroin but because the bring bang all the shadows that were partially supressed with the SSRIs.

Basically what you're saying regarding the effects of the drugs has no evidence, and I don't mean scientifical, but logical or even experiential, other than some conspiracy theory and prejudice. Basically you see the misuse of them and infer the worse about them, just if you infered how much a knife is dangerous by looking at the news of an homicide, while failing to see all the uses and different scenarios.

[docs20]

22 minutes ago, Enlightenment said:

Well, it that case I agree they're overused

@neutralempty I read the whole article. Example

 

Correlation doesn't mean causation. Many studies may be incorrectly interpreted assuming correlation is causation examples are the studies listed mentioning peoples worse outcomes in X years if they were medicated vs not, but this doesn't take into consideration that it's the most depressed people that are more likely to try antidepressants since in the first place so the group of medicated people is biased in the direction of the most genetically predisposed to severe, long depressions.

Another example is this

 

It's very possible that as mental health awareness increases and shaming around this topic decreases, more and more people are reaching out for help so of course there will be more mentally Ill patients diagnosed

Antidepressants are also much more effective in severe cases of depression (so actual serious MDE like I mentioned before) so yes if it is the case that people that just kind of not feeling ok, goto a doctor, and they are immediately put on SSRI's, that's a problem in my opinion.

The thing is - everybody with depression only partially responds. I mean, are they expect depression to completely disappear from antidepressants? That doesn't happen. Again, antidepressants are a tool in a toolbox to cope with depression not to cure it.

My father was anti-antidepressants too and eventually, he got severely depressed, refused to take them, and committed suicide. My whole family is genetically vulnerable to depression/anxiety. My aunt just took antidepressants when she got severely depressed and now years later she's doing ok even after withdrawal. I myself might not be writing this post if not antidepressants because I would commit suicide when my depression/anxiety spiked, I even had mild mild psychosis just from depression.

I think a lot of the people that criticize antidepressants (as much as they suck) fail to see that alternative is simply even worse in many cases. It's similar to how some people criticize chemotherapy, you know it destroys your body literally but the alternative of not doing chemo is even worse, I know it sucks life is hard.

100% agree, finally a quality post!

[Lyubov]

On 9/15/2020 at 0:12 AM, neutralempty said:

Psychiatric drugs are one of the worst things you can do to yourself.

Untrue 

Many people have gotten their lives back due to them and grown immensely. You're just focusing on their negatives which many medicines have. 

You mentioned Ayahuasca in this post. Are you going to mention how at every retreat there is always someone who leaves seriously messed up and ungrounded?

Edited September 17, 2020 by Lyubov

[The0Self]

The main benefit to serotonergic antidepressants is the “foot in the door“ effect that they can offer to severely depressed people — they can give people the slight kick (in the case of SNRI’s) or numbness / thought-suppression / emotion-suppression / OCD/dopamine-suppression (in the case of SSRI’s) to get out and simply DO stuff, which of course may be all they had to do in the first place... but in some cases it simply wasn’t going to happen without the antidepressant.

This is not meant to gloss-over the unfortunate fact that they’re way overprescribed. Indeed, part of the supposed antidepressant effect is serotonin’s induction of the learned-helplessness response — that’s probably the wrong path for most people... But antidepressants do increase BDNF, one of the main compounds associated with depression remission — BDNF can also be increased safely and naturally via meditation, conscientious living, and light but challenging exercise.

[Matt23]

The actor Richard Dreyfus claims he has bipolar.  He's talked about how he takes lithium and that it works quite well for him.  Whether it placebo or not, to me, doesn't really matter, so long as the benefits for him outweigh the negatives.  

I'm not saying individual cases don't get benefits from medications.  But I question a generalized, statistical and broad view of medications (and the pharmaceutical industry) which says the benefits outweigh the drawbacks (again, for most people, most of the time).

Here's an interesting piece (the first section of it) about how the mice we test drugs on are genetically different then wild mice.

• Basic story here...
  • Use animals for testing = animals must be relatively close genetically to humans
  • Lab mice = genetically different than wild 
  • results from lab mice = drugs not as harmful as they actually are to humans

Bret Weinstein is a decently famous evolutionary biologist and professor. 

He's got a podcast called the Dark Horse podcast.

...

To be fair, I haven't looked at much evidence on the other side of the argument.  I've been researching more on the anti-pharma side of things.  So, I've got that bias probably. But ya... just seems like some pretty credible people are advising that pharmaceuticals can be more damaging than helpful for most people, most of the time.

[Enlightenment]

@The0Self What version of cardio is better for increasing BDNF?

Go as fast as you can but only for 20 minutes (let's say it's 10 km/h) or 35 minutes but significantly slower, something like 8 km/h?

After I go as hard as I can for 20 minutes I get a very strong mood increase afterward for about an hour (runners high). Is BDNF related to runners high so I should aim to optimize my cardio training towards what gives me stronger runners high?

[Matt23]

I accidently reposted

Edited September 19, 2020 by Matt23

[The0Self]

5 hours ago, Enlightenment said:

@The0Self What version of cardio is better for increasing BDNF?

Go as fast as you can but only for 20 minutes (let's say it's 10 km/h) or 35 minutes but significantly slower, something like 8 km/h?

After I go as hard as I can for 20 minutes I get a very strong mood increase afterward for about an hour (runners high). Is BDNF related to runners high so I should aim to optimize my cardio training towards what gives me stronger runners high?

The runner’s high is related primarily to opioid activity, not BDNF. You’d have to do some research on it but I’m pretty sure the BDNF increase is largest with a challenge, but in the absence of stress — so for cardio this would be something like walking on a treadmill with the incline all the way up and doing that for 30 minutes at the same speed, then doing that every day and adding a tiny bit of speed every once in a while; or running at a comfortably fast pace for 30 minutes a day. Something like that. Or even lifting progressively heavier weights on chin/dip/deadlift etc but only in (for instance) the 5 rep range and rarely ever pushing to the max or getting significantly out of breath.

[Michael569]

13 hours ago, Enlightenment said:

Is BDNF related to runners high so I should aim to optimize my cardio training towards what gives me stronger runners high?

BNDF is always at work in your brain otherwise you would not be able to remember a single thing. All sorts of physical activity raise BDNF even gardening. Sleep is absolutely crucial for it and so is overall reduction of stress. Stress depletes BDNF and disrupts new sensitive neuronal connections. 

Good foods to focus on are those containing phosphatidylserine such as: legumes, edamame, sunflower seeds and oats. I think there are other. Choline rich foods are helpful as well in synaptic forming

[Brian Wolfe]

When anti-depressants taken correctly, it will not change your personality. Rarely, people feel apathy or loss of emotions while on certain antidepressants. When this happens, lowering the dose or switching to a different antidepressant may help.

[Enlightenment]

@Michael569 @neutralempty

I stumbled upon this today

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002239561100032X?via%3Dihub

Quote

 it was reported that depressed adults who used antidepressants were three times less likely than their unmedicated counterparts to still be depressed after eight years.

 

[Michael569]

@Enlightenment This is for MAJOR depression thou. That's the suicidal type where people unless sedated, can end up taking their life. For MDD antidepressants work well. 

The problem is that most people suffer from mild-to-moderate depression. Research shows that when compared with placebo even the most effective antidepressants like fluoxetine actually don't produce a lot of long term results. And when compared with herbs like St John's Wort, Saffron or 5-HTP there is actually very little difference (for mild or moderate). None of the herbs are effective for major depression thou. 

I think generally the drugs are used so that the doctors cover themselves in case the patient tries to kill themselves. If you, as a doctor, don't prescribe antidepressants and the patients commits suicide, you will lose license and can end up jailed if they prove that it was your fault. This is basically why all these toxic drugs are prescribed very often. Same for statins and diabetes drugs. Most of it is medical system covering itself and creating a sense that there is no other solution. 

A lot of people take these drugs for years and nobody ever investigated. It becomes part of their life, they learn to associate with the disease and they become the disease. I don't know if you ever knew a depressed person but they become The disease. The anxiety becomes the centre of their life and they will not let you help them even if you want to. This is partially why working with mental health is extremely difficult because most people don't believe it can be treated. 

 

 

[Nahm]

Clarity grows naturally right out of the earth & needs no human manipulation or explanation.