Depression

i have been very depressed three or four times. always it was the same cause. i’ve never had the experience of being depressed for no reason. i’ve never gone to bed feeling fine and woke up feeling depressed.i think i’ve acquired enough sophistication to say:i can’t imagine anyone under the same circumstances not becoming very depressed, crying constantly, hating himself, thinking of killing himself.i also think the circumstances are new to human experience. that is, in the past my guess is such circumstances were very uncommon.what were they every single time: a beautiful girl or woman who was unavailable. but not because i was ugly or boring or whatever.because of my family background.i live in the us. despite college entrance exams above the mean for admits to all of america’s best universities. despite the same for its graduate school entrance exams, i never had a chance of getting in. my parents divorced. my dad hit me, fornicated, was a loser.and so am i. social reproduction is reason enough to top yourself.the pills didn’t work. the psychiatrists and therapists were idiots.my solution has been alcohol.i’m in the following study believe it or not https://www.cog-genomics.org/.but i have no prospects and never will.anyway, blah, blah, blah…it is a fundamental tenet of the american ideology, so to say, that the locus of pathology is the individual, never his society and never the two together. ...

On June 18, the British Medical Journal published an article by Christine Lu et al, titled Changes in antidepressant use by young people and suicidal behavior after FDA warnings and media coverage: quasi-experimental study. Here’s the conclusion paragraph from the abstract: "Safety warnings about antidepressants and widespread media coverage decreased antidepressant use, and there were simultaneous increases in suicide attempts among young people. It is essential to monitor and reduce possible unintended consequences of FDA warnings and media reporting." ...

I recently came across the May 2014 issue of The Costco Connection, which is published by Costco Wholesale. This is the first time I’ve seen a copy of this magazine, and I would describe it as a catalog/lifestyle periodical. There are lots of ads for Costco’s own products, and the articles are wide ranging, topical, and easy to read. This particular issue was drawn to my attention because on page 57, there’s an article titled Blues Clues. The subtitle is: “Physical pain is one of the unexpected signs of depression.” The author is Jodi Helmer, a freelance journalist. ...

A very important and compelling article was posted on Mad in America on June 18. It’s by Andrew L. Yoder, and is called An Open Letter to Persons Self-Identifying as Mentally Ill. Here are some quotes: "My physician was not so cautious. He was a very pleasant man that always seemed to take his time with me and did not talk down to me. Yet as I described some of the emotional distress I was experiencing, and the ways it was affecting my life, he told me with great certainty that mine was a totally common experience. He told me that I had a biological condition in my brain, one in which certain chemicals were 'imbalanced.' He told me that there should be no stigma about asking for assistance from him. Specifically he told me, 'Trying to not be depressed is like telling a diabetic to just make more insulin.' He prescribed an antidepressant medication, saying that this was no different than taking medication to regulate blood pressure or manage cholesterol. I was told of the likelihood that I would need to remain on some form of medication for an indefinite future." ...

On April 19, 2014, The Lancet published an article titled Do we underestimate the benefits of antidepressants? by German psychiatrists Mazda Adli and Ulrich Hegerl. The Lancet, founded in 1823, is a weekly, general medical journal which since 1991 has been owned by Elsevier, a private, Amsterdam-based, publishing house with offices in the UK, USA, and other countries. The gist of the article can be gathered from the opening paragraph: ...

Alex Langford is a British trainee psychiatrist. He blogs at The Psychiatric SHO, and on April 21, he posted an article titled Antidepressants are not ‘happy pills.’ Thanks to Jean Davison for the link. The article is an impassioned attack on psychiatry’s critics. Here are some quotes, with my responses: "I am sick and tired of the way the press portrays depression as unhappiness and antidepressants as ‘happy pills’." This is interesting, though my general impression is that the mainstream media lean a good deal more towards psychiatry than towards our side of the debate. In addition, the words "depression" and unhappiness are pretty much synonymous. So it's difficult to see why that, or the characterization of antidepressants as "happy pills," should be so upsetting to Dr. Langford. We all, of course, have our linguistic likes and dislikes. I personally don't care much for the growing trend to pronounce the indefinite article as "ay," or for psychiatry's insistence on calling neuroleptic drugs "anti-psychotics." But what can you do? I just Googled the phrase "antidepressants are happy pills" and got 204,000 hits! So the notion has some traction and is probably here to stay. One can't legislate for the way people use words. Or perhaps psychiatrists imagine that they can. "For problems in other areas of health we’d only trust the experts to comment, but when it comes to mental health it seems like anyone can cast judgement." ...

In June 2011, Rif El-Mallakh, MD, et al. published an article, Tardive dysphoria: The role of long term antidepressant use in inducing chronic depression, in Medical Hypotheses. The article is a thorough and wide-ranging study review. Here are some quotes from the abstract: "Treatment-resistant and chronic depression appear to be increasing." "Depressed patients who ultimately become treatment resistant frequently have had a positive initial response to antidepressants and invariably have received these agents for prolonged time periods at high doses." [Emphasis added] ...

BACKGROUND On November 20, JAMA Psychiatry (formerly Archives of General Psychiatry) published an interesting letter. It was headed: Failure to Report Financial Disclosure Information, and was signed by Robert D. Gibbons PhD, David J Weiss PhD, Paul A. Pilkonis PhD, Ellen Frank, PhD , and David J. Kupfer MD. The letter is an apology for failing to disclose a financial interest in an article, Development of a Computerized Adaptive Test for Depression, that had appeared in Archives of General Psychiatry a year earlier (November 2012). The article described a computerized questionnaire for depression (the CAT-DI) and was generally positive with regards to the potential usefulness of the test in clinical settings. In the article, the authors had clearly stated that they had no conflicts of interest, but that: ...

I’ve recently come across a new website that is challenging the illness approach to depression. It’s depressionwars.com and is written by Char Leander, an industrial sociologist. Char became interested in this topic when she saw “…the epidemic of emotional disorders in the workplace.” She also recounts some personal experience with depression. Here are some quotes from her November 11 post Fight Back Against Depression: "You have to fight back against depression as disorder! The walls of depression may be high, but higher still are the invincible mental walls erected around the concepts of disorder, mental illness, and disease." ...

ANOTHER VIDEO FROM DR. LIEBERMAN On October 28, Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA, made another video. This one is titled An Important Look at Mortality in Mental Illness: A Decade of Data on Psychotropic Drugs, and was made for Medscape. You can see the transcript at the same site. Medscape is a web resource for medical practitioners. The video is Dr. Lieberman’s commentary on an article that appeared in JAMA Psychiatry online on August 28: Comparative Mortality Risk in Adult Patients With Schizophrenia, Depression, Bipolar Disorder, Anxiety Disorders, and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Participating in Psychopharmacology Clinical Trials, by Arif Khan, MD, et al. ...