Depression

SSRI’S AND SUICIDE Bob Fiddaman has a post up today called MHRA Consultant Calls for Antidepressant Use in Young. The article highlights some of the dangers associated with SSRI’s, and also describes some of the attempts to suppress or discount the significance of this information. Apparently in 2010, Swedish psychiatrist Göran Isacsson, MD, PhD, published a paper in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. The piece was titled Antidepressant medication prevents suicide in depression, and reported that of a group of 1,077 depressed people who had committed suicide, only 15.2% had measurable amounts of antidepressants in the blood stream at the time of the suicide. ...

Despite the general rise in economic indicators over the past year or two, there are still many young adults who, for economic reasons, have had to move back in with their parents. A proportion of these people become depressed. Depression is the normal human reaction to loss, disappointment, or a general sense of unfulfillment. Viewed in this light, it is not surprising that young people who have to move back in with their parents might be depressed. ...

A few days ago, there was an interesting item in the Dear Abby column of our local newspaper. Dear Abby is a general advice column written by Jeanne Phillips, and is widely read. The letter in question was written by “Sibling Standing By,” who described his/her 63 year old sister as someone who “…takes no responsibility for her health.” The sibling goes on to say: "She’s extremely overweight because she overeats and doesn’t exercise. She complains every day that she feels 'terrible.' (I call it self-pitying whining.)" ...

I’ve recently read a noteworthy article on PLOS One. It’s by Joanne M. Dickson and Nicholas J. Moberly, and it’s called Reduced Specificity of Personal Goals and Explanations for Goal Attainment in Major Depression. It’s a very interesting and detailed paper. The authors, who work at the University of Liverpool and the University of Exeter respectively, asked a group of depressed people and another group of people who were not depressed to list their goals. ...

Recently on Twitter, Disparity asked for my opinion on the term mid-life crisis, which “…is often treated as a mental health condition.” The term mid-life crisis has no formal meaning in mental health, though as Disparity says, the concept does emerge from time to time. The original meaning of the word crisis was a turning point in an illness. In the past forty of fifty years, the connotation has extended to embrace almost any kind of challenging situation or adverse event. ...

Routine screening for depression sounds like a very good thing, and in fact it is recommended by NIMH, and by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (a division of the Department of Health and Human Services), and various other groups. Medicare will pay the total cost of one depression screening per year. But it has long been suggested by those of us on this side of the debate that routine screenings, especially those “free” screenings that are paid for by pharmaceutical companies, have had a distinctive flavor of disease-mongering. ...

I keep two dictionaries on my desk. The first is a 1964 Webster’s; the second is a 2009 Webster’s. This morning I looked up the word “depression” in both books. 1964: n. 1. a depressing or being depressed. 2. a depressed part or place; hollow or low place. 3. low spirits; dejection. 4. a decrease in force, activity, amount, etc. 5. a period marked by slackening of business activity, much unemployment, falling prices and wages, etc. ...

There’s a new post on Mick Bramham’s website called “A time to grieve, a time to console, and a time to profit?” You can see it here. You might have thought that, given the adverse publicity that pharma has been receiving in recent years, they would be easing up on their expansionist agenda. But you would be wrong. The APA has declared open season on bereavement, and although DSM-5 won’t be released for a few more weeks, Eli Lilly is already grooming their SNRI Cymbalta as a “treatment” for this pseudo illness. ...

There’s an article in Science Daily (April 29, 2013) titled “Antidepressants Linked with Increased Risks After Surgery,” which I found courtesy of Monica on Twitter. You can see it here. The article is a report of a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine. You can see an abstract of the study here. The study was conducted by Andrew Auerbach MD et al, and involved examining the records of 530,416 patients who had undergone major surgery between January 2006 and December 2008 at 375 US hospitals. ...

Thank you to Tallaght Trialogue for drawing my attention to Blue Horizon Stem Cells (you can see their website here) and a recent article they’ve written titled Mood Disorder (here). The article contains a very brief discussion of the term mood disorder, including a mention of “major depressive disorder” and “bipolar disorder.” It then goes on to say: "To find out more about how you may benefit from stem cell therapy, please complete our Contact Us form and one of our physicians will reach out to you for a private consultation." ...