Guest Coalbucket PI Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 I think the 'they' who prescribe antidepressants here is the NHS accountants, because overall the drugs are effective and cheap while CBT takes a long time and costs a lot of money. In a way I suppose it's hard not to prescribe them even if the patient is getting therapy as well, because as a doctor you'd need to have a reason why you didn't give someone a treatment that has a proven track record. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fiznuthian Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 can anyone chime in on the effectivity of SSRIs and MAOIs? honestly most of my knowledge of how well they work is anecdotal with a few published articles citing studies and meta-analysis studies. i've met a few people who say they work well, and many people who say they felt weird, got more depressed, became suicidal, and exhibited other odd, out of place behaviors after taking them. i'm really curious just how it all stacks up.. is there a mound of supportive evidence that provides the basis for how frequently they're prescribed? what's weird to me is how quick they are prescribed, and this is the case with benzos too for those of us with disabling anxieties. it really shocked me to have the first psychiatrist i met, whom was recommended by my boss and a co-worker as being exceptional at what he does, call my doctor immediately and tell him i'm coming his way to pick up a bottle of xanax. and he did this after i informed him i have strong addiction potential and escapist tendencies, and that my social anxiety was not in the form of panic attacks but rather consistent irrational behavior that works against me and my goals. that struck me as an extremely dangerous choice of action and i knew it was not going to help me.. after all, he had allowed me to explain my struggles for a mere half hour before trying to get me to a bottle of benzos. so i'm really not sure where i stand on all of this.. its not like cannabis which has been smoked for many thousands of years now. its been a mere several decades since any of these drugs were developed. i'm not so sure that toying with neurotransmitters is the right way to go about it unless its certain a person is just that bad off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sneaksta303 Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 anti-depressants + a good psychologist (not psychiatrist) did well for me. Unfortunately, I haven't been on meds or seen a therapist for over 2 years now, and it may be starting to take it's toll. In fact, I need to do something about it NOW before it gets bad again. thanks thread for reminding me that 80% of the time i'm a miserable bastard that wishes he could sleep 23 hours a day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acidphakist Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 kaen, if I can ask, you've had a girlfriend/girlfriends during this time, right? Do you found that has helped at all, or made no difference? For me finally getting to a place where I could date again - or more specifically, fuck again - did me as much good as any medication I was on. The regular, normal erotic release, and person-to-person contact, was very therapeutic... Christ I'm fighting to get back to this. My addiction has erased the thought/hope of finding, courting and fucking a girl. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fiznuthian Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 kaen, if I can ask, you've had a girlfriend/girlfriends during this time, right? Do you found that has helped at all, or made no difference? For me finally getting to a place where I could date again - or more specifically, fuck again - did me as much good as any medication I was on. The regular, normal erotic release, and person-to-person contact, was very therapeutic... Christ I'm fighting to get back to this. My addiction has erased the thought/hope of finding, courting and fucking a girl. yes it seems girls have excellent detectors for any and all mental conditions afflicting men. by addiction do you mean drug addiction? your carrier wave EP is really fucking good though, if that boosts your confidence at all. it's going on my music player asap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fiznuthian Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 i'm going to reply a second time and say that its actually REALLY fucking good, i am digging these tunes so hard. the skittering drums and lush pads are great! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fiznuthian Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 anyway, so paxil makes some people fat and its irreversible? strange.. my last roomate spent a lot of time on SSRI and MAOI drugs. he cheated on his ridiculously sexy girlfriend (if i remember correctly) 5 times in a row, three of which occured in one night. he swore up and down it was the drugs making him act weird and feel weird.. i came home one night and a girl was sucking him off (i missed an opportunity for a good blowie here.. fuck) then in the same night he fucked another one. when the girls spread word eventually the gossip caught up to him, and he freaked out depressive hard. saying he was going to kill himself if she left him, he loved her so much, etc.. but in retrospect he was really quite a douche and his parents pay for his entire life including giving him jobs so i'm not sure if it was the drugs or the fact that he was possessive and had no conscience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest disparaissant Posted January 10, 2011 Share Posted January 10, 2011 yeh i had super severe depression (three suicide attempts, institutionalized a bunch) in addition to some kind of mood disorder when i was a teenager which i eventually self-medicated away by being drunk and stoned like 24/7 for i dunno, 8 years? then i started seeing a therapist who was actually really cool (vonnegut quote on the wall <3) and things have been a lot better. not 100% or even like 85% but everything's tolerable even without being perma-stoned. just having someone who can give you a perspective other than your own on why everything is shit is fucking amazing and freeing and all that jazz. oh and meds never did shit for me, made me more suicidal and my palms would sweat buckets, constantly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acidphakist Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 kaen, if I can ask, you've had a girlfriend/girlfriends during this time, right? Do you found that has helped at all, or made no difference? For me finally getting to a place where I could date again - or more specifically, fuck again - did me as much good as any medication I was on. The regular, normal erotic release, and person-to-person contact, was very therapeutic... Christ I'm fighting to get back to this. My addiction has erased the thought/hope of finding, courting and fucking a girl. yes it seems girls have excellent detectors for any and all mental conditions afflicting men. by addiction do you mean drug addiction? your carrier wave EP is really fucking good though, if that boosts your confidence at all. it's going on my music player asap. Thanks for your kind words! Yes, I got tangled up with speed and am slowly climbing out... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sup Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 looks like watmm is a pretty fucked up bunch lol, some drs/psychologysts where trying to sell me drugs but i said no way man i dont want some drug to change how i think im pretty good thinking now! so then now i just go to a psychologyst Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boxing Day Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 St. John's Wort did wonders for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marf Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 clinical depression changed me more than any acid or shroom trip. I took pristiq the second time and it saved my life. Drugs have helped me a great deal. I might of died without them . i almost did. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lumpenprol Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 anyway, so paxil makes some people fat and its irreversible? strange.. my last roomate spent a lot of time on SSRI and MAOI drugs. he cheated on his ridiculously sexy girlfriend (if i remember correctly) 5 times in a row, three of which occured in one night. he swore up and down it was the drugs making him act weird and feel weird.. i came home one night and a girl was sucking him off (i missed an opportunity for a good blowie here.. fuck) then in the same night he fucked another one. when the girls spread word eventually the gossip caught up to him, and he freaked out depressive hard. saying he was going to kill himself if she left him, he loved her so much, etc.. but in retrospect he was really quite a douche and his parents pay for his entire life including giving him jobs so i'm not sure if it was the drugs or the fact that he was possessive and had no conscience. While I'm quite sure that "douche" accounted for more of your friend's behavior than Paxil, no one should treat lightly the potential SSRI's have to amp the brain to 11 or otherwise do strange things. While this was basically a 1-in-a-million chance, there was a man who was a successful business owner and started to feel depressed. His physician put him on Paxil. He started to describe strange feelings, which the doctor took as him needing more Paxil. That phenomenon is not uncommon--in fact, when antipsychotics cause tardive dyskinesia, it can be confused with worsening psychotic symptoms and the patient gets more of the offending agent. Anyway, "Paxil man" is driving and sees a person pulled over by a cop. He suddenly guns it and runs the cop over and when he's down, he says to the cop, "I'm really sorry, I just want your gun". In prison, he withdrew from Paxil and couldn't believe how he got that far gone. When asked why he did that, he said "I really didn't want to hurt that cop. All I knew is that I wanted to end my life right then and all I could think about was getting his gun to do it". Peter Breggin's testimony and a request for leniency by the injured cop helped the guy get reduced charges and sentence but he was sufficiently fucked. good story. Regarding the douche guy, I'm just amazed his libido was raging like that on antidepressants! When I was on them my sex drive dropped to near zero, and from what I've read that's not an uncommon side-effect...hence why people are steered towards wellbutrin and meds that apparently have fewer adverse sexual side effects... My brain also did weird and sometimes wonderful things on antidepressants. downside: I became much more forgetful. I once drove somewhere to do some shopping, walked home, and woke up the next day wondering where my car was. True story. upside: my sense of humor improved a lot, I actually became charming. I started to get much more risk-taking, which can be considered good or bad. I was really into scuba diving at the time, and started doing frequent solo night dives. I was pretty fucking intense, I'd drive the 1.5 hours down to Monterey alone, drag my gear out in the middle of the night, sometimes in the middle of rainstorms, and go night diving in kelp beds with sea lions, no buddy, and nobody knowing where I was...in hindsight pretty damn insane but I was very, very happy. When I made the conscious decision to get off meds again, I knew I'd be losing that part of myself. Sure enough my personality came much more down to earth and I lost a lot of that "medication luster" but I felt more like the real me. Incidentally, I initially started on the older tricyclic antidepressants, which were a trip. I actually felt like I had "popcorn" going off inside my brain... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acidphakist Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 "Everyday ecstasy" is how Lexapro made me feel...not the intense, loved-up rhapsodies but fascination and wonder at what was previously quotidian. Yes. It was lovely while it lasted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lumpenprol Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 That is a gorgeous story re: diving. This is the thing that is bothersome to me though. Within the psychiatric framework, that would be called "hypomania" like its a symptom that needs to be controlled. "Everyday ecstasy" is how Lexapro made me feel...not the intense, loved-up rhapsodies but fascination and wonder at what was previously quotidian. But, in my case, it really did progress into hypomania, which was a very unstable and irritable state that got in the way of school and work so I stopped. I like that, "everyday ecstasy", exactly. For example, I'd see a cluster of strawberry anemones and burst out laughing like a loon, regulator almost falling from my mouth, at the sheer beauty of it. I can't imagine having that much joy about anything now, lol. I guess it was hypomania but I sort of miss it... Incidentally: LOL! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
remy marathe Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 Paradoxically, the people who need the help the most are the ones the most short on the 3 things I mentioned and therefore have to engage "boosters" like medication + therapy. strongly disagree with that last statement. intelligence can be a gigantic hindrance to getting out of a depressive period, as it leads to rationalizing thought loops that often just make you more depressed. i would go so far as to say it has absolutely nothing to do with someone's ability to regain control of their life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest fiznuthian Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 hm, that's fascinating. so despite all the joy these drugs produced for you, you feel the joy was lost once treatment halted? could you elaborate on the "i miss"? thats something i wondered about when considering my options.. i knew from my recreational experiences with drugs that yes, consistent use can produce feelings of happiness on a regular basis. i wondered if anti-depressants would do the same thing. but what to do when the drugs weren't there? there had to be some effort on my part to make changes in my mind that no drug would do on its own accord. what worried me was the permanence of it all, and whether i would become dependent on the drugs to reproduce positive emotions. even worse, the potential to damage systems responsible for producing happiness, contentness, and joy made me really paranoid about taking the plunge.. sometimes people post accounts of having used these drugs and then struggling even worse afterwards, beyond the withdrawal periods some anti-depressants produce. kind of have to take it with a grain of salt, its the internet and its hard to say if they describe the full picture. but as frequently as the topic comes up surely there must be some truth to it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lumpenprol Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 I dunno if there's any long-term impairment caused by SSRI use, it wouldn't surprise me if having your little dendrites swimming in a constant soup of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine is "not a good thing." Do I feel my capacity for authentic joy has been diminished? Possibly, but that could also just be the pre-existing depression. Hard to tease it apart. What I miss is the sense of energy and occasional euphoria I got while on ssris, but the funny thing was I had lived with my previous self long enough to feel that "this isn't me." I wonder with all the kids getting medicated at such an early age nowadays, do they even have a sense of an "authentic", unmedicated self? And should that even matter? This topic is close to my heart because I actually had a major falling out with my father years ago when he decided to put my much younger (at the time pre-teen) brother on SSRIs. I've talked to him very little since, but I was always cognizant of the fact that I might be in the wrong. I've been curious to see if my brother would grow up and have major issues from being medicated at such a young age, but so far he seems to be doing ok. He's an undergrad now. Some day I hope to talk to him about it, about his sense of identity and self. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TwiddleBot Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 Anti-depressants were quite possibly, the worst thing that ever happened to me. However I was prescribed them by a doctor, not a psychiatrist, because I was going through a period of depression. Thing is, I was depressed because of life circumstances. He asked me a list of 8 questions and then tossed me a prescription for venlafaxine. This was about 12-13 years ago. It ruined me. Basically all the symptoms of my depression doubled or tripled. It fucked up my short term memory. Nevermind it killed my libido and the insane fatigue, sleeping 13-14 hours a day. I was in my late teens at the time, thank god, because it meant my parents could look after their crippled child, without help I would have been royally fucked. A few months later we switched to paxil. I took it for a few weeks and tossed it and vowed never to touch the stuff again. I'm glad I did. Friends I grew up with who took that stuff never did anything with their lives and have severe social problems they've never attempted to overcome. I'm not saying those drugs are evil, I do know some people who had proper psychiatrists who have benefited from them in the long run, and have accomplished a lot with their lives. Interestingly the most healing drug experience in regard to the above was the one they say you aren't supposed to have. I tried it rather late in life a few times and had a shit tonne of memories come back to me that I had nearly forgotten. Let's hear it for a bit of temporary heightened synesthesia and metaphorical thinking. Not saying that this is the best solution either of course. YMMV. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
murve33 Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 This thread is too long for me to read right now. Bullet points: -Mental disorders are definitely over diagnosed. For example, Aspergers. I have an Uncle who was diagnosed, and he's not aspy at all. -Mental disorders are over medicated. The most depressing thing I see time and time again are someone being prescribed pills, having side effects, and then being prescribed more pills to get rid of the side effects. -Pills do help some people, but they can others feel worse. I felt suicidal and socially anxious when I took Well Butrin, especially when coupled with Adderhal (excuse my spellings). My dad, on the otherhand, turns into a lunatic if he's not on his anti-depressants. Either way, I never really feel like pills eliminate any depression. Major lifestyle changes are the only thing that ever seem to change anything. So counseling probably could help (if you actually find a good counselor). In regards to depression being a choice or people diagnosing themselves with depression, I think that's true to an extent. But if someone's life is really shitty, and they feel like dump all of the time, I feel that that could make some changes in one's mind. Maybe instead of saying "Depression is a choice" the author should have said "Depression can be avoided if one keeps the right mindset." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest the anonymous forumite Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 That is a gorgeous story re: diving. This is the thing that is bothersome to me though. Within the psychiatric framework, that would be called "hypomania" like its a symptom that needs to be controlled. "Everyday ecstasy" is how Lexapro made me feel...not the intense, loved-up rhapsodies but fascination and wonder at what was previously quotidian. But, in my case, it really did progress into hypomania, which was a very unstable and irritable state that got in the way of school and work so I stopped. I like that, "everyday ecstasy", exactly. For example, I'd see a cluster of strawberry anemones and burst out laughing like a loon, regulator almost falling from my mouth, at the sheer beauty of it. I can't imagine having that much joy about anything now, lol. I guess it was hypomania but I sort of miss it... LOL! Hypomania looks fantastic. Does Lexapro automatically put you in that state ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
murve33 Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 Hypomania looks fantastic. Does Lexapro automatically put you in that state ? No, sadly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest disparaissant Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 hypomania really isn't a good thing. i mean you get a lot of shit done but fuck i have made some incredibly bad decisions while hypomanic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acidphakist Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 hypomania really isn't a good thing. i mean you get a lot of shit done but fuck i have made some incredibly bad decisions while hypomanic. But in all seriousness, don't you feel so fucking sexy when 'up' like that? I sure do. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest disparaissant Posted January 11, 2011 Share Posted January 11, 2011 hypomania really isn't a good thing. i mean you get a lot of shit done but fuck i have made some incredibly bad decisions while hypomanic. But in all seriousness, don't you feel so fucking sexy when 'up' like that? I sure do. haha well yeah totally, it's the just the repercussions are never good :S if i could somehow lock out my bank account while hypomanic it would be incredible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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