Anybody watching 60 minutes tonight? If not, watch it online. It's very interesting how some researchers are now saying that antidepressants don't work in mild or moderate cases. Heck, it sounds like the UK has already admitted it.
Take a view, it's good.
They don't work in most cases because "depression" has no pathology....There's no "disease", in the traditional clinical sense, to treat.
Most of today's unquantifiable "disorders" are pretty much dreamed up by PhD candidates, who needed to make a "new discovery" for their dissertations.
Clinical Depression exists. I have it and I suffer major depression pretty much all the time. It is caused mostly by a lack of one or more neurotransmitters in the brain. They have not developed a way to test medically for it.
The problem currently is that people that are NOT clinically depressed are diagnosed as such and given pills that won't help them because they have no deficiency of those transmitters.
Kids are the most over diagnosed of the lot. Act up as a teenager naturally does and an over concerned parent or Teacher will get you seen by a therapist or Doctor that has a vested interest in you being depressed.
The local mental health facility went from treating adults and senile old to no old people only about 10 beds for adults and almost exclusively treating teenagers and small children.
Further in children and teenagers the drugs that are common to the current era do not work on them. They actually induce the very effects they are supposed to treat.
Gunny, I thank you for having the courage to write this post. I have a transmitter-related disease called fibromyalgia (muscle pain), a disease that carries odd and uncontrollable muscle pain here, there, and everywhere. When I first got the disease about 12 years ago, my doctors tried everything to rid me of pain. I got pretty uncooperative when I couldn't efficiently do math in my retail store, and began to quit taking some of my prescriptions. My doctor insisted I had to take an antidepressant, because the majority of fibriomyalgiacs are supposed to be depressed. I couldn't figure it out. I was so
not depressed that their antidepressants caused me to laugh or giggle, which is not always appropriate, i.e.--Oh, your husband died? hehehehehe. Good grief. I spent the first two years trying to rewire responses, when I just set aside the antidepressants, which had a nil effect on pain anyway. Finally, my phisician just gave up on me. He prescribed Neurontin, a product that was being used in surgery that stops pain at the spine. It didn't take long to figure out that while I wasn't hurting while taking it, it was causing total lapses in my mathematics. I lost all connection I had learned in working for an accountant between the column and its total. When you get good at numbers, you can just glance down a column and know if your answer is too great or small or has an error. To make a long story short, I hated the product with a passion, would prefer total torture to not being in charge of my brain. I stayed home a lot and developed sewing skills to keep my mind off pain. That worked really well, but it is deleterious to a mom and pop business to have its principal staying home 80% of the business day. Eventually, I found some health products that did stop my pain, and I still take one of them today to be sure I don't have that problem.
When we moved, my new physician practitioner specialized in bones, and she noticed I had a problem with calcium levels in my blood. She knew exactly what to do. She ordered a scan of my parathyroids and found 2 of the 4 were glowing on the scan and needed removal. She sent me on to an endocrinologist who tested me for 6 months, then concluded the same as she, so their surgeon friend did the procedure. I don't know what to make of an operation that doesn't show results for a while, but after about 4 months, not only had my parathyroids healed, my fibromyalgia was put on the back burner, and for the first time in 10 years, I could stand my life. I cannot, however, take calcium because I am allergic to it in all its tablet forms. However, being a transmitter important in muscle synapses, I decided I'd better drink a small amount of milk 3 or 4 times a day. My bright new physician also worked out a way for me to take a medicine that caused itching with another product that stops that particular allergic reaction, even in a fibromyalgia sufferer, who may have litterally dozens of allergies.
Knowing that depression is a problem of neurotransmission as is fibromyalgia reaction makes me realize the great strides that have been made in medical science recently by physicians, researchers, and clinicians. I've read some theorists attribute a possible link between some human diseases and a bout with certain diseases. One of my books on fibro says 80% of sufferers seem to have had a disease called Epstein-Barr virus in their medical history. So whether a virus inserts itself into its victim's dna is not really clear to me, but my thinking is it may in concert with other viruses, change the way the human body reacts to a stimulus.
Something in my vitamin regimen does fight the pain, but when I stop taking the drugs prescribed following parathyroid surgery, I have 2 hours before the fibromyalgia returns with a venom. The disease feels like a deadly fire, and once the fire starts, it's harder to stop than an oil rig burning.
Also, the disease is associated with other autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and diabetes. I wonder if that means depression could also be of an autoimmune bent. If so, I am sure others are onto depression and will find a cure in the near future. I pray it is so, and along with it, my hopes and prayers that you will be able to fight it off with attention to nutritional aids that help others with autoimmune issues.
Life is so short, and mankind that can now travel to a moon and research its chemicals, might consider more human chemistry that will help people out as the thread of life runs thin.
I'm just thinking we're knocking off deadly diseases one at a time, some are autoimmune, and some seem to be caused by outside agents.
Here's to progress in medicine:
