4 replies to this topic

[thismoment]

This website is well-known. You will surely find it informative to spend an hour or so looking through it.

 

http://ssristories.org

[gail]

Hum! That is the dark side of the story of SSRIS, a sad one.

But, there is also a bright side, one that is rarely published.

It does make my life livable, for the moment. I feel normal, for the moment.
Of course, two sides of the medal. Just sad that the dark side is the one to show up first in the medias. It has saved many lives from suicide.

[thismoment]

I agree that antidepressants have an effect, and often that effect is rightly viewed as helpful or beneficial. Placebos, however, have virtually the same effect-- and they are not neurotoxic.

I think this aspect needs to be explored more for application within general patient care; while it's not permissible to prescribe a placebo, it is ethical to work with placebos in a controlled environment. The issue, however, is will and funding (which are intertwined), and both are non-existent for this level of personal care.

One cannot underestimate the stranglehold pharmaceutical companies have on the dissemination of information (including media), and the shocking control these companies have over the individual physician. We are all familiar with the army of front-line, high-profile lecturing psychiatrists who swoon over the opportunity to read aloud a BigPharma document for a fistful of dollars (sorry Clint).

If it's possible to help patients without permanently altering their brains as SS/SNRIs do, that's certainly something worth pursuing.

[equuswoman]

I could NOT continue to take Cymbalta (chronic pain of lower back due to severe arthritis)  however I have a friend that has fibromyalgia and she says that she could NOT function if she didn't take it.

I just know that it didn't work for me. Not in the way that I needed it to do. I am glad tho for the ppl who do benefit from it.

May God bless all of us who so need a better life when dealing with such difficulties.

TheEquusWoman  

[FiveNotions]

Gail, it's wonderful that you've found a med that helps, not hurts, you! It sounds like you've got the anxiety under control now !
 
I definitely don't think all anti-depressants are bad, or that we should never use them ... for example, Wellbutrin, which I continue to take, was a life-saver for me ... I was near suicide (18 years ago, I've been on it too long, time to examine that, I think) ... but, it's not an SSRI, and it's one of the older meds ... not in the later "generations" of increasingly more powerful drugs
 
Cymbalta just seems to be a more evil drug than most ... at least for those of us who were lucky enuf to find this forum ... none of the other SSRIs I've taken ever got the strangle-hold on me that this stuff did ... and it did so insidiously ... I didn't realize what it had done to my mind until after I quit, survived withdrawal, and then stabilized ...
 
Another point ... while I was doing the freelance research for the psych PhD student I read tons of older journal articles about SSRIs ... and anti-Ds in general ... many of the articles prior to about 1997-1998 indicated that these drugs were recommended to be used for a period of months only, as an augment to CBT and other therapy ... not to be prescribed for a lifetime ... somewhere around the turn of the century, something changed radically ... the drugs became the replacement for therapy ... and therapy became the "augment" ...

And the drug companies now have a strangle-hold on doctors .. right from medical school into their practices ... drug cos fund the professors, med school scholarships, research, even the DSM ...

The more people who are made aware of the "dark side," and read stories like those at the website TM posted, the better ... because that info will never be shared by big pharma or our doctors ...