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Where Is It Going?


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#1 thismoment

thismoment

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Posted 27 February 2015 - 11:34 AM

"When patients request help with SSRI toxicity, I ask them why they didn’t go back to their prescribing doctor and ask them to stop the medicine. The typical answer is not surprising: the physicians are frequently unwilling to stop the medications at all or insist on substituting a similar medication or an antipsychotic medication. You would think that a high-functioning, more-or-less asymptomatic person asking to stop medications would find their physician agreeable. My guess is that physicians do not stop the SSRIs because the physicians have already had a few difficult experiences with what can happen after stopping the drugs. I suspect that physicians want to think that the problems are not withdrawal-related, but a reappearance of the mythical chemical imbalance or a new onset of bipolar disorder.

When you stop to think of how many patients the average family physician or psychiatrist puts on SSRIS, including themselves, family and friends, and the long-term results of these prescriptions, the cumulative misery effect is so large that if the physician really became educated, then they would be unable to live with themselves.

SSRIs have now been on the market for over 25 years, and some patients have been taking them for that long. So a lot of the patients seeking to stop taking SSRIs have been on them for so long that the risks from stopping the drugs are significant.

It is difficult to imagine anyone performing scientific study to prove that late neurotoxic withdrawal symptoms will occur. Ideally, a control group of people who recovered from anxiety/depression with no medications would need to be compared with a similar group who recovered with medication and then stopped the medication as well as another group who recovered with medication and never stopped taking the medication. I don’t see this on the horizon any time soon.

What is going to happen at 30 years or 40 years of cumulative exposure? Similar to global warming, it is the sheer magnitude of the problem that may prevent critical analysis. In the meantime, getting this information to the public, such as in well researched books like ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ and the excellent work from RxISK is the critical first step. A decade ago patients were almost always insisting on an SSRI, but now a lot of patients know somebody who took an SSRI and went downhill rapidly and they are more interested in other treatment options. Let us hope that public opinion trends further away from SSRIs and the unproven benefits from psychiatric drugs in general and that research will be done to clarify just what these drugs are doing and what can be done about the adverse effects."

Dr. Stuart Shipko, psychiatrist
From madinamerica "Playing the Odds, Revisited"
July 21, 2014



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