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Nine Million And Counting


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#1 thismoment

thismoment

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Posted 06 April 2015 - 08:17 PM

We can now see how the antidepressant story all fits together, and why the widespread use of these drugs would contribute to a rise in the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States. Over the short term, those who take an antidepressant will likely see their symptoms lessen. They will see this as proof that the drugs work, as will their doctors. However, this short-term amelioration of symptoms is not markedly greater than what is seen in patients treated with a placebo, and this initial use also puts them into a problematic long-term course. If they stop taking the medication, they are at high risk or relapsing. But if they stay on the drugs, they will also likely suffer recurrent episodes of depression, and this chronicity increases the risk that they will become disabled. The SSRIs, to a certain extent, act like a trap in the same way that neuroleptics do.

 

We can also track the rise in the number of people disabled by depression during the antidepressant era. In 1955, there were 38,200 people in the nation's mental hospitals due to depression, a per-capita disability rate of 1 in 4,345. Today, major depressive disorder is the leading cause of disability in the United States for people ages fifteen to forty-four. According to the NIMH, it affects 15 million American adults, and researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health reported in 2008 that 58 percent of this group is "severely impaired". That means nearly 9 million adults are now disabled, to some extent, by this condition.

 

It's also important to note that this disability doesn't arise solely from the fact that people treated with antidepressants are at high risk of suffering recurrent episodes of depression. SSRIs also cause a multitude of troubling side effects. These include sexual dysfunction, suppression of REM sleep, muscle tics, fatigue, emotional blunting, and apathy. In addition, investigators have reported that long-term use is associated with memory impairment, problem-solving difficulties, loss of creativity, and learning deficiencies. "Our field," confessed Maurizio Fava and others at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2006, "has not paid sufficient attention to the presence of cognitive symptoms emerging or persisting during long-term antidepressant treatment . . . These symptoms appear to be quite common."

 

Animal studies have also produced alarming results. Rats fed high doses of SSRIs for four days ended up with neurons that were swollen and twisted like corkscrews. "We don't know if the cells are dying," the researchers from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia wrote. "These effects may be transient and reversible. Or they may be permanent." Other reports have suggested that the drugs may reduce the density of synaptic connections in the brain, cause cell death in the hippocampus, shrink the thalamus, and trigger abnormalities in frontal-lobe function. None of these possibilities has been studied or documented, but something is clearly going amiss if symptoms of cognitive impairment in long-term users of antidepressants are "quite common".

 

 

ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC

Robert Whitaker

p 169-171





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