Before I started taking psych meds, one of the major concerns I had was addiction.
I didn’t want to be an addict of any sort as I’m quite familiar with the horrors of addiction, having addicts in the family.[push]Will I get addicted to antidepressants?[/push]
And I knew people often took antidepressants for long periods of time, sometimes forever.
Busy. Crazy. Crazy busy. New antipsychotic. You know how it is.
As per the usual, however, I plow through my own research materials like a crazy person possessed. So I do know of many excellent articles you should be reading.
Check out these articles from Breaking Bipolar and other great sources:
Hope you enjoy, I’ll be back with fresh content next week.
I despise drug ads. No one should be interrupted from watching the season-finale of House only to have a picture of a highly unkempt woman on a couch quickly to be turned into vital young dream girl thanks to the latest wonder-pill. That is absolute poppycock.
But drug companies spent $4.2 billion in 2005 on direct-to-consumer advertising in the US.
As I mentioned last week, it’s very difficult to measure long-term outcomes of depression treatment due to the confounding depression variables like severity of depression, duration of depression, number of depressions and so on.
In short, the sicker you are, the more depressed you are, the more likely it is you’ll get treatment.
I discussed the basic outcomes of this study: The association between antidepressant use and depression eight years later: A national cohort study by Colman et al. which tries to take these variables into account.
Colman et al. showed those who took antidepressants had better depression treatment outcomes than those who didn’t, eight years later, once confounding variables were taken into consideration.
I’ll now point out the strengths and weaknesses of this study as well as some other interesting tidbits shown or cited in the study. Oh, and I’ll give my opinion on what it all means.
Recently the controversy over long-term outcomes of those who use psychotropic medication has flared up again. Some people argue depression/bipolar/mental illness patients do the same, or better, when they don’t take psychiatric medications long-term. However, the statistics they use to assert this claim are often faulty.
A study from Calgary, Alberta, Canada (yes, we do research up here too) has attempted to fix some of the bias seen in other long-term depression treatment outcome statistics. I’ll cut to the chase for you:
Over the course of eight years people with depression who took antidepressants had better outcomes.
One of the crazy things that will happen to you when you seek treatment for being crazy, is doctors will ask you what treatment you want. Usually your psychiatrist/doctor will give you two options: Would you like to try psych med A or psych med B? This provides the mirage of control over your mental illness and your mental illness treatment.
Frustration, thy name is bipolar.
This choice, of course, is ridiculous.* How should you know which medication to pick? They’re the doctor, the fancy psychiatrist, aren’t they supposed to know?
What criterion could you possibly use to pick a psychotropic medication that would conceivably compare to an actual doctor?
One of the problems with the antipsychiatry movement is they assert all of psychiatry, all doctors, all science is lying, pretty much all of the time. Any biological evidence for mental illness must be wrong, because if it isn’t, then psychiatry might make sense. Any evidence that antidepressants help a brain must be wrong, because otherwise antipsychiatry views might come into question.
But seriously, does any rational, thinking person really believe all of science, all over the world, is lying?
Hot on the heels of my post about the neurobiological evidence for major depressive disorder comes this: the first blood-based diagnostic aid for schizophrenia.
Um, what’s that again?
I have spent quite a bit of time in the last week looking at a paper: Pathophysiology of Depression: Do We Have Any Solid Evidence of Interest to Clinicians? By Gregor Hasler.
This paper discusses seven research areas relating to the neurobiology of major depressive disorder (MDD). In other words, it talks about the biological evidence of depression, mental illness. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of biological theories of depression via evidence and aims to point out some of the reasons our current treatment isn’t as successful as it should be. The paper cites 88 other studies and was published in the Journal of World Psychiatry in 2010. It’s pretty educational.
Not long ago the Bipolar Burble had a commenter ask me about delusions of grandeur in mania as a part of bipolar disorder. She was feeling alone in her experiences and so was hesitant to talk about her own delusions of grandeur during mania.
I’m not familiar with delusions of grandeur in mania and bipolar disorder so I looked it up and I asked if anyone had stories of their mania and delusions of grandeur. Naturally, my lovely readers provided.
If you’re been reading my writings here at the Bipolar Burble for a while, you’ve probably gathered that I don’t like antipsychiatry groups. These groups are often under the “mad pride” flag or “psychiatric survivors” or people for “human rights” or people fighting psychiatric abuses. Often the language they use is solely designed to convince you that psychiatry is evil, psychiatry should be stopped, no one should take psychiatric medication and in many cases, psychology is also evil. Many antipsychiatry groups are sneaky. Antipsychiatry groups sounds reasonable on first glance but it’s only once you dig into them that you see how insidious they are.
Antipsychiatry groups are ridiculous.
I’ve tried to look into antipsychiatry groups to see if there’s something worth understanding but they have no evidence. Just ardent supporters that make wild claims without proof. And their tactics of cruel, personal, abusive attacks are not worth my time. It assures that their groups have no credibility whatsoever.
And sometimes I spend entire days fighting antipsychiatry people. Antipsychiatry shows up on the Bipolar Burble, antipsychiatry finds me on Twitter, antipsychiatry follows me to Facebook, antipsychiatry shows up on Breaking Bipolar. And these charming antipsychiatry folks, for whatever reason, read all about me and then use those person details to ensure their personal attacked will be as nasty as possible.
Long (long) time readers will recall that once-upon-a-time I took the atypical antipsychotic Geodon. I found this to be an unbearably painful and side effect laden psych med. I hated Geodon. I wouldn’t wish Geodon on my worst enemy. I lost touch with reality with Geodon. I passed out at work on Geodon. I got sick constantly on Geodon.
You know, that being said, Geodon works for a lot of people.
I gather my reaction to this antipsychotic was fairly atypical. And if I had known what to eat when taking Geodon that might have helped.
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