Antidepressants

"CNN's Carol Costello explores Operation Tohidu, an experimental rehabilitation program to help veterans with PTSD." Operation Tohidu founder, Dr. Mary Vieten claims PTSD is not a mental illness and "there is no reason to medicate someone who has been traumatized by their war experience." When asked what percentage of soldiers returning with PTSD do not need drugs she responds, "100%."

There is robust evidence for the long-term effectiveness of psychotherapy, and it also provides good value-for-money, according to a large randomized control trial published open-access this month in The Lancet. The researchers recommend that clinicians refer all patients with treatment-resistant depression to therapy.

The Times Katie Gibbons reports that the UK “NHS is spending a record £780,000 a day on antidepressants as failing mental health services struggle...

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy worked as well -- and as poorly -- as antidepressants for preventing relapses in depressed people. Though the mindfulness participants may have been in acute withdrawal.

The assertion that the so-called antidepressants are being over-prescribed implies that there is a correct and appropriate level of prescribing and that depression is a chronic illness (just like diabetes). It has been an integral part of psychiatry's message that although depression might have been triggered by an external event, it is essentially an illness residing within the person's neurochemistry. The issue is not whether people should or shouldn't take pills. The issue is psychiatry pushing these dangerous serotonin-disruptive chemicals on people, under the pretense that they have an illness.

Research from Germany finds that people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective diagnoses given multiple medications - an antipsychotic plus a benzodiazepine or more than one...

BBC 5 live ran a recent piece that aimed to explore why antidepressant prescriptions have doubled in the last ten years. Unfortunately, it failed to address the drivers of this epidemic – industry-backed diagnostic inflation and the lax regulation of medicines.

A retrospective study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry examined cases of people who suffered sexual dysfunction that endured even after stopping taking SSRI antidepressants.

Zoloft isn't just for depression any more; it also kills fungal meningitis. Researchers from Texas A&M find that "The problem for many current antifungal...

From Psychiatric News: According to a new study, patients who take antidepressants simultaneously with benzodiazepines are at an increased risk of becoming long-term benzodiazepine users. Article...

The Washington Post investigates the epidemic of suicide and the overuse of psychiatric drugs that is sweeping through towns in Colorado.

I’ve been reading Dr. David Healy’s new book, Pharmageddon, and while some of it may seem like old news, I was struck by his...

From EndocrinologyAdvisor: A recent meta-analysis suggests that antidepressant drug use may increase patients' risk of diabetes. According to the lead investigator, over 1 million diabetes...

From Medical Xpress: A new analysis of the long-term effects of antidepressants found that symptoms of depression were more sharply elevated nine years following treatment...

I have given up on psychiatry as a system capable of “being there” for people who are dealing with life and death issues. Psychiatry as a system of care lacks validity. Every day — unfortunately — we learn of new examples proving this statement. But here's the good news: every day we meet people who show us that the predictions of psychiatry are not true; that there are “cures,” that it is possible to reduce or withdraw psychiatric drugs.

Forest Labs has been hit with a new lawsuit in Massachusetts, over misleading marketing of its antidepressant drugs Celexa and Lexapro to adolescents, even...

The title of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent derives from presidential advisor Walter Lippmann’s phrase “the manufacture of consent”—a necessity for Lippmann, who believed that the general public is incompetent in discerning what’s truly best for them, and so their opinion must be molded by a benevolent elite who do know what’s best for them. Why has the American public not heard psychiatrists in positions of influence on the mass media debunk the chemical imbalance theory? Big Pharma’s corruption of psychiatry is only part of the explanation. Many psychiatrists, acting in the manner of a benevolent elite, did not alert the general public because they believed that the chemical imbalance theory was a useful fiction to get patients to accept their mental illness and take their medication. In other words, the chemical imbalance theory was an excellent way to manufacture consent.

New research demonstrates that children diagnosed with ADHD at younger ages are more likely than those diagnosed later to receive multiple medications within five years of their diagnosis.

After a number of years with a steadily increasing sales curve, the number of children and adolescents in treatment with depression pills decreased by 41% in Denmark. Despite this welcome development, pharmaceutical companies and psychiatry professors continue to deceive the population and deny the facts about these drugs.

In this piece for Psychiatric Services, Dr. Sandra Steingard comments on the implications of a recent meta-analysis demonstrating the positive effects of the therapeutic alliance on pharmacologic...

Important assessment tool found to underestimate the risk for fracture in patients on psychiatric medication.

Canadian researchers, publishing in Neurology, find in a meta-analysis of controlled observational studies comparing SSRI therapy with a control group that SSRI exposure increased...

An important new research paper was published this week on the topic of antidepressant use during pregnancy and preterm birth.  The issue is a crucial one as preterm birth (i.e. birth at less than 37 weeks gestational age) is one of the most challenging problems facing the obstetrical community today.  Rates of preterm birth have been increasing over the past two decades.  Babies born early have increased risks of morbidity and mortality.  At the same time, rates of antidepressant use during pregnancy have increased dramatically.

In this piece for Glamour, Suzannah Weiss tells her story of SSRI withdrawal, which resulted in intense rage attacks for six months after discontinuation and...

An international team of researchers (including Irving Kirsch) found in a review "of 62 pivotal antidepressant trials consisting of data from 13,802 depressed patients"...