Tag: Serotonin

Moncrieff et al. respond to the contradictory and, in some cases, false concerns raised by these critics of their serotonin review.

Despite new claims that their study provides "clear evidence" linking serotonin and depression, their data actually supports the opposite conclusion: serotonin levels did not correlate with depression.

“Psychiatry’s Starter Kit”: Many people start their psychiatric "careers" by consulting their family doctor with some problem many of us have from time to time and leave with a prescription for a depression pill.

Researchers, publishing in Toxicology Research, review the evidence that antidepressant exposure in the womb is linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in humans.

Researchers experimenting on mice found that exposure to fluoxetine (Prozac) in utero resulted in behaviors considered in animal studies to be analogous to autism in humans.

A new study investigated whether participants guessing if they have an antidepressant or placebo affects response rates.

A large and rigorous meta-analysis fails to find support for the gene-environment interaction theory of depression.

A new study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, found no link between genetics and the occurrence of depressive symptoms.

A recent review, published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, challenges the dominant assumptions about the neurochemical and therapeutic effects of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors...

Mourning is the biological process that allows us to relinquish and deactivate the brain mappings that result from trauma. By facing the pain, we can truly put it behind us, where it no longer rules us. In so doing, one writes a new play that is infused with authenticity and love.

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.

Depressed, anxious, and substance-abusing people can beat themselves up for being defective. And psychiatrists and psychologists routinely validate and intensify their sense of defectiveness by telling them that they have, for example, a chemical-imbalance defect, a genetic defect, or a cognitive-behavioral defect. For some of these people, it feels better to believe that they are essentially defective. But the “defect/medical model of mental illness” is counterproductive for many other people—especially those “untalented” in denial and self-deception—for whom there is another model and path that works much better.

There is an enormous irony in a psychiatrist using the epithet "thought police" to express censure, when it is psychiatry itself that routinely incarcerates and forcibly drugs and shocks people on the grounds that their thoughts and speech don't conform to psychiatry's standards of normality.

In the September, 2015 issue of JAMA Psychiatry, a team of Swedish researchers published a study evaluating the serotonin system in persons with social anxiety. the findings here are in direct contradiction to what the pharmaceutical companies would have us believe: that anxiety and depression are caused by deficit levels of serotonin. There was an editorial by the authors in the same issue which attempted to obfuscate the findings by referencing the heterogeneity in persons who exhibit social anxiety. Unfortunately, neither the article or the editorial referenced the work of neuroscientist who for the past 30 years have been investigating what happens in the brains of animals that are subjected to uncontrollable stress.

There is accumulating evidence that taking SSRI antidepressants increases the risk of bleeding and other complications during surgery, according to a review published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

Individuals between the ages of 15 and 24 are more likely to commit a violent crime if they are taking an SSRI antidepressant than if they are not, according to new research out of Sweden. The study published in PLoS Medicine on Tuesday, suggests "warnings about the increased risk of violent behavior among young people taking SSRIs might be needed.”

A recent article on the website i09 titled, ‘The Most popular Antidepressants are Based on an Outdated Theory” has again raised the issue of Chemical Imbalances.  It is interesting that the author of the  i09 piece cites Dr. Peter Kramer and states, “Some psychiatrists vehemently disagree with the way journalists and other psychiatrists have pushed back against the chemical imbalance theory….” In both cases he cited what he considered the best evidence in support of the theory, but he did not discuss the research in any depth. Back in 2008, we took an in-depth look at the evidence that Dr. Kramer used to support the chemical imbalance theory. When one takes a closer look at that research we do not think it supports the theory. For this reason, we are reposting our 2008 essay about this.

The conventional wisdom is that antidepressant medications are effective and safe. However, the scientific literature shows that the conventional wisdom is flawed. While all prescription medications have side effects, antidepressant medications appear to do more harm than good as treatments for depression.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal has an article titled The Medication Generation by Katherine Sharpe which questioned the fact that a large number of teenagers are...

Last night, 60 Minutes presented the work of Irving Kirsch, who has been researching the placebo effect in antidepressants for many years. We discuss.

Did scientists recently discover that the Serotonin Theory of Depression is false? Or has this been known for decades? We investigate.

The psychiatric profession has finally come clean and confessed on a national media outlet that there is no evidence to support the Serotonin Theory...