Posted by Racer on July 27, 2004, at 22:27:10
In reply to Re: Hallucinations on zolpidem, zopiclone.. don, posted by jlbl2l on July 26, 2004, at 10:50:03
I don't think you can say it's a case of "only one person being right", if I understand your meaning correctly as being that you're not being allowed to make your case because someone (I guess Dr Bob) disagrees with you.
One of the problems with a board such as this is that there are no real bona fides available. I can tell you that I'm currently unemployed due to a continuing Major Depressive Episode -- which is the truth -- but I can equally well tell you that I'm a research biochemist at the NIMH. While I'm sure I couldn't sustain the imposture for very long, nor under any real scrutiny, there are a lot of people in this world who might believe me for a time and be swayed by what I wrote. I think that chemist's first post was an attempt to present a balanced picture of the drugs involved, in order to prevent "passersby" from discarding a medication that may be working quite well for them.
For a time, I attended a peer run support group that disallowed any opinions being offered about any medications. The rationale behind this policy was pretty simple: most of the psychotropic drugs out there can have very different effects for different people. For me, for example, Remeron was a total nightmare -- but there are people who have had very good results from it. Ditto Lexapro and Serzone for me, and I'm sure most people on this board could name a drug they think designed and marketed by the devil himself. And for each one of us who has a nightmare horror story about a drug, there's probably someone else here who considers it a life saver.
And it's not just chemist, by the way. I was very concerned when reading your posts in this thread, because I do think that there is a strong possiblity that someone reading them might be frightened off from a drug that might help them a great deal -- a drug that might never cause them any of the adverse effects that you call so common.
I think a lot of us here who have had a bad experience with a specific medication have been guilty at one time or another of posting alarmist comments about that drug. I know that I wrote some pretty heated denunciations of Serzone way back when -- but I also know that my experience will be different from yours, or chemist's, or Sad Panda's, or anyone else's. It's not that I object, per se, to your report of these side effects. I do object, though, to any sweeping claim of commonly occurring adverse effects -- especially when they refer to deliberate misuse of a drug in order to produce that very effect. Any time I read something about a med that sounds too broad, it triggers my bull$%%% detector, and I consider carefully how credible the claim sounds to me, how well it fits with my experience of the world, and whether I can verify any of the elements of the claim in question. There are a lot of people, though, who may not have the skills to do that, or who may simply be so depressed that they lack the clarity do so at that moment. It strikes me a dangerous to ignore the possiblity that those people may be gravely harmed by reading a statement which, while possibly true in some instances, or even common under extraordinary circumstances, is relatively unlikely overall.
I very much doubt that chemist was making a personal attack on you, Jason. I think he was acting out of a concern similar to mine. And I don't think he was attacking you in his post -- I think he was contradicting the information you presented, and he did it with citations to back him up. There really is a difference between the two, you know.
poster:Racer
thread:370403
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040724/msgs/371440.html