Posted by zeugma on May 2, 2006, at 5:42:14
In reply to Re: Animal models of psychiatric illness, posted by linkadge on May 1, 2006, at 19:33:37
I don't know. I personally think that SSRI's are so widespread and commonplace simply due to the fact that they're basically serentics. Nobody is going to object to a class of drugs that shuts people up. Its basically "SOMA" or whatever from Brave New World.
A lot of depressed people respond quickly to things like stimulants. Granted the effect is short lived. I don't know, SSRI's never really gave me much of a desire to live.
I think we need to do more to get people "actually feeling better", be more agressive. >>
I would not draw the conclusion, from the serenic effect of SSRI's, that SSRI's are not effective antidepressants.
The problem I think is that AD's have differential effectiveness (ie what works for one won't work for another) but that trials of patented drugs (which are the majority) obscure this due to industry sponsorship, not necessarily malign but it introduces subtle biases into studies that make it seem that AD response is random because all AD's are the same.
If you look at diligent investigators, using OFF-PATENT drugs, a different pattern emerges:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed
One has to persevere through blind alleys to find patterns, eg:
These authors impress me tremendously because they actually admit to study failures:
Being able to be wrong is the cardinal feature of scientific endeavor. Rats don't give a rat's a** about the investigator's biases, which is why animal studies are helpful, and also since the patterns are difficult to detect (how many times have I read that AD selection is a random process because they all have 'equal efficacy') one can see patterns more clearly in another species than we can in ourselves oftentimes.
-z
poster:zeugma
thread:638491
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060429/msgs/639128.html