Posted by SLS on June 30, 2013, at 2:06:16
In reply to Re: 14yo daughter - bi-polar, not MDD - new info HELP, posted by poser938 on June 29, 2013, at 20:38:44
> Laura, based on my experience, a psychiatrists information on all possible negative effects of medication will be far from complete.
A good psychiatrist will know and understand far more about the effects of a medication than they could possibly impart to a patient during patient visits. Nor would they want to. A good psychiatrist is also limited in his own knowledge due to the limitations of man's knowledge in general.
> I have experienced some brain disabling effects from psychiatric meds myself.
What are these effects?
> I went into the mental health system for mild to moderate depression in 2005. And now, what I have, I don't like to call it severe depression, but that's what it would appear as.
The appearance of a deterioration in one's state of depression over time is often representative of the natural course of the illness rather than exposure to medication. This is seen even in the absence of medication.
> What I have is a bona fire brain dysfunction caused by chemicals (medicine) that I willingly swallowed.
How do you know this given the passage of 8 years?
> My whole brain, emotion sensory system is messed up,
That's what a brain disorder like MDD and BD does to people. You don't need chemicals for that.
Personally, I do believe that many of the potent psychiatric drugs we expose ourselves to produce long-lasting effects. Some of these effects are beneficial. Some are tragic and disabling. All are far from well understood by science. This is why all of the adverse events seen during the clinical trials of a drug must be reported. They are not necessarily caused by the drug being studied, but will be listed on the package labeling for the product if it reaches market.
> I just want everyone to have fully informed consent.
Is yours yet fully-informed? Mine isn't.
> And I believe if one were to mainly make their decision to take these made based on the information their psychiatrist provides, and what is written in the patient information sheet, then they'd be making a decision based on incomplete information.
Yup.
> Just be careful. Use logic, reason. And yes, research. The best we know about these meds is that they tell the brain to function in an unnatural way.
Actually, the disease itself causes the brain to act in an unnatural way as can be seen by psychometric, metabolic, and imaging testing. Most of medicine involves using drugs that alter the course of physiology in ways that do not occur naturally. Until more is understood, I don't think we will have well-targeted treatments that eliminate undesirable side effects. Besides, each person's biology is unique and might require a customization of interventions.
One example of a long-term - perhaps irreversible - unwanted effect of antidepressants is "poop-out" and the subsequent loss of therapeutic responsivity to a particular drug after repeated exposures. For example, it is not unusual for someone to respond well to paroxetine de novo, then discontinue treatment upon remission, and thereafter remain unresponsive to its reintroduction following a rapid relapse. In other words, it appears that exposure to paroxetine has caused changes to one's biology that make them less responsive to subsequent exposures to paroxetine. It is not unreasonable to assume that there are quite a few other persistent changes that antidepressant drugs can produce.
To treat or not to treat?
One question to be asked might be whether or not it makes sense to wait another 50 years before accepting treatment so that man can more fully understand the illness being studied. That's a personal decision. For me, I felt that I had no better choice than to gamble with today's treatments and tomorrow's side effects.
I, too, have reason to believe that the misapplication of medications in a therapeutic milieu caused me to become treatment-refractory (much more so than previously). The story is a bit complicated, but still involves the making of personal observations and deductions that are really little more than temporal associations.
If left untreated, time marches forward as the disease process continues unabated. Apparently, these diseases are more degenerative than were first thought. They might even lead to the early emergence of Alzheimers Dementia. That's pretty scary stuff.
- Scott
Some see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1045977
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20130617/msgs/1046091.html