Posted by JohnL on June 10, 2000, at 5:40:44
Just thought I would share some information from my pdoc meeting a couple days ago.
My pdoc is head of psychiatry at two different institutions. And he has pretty much phased out private practice. As a result he spends most of his time in conferences, meetings, consultations, research, and stuff like that.
He acknowledged that antidepressants are indeed wonder meds. He says 80% of patients who try 2 different antidepressants will improve. But he says recent focus has been on the recognition that of those 80% who improve, a substantial proportion of them do not indeed recover to complete normalcy. Or normal baseline as he called it.
But of course, scientific controlled studies have proven that for a long time. That's because success in controlled studies is usually based on a 50% improvement of symptoms. Fine, but what about the other 50%? Yikes. I like the scientific studies that use stricter criteria. But even with those, success is dependent on each person's unique chemistry.
This is why I believe that there are multiple chemical imbalances that can cause depression, and that low serotonin is just one of them. Obviously if doctors focus on serotonin meds--as evidenced by the universal popularity of SSRIs--then a whole lot of other guilty chemistries are being ignored. And thus considerable--yet incomplete--recovery. Antidepressants as a class only address three of ten possible causes.
In my case for example I experienced substantial improvement on any serotonin antidepressant. Yet I was still left with this crippling anhedonia thing. I never recovered to baseline. As it turns out, the chemistry guilty with me was not low serotonin, NE, or dopamine, but rather malfunction of something in the NE/dopamine relationship. My robust response to Ritalin was the tip-off, as my pdoc phrased it. Or, as I call it, an important clue. All along antidepressants were merely masking the symptoms of depression, but not fixing the cause. Adrafinil ended up being the molecule that hit a bullseye and fixed the problem right at the heart of the source.
Anyway, no real point here. Just wanted to share what we talked about in case anyone's interested.
JohnL
poster:JohnL
thread:36813
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000610/msgs/36813.html