Posted by JahL on March 9, 2001, at 16:56:55
In reply to Re: treatment resistant (or caused) depression » JahL, posted by steve on March 9, 2001, at 15:33:03
> > Are you a melancholic depressive (ie no appetite, no sleep and agitation) or an atypical one (ie sleeping all the time, overeating and feeling just tired.)
> > If you are the former, meds like nardil etc could very well be making things worse and not better.
> > The two different forms of depression have opposite symptoms and functional imaging studies have shown that in one form of depression some areas are underactivated and in the other one the same areas are overactivated.
> > This begs the question how the same medicine is good for both manifestations. The answer is that meds seem to cause structural changes to the brain that usually allow melancholics to lead a normal life, and at the same time cause other changes which give atypicals their oomph.
> > However, and I think this a terrible blot on psychiatry, which I consider the most corrupted part of medicine, some can't handle the energizing properties of the SSRIs, and actually do worse on them, as my Yale educated doctor told me. Dr. Cole at Harvard estimates that roughly one out of every two hundred depressives becomes severely agitated on the SSRIs, and I would wager that there are even more people who don't go nuts, but become more depressed on them. And of course most idiot shrinks, going purely by what they learn at the symposia sponsored by pharma companies, conclude that their patients are doing worse despite, and not because of, their medicines. This in turn leads them to add more medicines, making the sitation even worse. According to my doc, the best one can do for melancholics who worsen on ssris is to take them off SSRIs and go with lamotrigine monotherapy.Steve. On this one I am COMPLETELY in agreement with you (makes a change, huh?). I fit yr description of 'melancholic depressive' and found that the SSRIs, Nardil etc did indeed worsen my depression (pdocs insisted that ADs *couldn't* exacerbate depression-how ignorant can you get? Can you see why I've practically given up on them?), specifically by making me more agitated.
As your pdoc predicts, Lamotrigine has been by far the best drug so far & it's still early days.
Jah.
> >Since I've just once again harped on how corrupted psychiatry has become, maybe I should give an example. When their were concerns that Prozac, which is known for giving tired depressives a "boost" might be making agitateted depressives even more anxious, perhaps to the point of becoming psychotic, Eli Lilly hired Dr. Martin Keller to 'study' the matter. Later on it emerged that Lilly and others had paid Keller $500,000 without it being reported. I think justice would have required that he be stripped of his professorship at the very least, and his medical license probably as well. Instead the only repercussion of his blatantly unethical conduct was that he was barred from giving presentations at the APA. Another barely known factoid is that the FDA seriously considered making Lilly include a warning in its Prozac information leaflet saying that Prozac had been found to worsen many forms of depression. For reasons that are somewhat opaque to me, they decided that such a warning would be too 'complicated.' Face it sports fans, the only focus of the industry is to sell their product. If it gets you well that's good, if not, or it worsens your condition, that's your problem.
>
poster:JahL
thread:55847
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20010302/msgs/56044.html