Posted by Thomas Schlaeger on May 26, 2001, at 10:44:31
It has been a while someone has submitted to the thread, I however hope that it is read and would be happy about any e-mail reply.
The "controversial" subject is to use codeine in depression treatment. This is "controversial" because the majority of doctors appear to have a different oppinion than their depressive patients.
Basically I have ro confirm what others have said before. The immediate anti-depressive effect of codeine is almost unbelieveable and hence relieves the suffering patient of most of her/his depression symptoms.Every badly depressive person knows the terrible state where one just wants to stay in bed and one is almost unable to wash her/himself and so on. These and other depression symptoms are almost "switched off" by taking codeine.
One of the downsides is that a rather large dosis is required to obtain the desired effect. In my case this is 250-400 mg which lasts for 6-8 hours. There is absolutely no "high" effect, just total normalization allowing me to do all the things which otherwise would be impossible through the depression. Working, shopping, looking after myself, my pet etc.
Whilst medication like codeine against depression was known until the mid.50s, regretfully nowadays it seems completely forgotten. The most important thing for every doctor should be hers/his patient's well being and yet many doctors refuse to prescribe codeine as an intermediate solution. Sad cases are known where depressive patients trick their doctors in prescribing codeine containing cough syrup. This should not be like that, I would wish that the highly anti-depressive component of codeine gets widely known in the medical field again and is prescibed to give relief to depressive patients. I am myself very lucky to have an understanding good doctor, so I don't have to suffer to badly under my depression.
There are some important things to note however. Codeine provides almost instant relief of depression symptoms but this is only a sort of "cover up". Nothing is done with regard to the actual cause of the illness and hence it is very important that standard anti-depressive medicine is taken in addition. In some cases psycho-therapeutic treatment may be necessary as well. Codeine is great in "surviving" your depressive days but it does nothing towards the actual cause.
as I said in the beginning I would be happy to receive comments by anyone concerned.
Thomas, Hamburg, Germany
poster:Thomas Schlaeger
thread:64320
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20010522/msgs/64320.html