Posted by zeugma on November 26, 2005, at 17:28:53
In reply to Re: Studies on long term use of SSRI's, posted by linkadge on November 26, 2005, at 16:32:16
> I'm not really trying to dismiss people's experiences with meds, but sometimes depression gets better on its own. If somebody is on a medication when they get better then there is a tendancy to want to attribute it to the medication because that gives the patent a sence of controll over their situation, as opposed to thinking that things just got better on their own.>
That is very true. However, the situation also works for the converse: if someone experiences an adverse reaction at some point there is a tendency to blame the drug.
healy claims that TCA's do not cause switches to mania for bipolars, they merely do not prevent them. He says that rates of switching did not change after the introduction of AD's in the 50's, but that since they occurred in patients 'naturally', the drug was blamed. It seems to me that it is just dogma that SSRI's are better AD's for bipolar patients than TCA's.
All we can go on are our own subjective experiences with meds and with depression itself, since we can't get tested with depression as we can for TB. So it makes no sense to say that spontaneously remitting depression is any less depression than depression that improves with an AD, although statistics do seem to point in the direction of severity of depression being correlated with a response to an active drug and a falling off of placebo (and presumably of spontaneous remission).
-z
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> Linakdge
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poster:zeugma
thread:582087
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20051126/msgs/582473.html