Re: Pills Dont Work What You Think + Feel Does

When I read the experiences of those who were doing well on Nardil until the medication's formulation was changed in 2003, I reached a much different conclusion than you did regarding the long-term effects of medications. Prior to the Nardil formulation change, the individuals who were responding to the medication weren't spending much time on Internet forums talking about how good their response to the medication was. But as I learned from reading the stories of those who suffered after Nardil's formulation was changed, the individuals in question *were* doing well on the medication and going about their daily lives up until the fall of 2003. It wasn't until Nardil's formulation was changed that those who had been responding to the medication took to the Internet to say that Nardil wasn't working as well as it had previously and noticed that they weren't the only ones for whom the medication had become less effective and less tolerable after the appearance (and inactive ingredients) of the medication had changed.

My point in bringing this up is that a lot of those who respond well to medications in the long term aren't posting messages on the Internet about how well they're doing. Those who post are usually struggling and looking for solutions to their symptoms, whether those solutions are pharmacological, psychological, or something else. That's what happened when Nardil's formulation was changed. There were individuals who had been doing well on Nardil for years or even decades, but when did they go online to tell their stories? Only after their medication had stopped working, which was presumably a result of the fact that the medication's formulation had changed. My guess would be that if a lot of the antidepressants and other psychiatric medications that are on the market were rendered less effective that we would start hearing about those who were responding well to the medications for so long just as we did when Nardil's formulation was changed in 2003. Maybe some of the medications that are on the market don't work as well in the long term as Nardil seemed to work for some individuals, but it wouldn't surprise me if altering the effectiveness of one of the SSRIs would bring forth droves of people saying that they were doing well on their medication for a long time until its effectiveness was compromised.

So, basically, after having read the stories of those who were doing well on Nardil until the formulation was changed, I'm not convinced that you're right in saying that medications never work in the long run. It does seem that a lot on this board, myself included, don't respond well to medications in the long run, and I can see how reading messages on this board could lead you to conclude that medications never work in the long term, but I don't think that those who post here are representative of the general population of psychiatric patients. Medications obviously work in the long run for some individuals, or the stories from individuals who were responding to Nardil for decades before the formulation was changed never would have been written.

As far as changing one's thinking patterns is concerned, I do think that there's evidence that doing what you've said can be helpful for people with depressive disorders and other mental illnesses, but I think that psychotherapy is like medications in some ways in that it works really well for some individuals, it's somewhat helpful for others, and it does very little to nothing for others. I'm currently in counseling and have received other forms of therapy, and I can't say that it's helped to reduce the severity of any of my symptoms. It would be nice if talking to someone and changing my thinking patterns (which are pretty much nonexistent when my vegetative depression is at its worst) could give me the energy that I used to have before the onset of my illness or restore my cognition to what it used to be before I took aminoguanidine, but the reality for me is that psychological interventions have been ineffective in doing those things, at least so far. I'm not saying that changing one's thinking patterns can never be beneficial, but I do think that for someone like me, whose depression is vegetative in nature and has a lot of trouble thinking at all when really symptomatic, that changing thinking patterns isn't going to do much about the bigger problem of having one's energy level depleted.

Maybe if I and some of the others here were to write post after post about we haven't found psychological interventions to be effective, you wouldn't have reached the conclusions that you reached in your post. But after all, this is the medication board, and so people tend to discuss medication issues here, and that includes the problems that we have with medications. I personally tend to write the most about the treatment interventions that have made some impact on my symptoms, which in my case are medications and supplements. Have I had good long-term success with the medications and supplements that I've tried? Generally, no, although Abilify does tend to keep my positive psychotic symptoms mostly at bay. And I don't know if I ever will respond well to a medication in the long run. But if defeating my vegetative depression were as simple as changing my life circumstances and/or my thinking patterns, then I would have discovered that a long time ago -- long before I started taking medications. I don't know the extent to which others on this board have tried psychological interventions for their illnesses, but I would imagine that the results of such interventions are probably mixed, as they are with medications.

Dx: schizoaffective disorder

Taking Abilify and 5 supplements

tomatheus.blogspot.com

Re: Pills Dont Work What You Think + Feel Does

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