Isn't that pretty-much the desired effect on chronically depressed people?
Doctor insisted I take those and they didn't improve mood much. They dulled the lows a bit. I don't have regular "good mood highs" so I wouldn't have noticed if it dulled them.
Seems perfectly in line with the "it made a barely statistically-significant difference over placebo" research results. Positive results are so weak compared to placebo, it's a joke, borderline a scam.
And there are side effects.
Daily exercise was much more effective. I still dislike exercise very much, it still hurts every day, but I do it anyway.
They are desperate for something that doesn't come in a pill. At best it provides a mild sense of emotional containment. I respect that it's only my anecdote, but I quit these meds personally and have talked to many many former users who all regret it and have made sacrifices to ween or cut themselves off. I have also not heard one doctor say anything like "weird, we definitely expected that to work", if you tell your doc these meds have lowered your QoL they won't even blink, it's expected and they have lots of other meds for you to try out in a system of pure ignorant trial and error.
I’m becoming somewhat “nihilistic” in my personal relationships, now. I just… Don’t even care. I try, and if the other person doesn’t want to play their part/isn’t receptive, I just forget about ‘em (or try to)…
It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s the only way I’ve found to deal with being repeatedly fucked over by people, ha…
I won’t blame people, anymore, for their actions, but I also just… Won’t pretend to care, if they clearly don’t, or have decided not to.
I’ve just grown really tired of putting in excess effort into that stuff, for frequently very little, if any, reward…
But of course this goes both ways. Undeniably.
Unfortunately reality is that we seem to be living through a time of unparalleled selfishness, and it’s very rare to be able to “break through that” enough to form a genuine connection with somebody, and to keep that connection “alive” and “healthy”…
Right now, I would rather work on myself, first, before I even try to put any “special effort” on that front. And that goes for a lot of my friendships, too. Not just relationships.
But yeah, all in all, I think you’re right, and I’m yet to find a better way to handle it, and accept it, where possible, than that…
For me, it’s trying to find the “little wins”, and appreciate them. Which sounds like a gambler’s mentality, but I’m just talking basic shit like:
“Ok, today I got this thing done.
I actually left the house.
I actually organized that thing I meant to do.
I actually messaged an old friend.” Or whatever it may be.
This still doesn’t allow me to sleep at night. It still doesn’t make it ok. But it’s very much all I have, and all that is really keeping me going, at the moment…
Exercise is definitely good, but, for me at least, with an illness that gives me terrible fatigue, as well as the mental stuff, unfortunately it doesn’t really seem to help my depression much afterwards…
Man do I feel that exercise struggle. It's just another one of the small difficulties you gotta endure to avoid the big ones. Meanwhile, I've got gym rat friends who say they get a workout high, and I'm half-convinced they're just spiking their water bottles.
Community is the only real answer to depression, both overcoming a chemical imbalance and preventing a relapse. You can be the healthiest motherfucker out there or the fattest weeb, but unless you have a group of people who accept and interact with you on a daily basis, you're fucked.
I think the larger answer is a healthy sense of self, and just being in a healthy environment that can foster better mental/emotional health. A grounded, healthy community can often provide a good portion of that.
With all this being said, there must be some inherent reason why some people are able to cope with stuff better than others…
Like, I’ve tried desperately hard to improve my “coping mechanisms”, over the years, and I think, maybe, I’m very slowly getting better (one step forward, two steps back). But some people will experience much worse things in their life, and they will be able to cope.
People who survive terrible things, like war, natural disasters, extreme poverty, whatever.
Why it is that some (not all) of them could cope, and made it through, and some of us just seemingly cant, I do not know. But it must be something to do with the way our brains are wired…
Regardless, I suppose one thing, for me personally, is that, for the first time in a long time, I no longer blame anyone for what has happened. Not family. Not shitty people within the system (often, educational bureaucrats) who made my life so much harder. Not abusive bosses. Not the people who’ve hurt me, or discarded me, or let me down, along the way. And I try not to blame myself, either.
Things happen. People make mistakes. Life is not easy. Unfortunately sometimes those mistakes can haunt you forever, if you don’t overcome them…
Anyway, I truly hope there’s light at the end of this tunnel, for all of us, but it’s a really hard place to reach, chemicals or no.
As someone who doesn’t have that, and has always really wanted it, yeah, I completely agree…
Also, I think, the need to feel genuinely valued/of value to someone or something…
If you don’t have that, unless you’re a very specific type of person (the kind who can survive as a hermit, for example), then you’re likely to really struggle…
I’ve never had a friend with whom some form of daily/near-daily contact worked out, in the long run…
Ever.
Not to say that it wouldn’t be ideal, or that I’m not appallingly lonely. Just that I’ve never had a friend like that, who would be there through the ups and downs, who wouldn’t judge, and who could bring themselves to put in that effort…
I just can’t imagine what that would be like, honestly.
Only guy I know who takes antidepressants tells me they didn't cure his depression at all but when he stops taking them he feels even worse so he keeps taking them.
Sounds like a total scam to me. It sounds to me like antidepressants just make you become dependent on antidepressants to not feel even worse but do nothing to actually improve thus creating a person who is essentially "coerced" into a lifetime of pills.
If you're reliably feeling 2/10, turning it into a 2.5/10 means you still feel like shite, but technically, it's better on the scale, and you'd notice the difference if it dropped again.
I’m thinking it’s more that the person will experience less “extremes” (as the study attests to)…
So they might average out at a 4, but the SSRIs in theory prevent them from reaching a 1/10…
But they likely also prevent them from ever getting much above a 6 or 7 out of 10.
So the question is, is that worth it? With all the side effects, and all that we know, is it worth “neutering” that..?
And that’s what arguable. I guess it keeps people alive, which in turn gives them the chance to fight for a better life, and to truly… “Get better”. But as to whether it actually “helps” the depression…
I think most would agree that the jury is very much still out on that one…
There's a fairly well documented "SSRI discontinuation syndrome" where people feel physically unwell for weeks after stopping a SSRI cold turkey.
It's more of a constellation of unpleasant physical symptoms rather than true return of the depression though.
It's theorized that it's a result of suddenly decreasing serotonin release after the body has upregulated the number of receptors after a time of plenty.
But realistically, psychiatrists and neuroscientists don't actually know ahit about what SSRIs actually do despite Prozac being on the market since the late 80s.
It's a bit of both. The withdrawal effect from decreasing a dosage, or going off cold turkey, won't "make" depression return necessarily, but it can open up some vulnerability to it due to the somewhat shaky neurochemical state.
Also, there's usually a bit of a blowback effect from decreasing some of the calming effects that were previously present (from the higher serotonin levels), which typically leads to heightened anxiety and agitation. Mostly in the short-term, but it can be tricky to shake off the fearful state even after a person's system starts to rebalance itself.
You're right about one thing though, the exact nature of the "supposed" therapeutic effects from SSRI's are... basically something that can't realistically be quantified or measured. There's some hints at what some of those neurological effects are, but they can't trace it with any kind of precision or accuracy. T
here's not any specific chemicals or by-products they can trace, because it's not specifically the serotonin that's supposedly the therapeutic effect. It's the by-products produced from ramping up that serotonin uptake. And those effects will not really correlate with how much of the active ingredient is measured in the bloodstream.
The serotonin CAN however have a direct therapeutic effect on anxiety related symptoms however. But for the purposes of developing and marketing drugs as antidepessants? The serotonin itself was never intended to be the main fix, though they did end up marketing it that way, likely because it was easier to try and explain in laymen terms.
SSRIs are definitely a big part of why antifa guys can do the kinds of things they do, you have to suppress normal human emotions pretty hard to stomp someone's head on a sidewalk.
That and/or having so much nonsensical rage that it ends up drowning out any capacity for basic human empathy or sound reasoning. And definitely some fucked up hormones, what with all the soy and hormone-fucking medications so many of them seem to take.
The latest work suggests that the drug alone can produce emotional blunting. In the study, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, 66 volunteers were given either the SSRI drug, escitalopram, or a placebo for at least 21 days before doing a set of cognitive tests.
So the study was very tiny (30 subjects in each arm) and too short (21 days).
It's odd that they chose the three week mark to administer the cognitive tests.
It's common practice to wait at least 4 weeks to evaluate the effect of a SSRI for patients with depression clinically unless they are very severe because of the wonky and delayed mechanism of action of the drug which takes at least 7 days to have any effect at all.
I do find it "interesting" (but mostly just unfortunate) that the "chemical imbalance" model alone has been so widely accepted by society, when it comes to depression and anxiety, in recent decades (look up "the grief exception", if you want to see how dubious all of that is)...
Yet we don't apply that same "logic" to personality disorders such as narcissism? We accept that narcissism and other personality disorders (BPD, in particular) have roots, largely, in early childhood experiences, yet we cannot seem to accept, as a society, that maybe that applies to a lot of other "disorders", too...
I know that my brain is fucked. I know that. But I also know that if there had been maybe a bit less trauma, in my life, over time, I could at least have managed it. Without those "traumatic life events", or even with, I dunno, maybe half of the shit that has happened to me, I honestly think I might have been OK...
But unfortunately that isn't how life has worked, at least, for me...
Same goes for pretty much every depressed person I've ever met, in person.
I know there are supposed "exceptions", like celebrities who outwardly appeared to "have it all", and yet couldn't cope anyway. But the fact is, we just don't know. We don't know what people have gone through, and we don't know what trauma, or shitty memories and regrets, that they may have... Succumbed to.
Frankly, I just wish we... Didn't assume that drugs will "fix" people. Because they don't, and they won't. It might "neuter" them, as this study attests to. But it won't "fix" anything. Only a change in life circumstances can do that. Only somehow finding a way to forgive yourself can do that. And even then, it might not be enough. Drugs? As pointed out by others, drugs are more of a "mask" or a "pain block" - they won't take any of that away.
It was always and ever thus.
I'm told "at least we admit mental illnesses are real, nowadays!"
Sure. That's a start. But until we admit that experiencing a lot of bad shit will fuck most people up, and that feeling like shit is a reasonably "expected" response to that bad shit? Well, I guess we're just gonna keep medicating people, and pretend that a neutered, drug-dependent zombie is somehow better than someone who simply cannot cope.
Something else to consider. For all intents and purposes, I don't think I've ever heard pharmaceutical companies or doctors ever posit the question of just what would happen if the production and manufacturing of these kinds of medications were to suddenly cease?
Maybe due to production costs, other economic/logistics problems, or even geopolitical issues. There has, to my knowledge, never been even a hint of a guarantee of any sort, to patients or the general public, that these drugs will always be available. That they have any intention to insure that they'll remain available. Let alone available with any kind of reliable quality assurance. That is a very dangerous and risky potentiality.
Isn't that pretty-much the desired effect on chronically depressed people?
Doctor insisted I take those and they didn't improve mood much. They dulled the lows a bit. I don't have regular "good mood highs" so I wouldn't have noticed if it dulled them.
Seems perfectly in line with the "it made a barely statistically-significant difference over placebo" research results. Positive results are so weak compared to placebo, it's a joke, borderline a scam.
And there are side effects.
Daily exercise was much more effective. I still dislike exercise very much, it still hurts every day, but I do it anyway.
Nothing about the study is in any way surprising. It is what most people already assumed.
For me it was exercise, building things myself and finding religion after being agnostic for most of my life.
I very much doubt that claim
I may be wrong but it was just what I assumed and never heard anyone argue against it.
The amount of people using antidpressants suggests that most people don't assume that they don't help.
You have to consider who you argue these things with. I mean you won't find anyone hyping these things here, for example.
They are desperate for something that doesn't come in a pill. At best it provides a mild sense of emotional containment. I respect that it's only my anecdote, but I quit these meds personally and have talked to many many former users who all regret it and have made sacrifices to ween or cut themselves off. I have also not heard one doctor say anything like "weird, we definitely expected that to work", if you tell your doc these meds have lowered your QoL they won't even blink, it's expected and they have lots of other meds for you to try out in a system of pure ignorant trial and error.
I’m becoming somewhat “nihilistic” in my personal relationships, now. I just… Don’t even care. I try, and if the other person doesn’t want to play their part/isn’t receptive, I just forget about ‘em (or try to)…
It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s the only way I’ve found to deal with being repeatedly fucked over by people, ha…
I think this is the only way to handle it. People are shit, and often not worth it.
Unfortunately, yeah.
I won’t blame people, anymore, for their actions, but I also just… Won’t pretend to care, if they clearly don’t, or have decided not to.
I’ve just grown really tired of putting in excess effort into that stuff, for frequently very little, if any, reward…
But of course this goes both ways. Undeniably.
Unfortunately reality is that we seem to be living through a time of unparalleled selfishness, and it’s very rare to be able to “break through that” enough to form a genuine connection with somebody, and to keep that connection “alive” and “healthy”…
Right now, I would rather work on myself, first, before I even try to put any “special effort” on that front. And that goes for a lot of my friendships, too. Not just relationships.
But yeah, all in all, I think you’re right, and I’m yet to find a better way to handle it, and accept it, where possible, than that…
For me, it’s trying to find the “little wins”, and appreciate them. Which sounds like a gambler’s mentality, but I’m just talking basic shit like:
“Ok, today I got this thing done. I actually left the house. I actually organized that thing I meant to do. I actually messaged an old friend.” Or whatever it may be.
This still doesn’t allow me to sleep at night. It still doesn’t make it ok. But it’s very much all I have, and all that is really keeping me going, at the moment…
Exercise is definitely good, but, for me at least, with an illness that gives me terrible fatigue, as well as the mental stuff, unfortunately it doesn’t really seem to help my depression much afterwards…
But I’m trying.
Man do I feel that exercise struggle. It's just another one of the small difficulties you gotta endure to avoid the big ones. Meanwhile, I've got gym rat friends who say they get a workout high, and I'm half-convinced they're just spiking their water bottles.
I've found lifting heavy to be the exercise that really does it for me in regards to mood.
Community is the only real answer to depression, both overcoming a chemical imbalance and preventing a relapse. You can be the healthiest motherfucker out there or the fattest weeb, but unless you have a group of people who accept and interact with you on a daily basis, you're fucked.
I think the larger answer is a healthy sense of self, and just being in a healthy environment that can foster better mental/emotional health. A grounded, healthy community can often provide a good portion of that.
With all this being said, there must be some inherent reason why some people are able to cope with stuff better than others…
Like, I’ve tried desperately hard to improve my “coping mechanisms”, over the years, and I think, maybe, I’m very slowly getting better (one step forward, two steps back). But some people will experience much worse things in their life, and they will be able to cope.
People who survive terrible things, like war, natural disasters, extreme poverty, whatever.
Why it is that some (not all) of them could cope, and made it through, and some of us just seemingly cant, I do not know. But it must be something to do with the way our brains are wired…
Regardless, I suppose one thing, for me personally, is that, for the first time in a long time, I no longer blame anyone for what has happened. Not family. Not shitty people within the system (often, educational bureaucrats) who made my life so much harder. Not abusive bosses. Not the people who’ve hurt me, or discarded me, or let me down, along the way. And I try not to blame myself, either.
Things happen. People make mistakes. Life is not easy. Unfortunately sometimes those mistakes can haunt you forever, if you don’t overcome them…
Anyway, I truly hope there’s light at the end of this tunnel, for all of us, but it’s a really hard place to reach, chemicals or no.
As someone who doesn’t have that, and has always really wanted it, yeah, I completely agree…
Also, I think, the need to feel genuinely valued/of value to someone or something…
If you don’t have that, unless you’re a very specific type of person (the kind who can survive as a hermit, for example), then you’re likely to really struggle…
At least in my experience, anyway.
Not sure about the daily basis part.
With good friends, it is ideal. Loneliness is devastating.
I agree it's probably ideal for most people.
I’ve never had a friend with whom some form of daily/near-daily contact worked out, in the long run…
Ever.
Not to say that it wouldn’t be ideal, or that I’m not appallingly lonely. Just that I’ve never had a friend like that, who would be there through the ups and downs, who wouldn’t judge, and who could bring themselves to put in that effort…
I just can’t imagine what that would be like, honestly.
Only guy I know who takes antidepressants tells me they didn't cure his depression at all but when he stops taking them he feels even worse so he keeps taking them.
Sounds like a total scam to me. It sounds to me like antidepressants just make you become dependent on antidepressants to not feel even worse but do nothing to actually improve thus creating a person who is essentially "coerced" into a lifetime of pills.
If you're reliably feeling 2/10, turning it into a 2.5/10 means you still feel like shite, but technically, it's better on the scale, and you'd notice the difference if it dropped again.
I’m thinking it’s more that the person will experience less “extremes” (as the study attests to)…
So they might average out at a 4, but the SSRIs in theory prevent them from reaching a 1/10…
But they likely also prevent them from ever getting much above a 6 or 7 out of 10.
So the question is, is that worth it? With all the side effects, and all that we know, is it worth “neutering” that..?
And that’s what arguable. I guess it keeps people alive, which in turn gives them the chance to fight for a better life, and to truly… “Get better”. But as to whether it actually “helps” the depression…
I think most would agree that the jury is very much still out on that one…
Never. But also, someone who got better, is likely not someone who will broadcast it. The people who don't get better tell everyone as a cry for help.
There's a fairly well documented "SSRI discontinuation syndrome" where people feel physically unwell for weeks after stopping a SSRI cold turkey.
It's more of a constellation of unpleasant physical symptoms rather than true return of the depression though.
It's theorized that it's a result of suddenly decreasing serotonin release after the body has upregulated the number of receptors after a time of plenty.
But realistically, psychiatrists and neuroscientists don't actually know ahit about what SSRIs actually do despite Prozac being on the market since the late 80s.
It's a bit of both. The withdrawal effect from decreasing a dosage, or going off cold turkey, won't "make" depression return necessarily, but it can open up some vulnerability to it due to the somewhat shaky neurochemical state.
Also, there's usually a bit of a blowback effect from decreasing some of the calming effects that were previously present (from the higher serotonin levels), which typically leads to heightened anxiety and agitation. Mostly in the short-term, but it can be tricky to shake off the fearful state even after a person's system starts to rebalance itself.
You're right about one thing though, the exact nature of the "supposed" therapeutic effects from SSRI's are... basically something that can't realistically be quantified or measured. There's some hints at what some of those neurological effects are, but they can't trace it with any kind of precision or accuracy. T
here's not any specific chemicals or by-products they can trace, because it's not specifically the serotonin that's supposedly the therapeutic effect. It's the by-products produced from ramping up that serotonin uptake. And those effects will not really correlate with how much of the active ingredient is measured in the bloodstream.
The serotonin CAN however have a direct therapeutic effect on anxiety related symptoms however. But for the purposes of developing and marketing drugs as antidepessants? The serotonin itself was never intended to be the main fix, though they did end up marketing it that way, likely because it was easier to try and explain in laymen terms.
SSRIs are definitely a big part of why antifa guys can do the kinds of things they do, you have to suppress normal human emotions pretty hard to stomp someone's head on a sidewalk.
That and/or having so much nonsensical rage that it ends up drowning out any capacity for basic human empathy or sound reasoning. And definitely some fucked up hormones, what with all the soy and hormone-fucking medications so many of them seem to take.
Or just really despise them for existing. I can understand wanting to curbstomp some soyboy trustfund brat in a black and red outfit.
This is true, but it also underestimates how unfortunately effective dehumanization and tribalism are towards this…
If you see “the enemy” as less than human, you just don’t feel any empathy towards them, and it’s easier to do things like that…
Much like we saw with Covid and “vaccine status”, naturally…
What the fuck? This has been known for 20 fucking years. Why is this coming up now?
So the study was very tiny (30 subjects in each arm) and too short (21 days).
It's odd that they chose the three week mark to administer the cognitive tests.
It's common practice to wait at least 4 weeks to evaluate the effect of a SSRI for patients with depression clinically unless they are very severe because of the wonky and delayed mechanism of action of the drug which takes at least 7 days to have any effect at all.
I do find it "interesting" (but mostly just unfortunate) that the "chemical imbalance" model alone has been so widely accepted by society, when it comes to depression and anxiety, in recent decades (look up "the grief exception", if you want to see how dubious all of that is)...
Yet we don't apply that same "logic" to personality disorders such as narcissism? We accept that narcissism and other personality disorders (BPD, in particular) have roots, largely, in early childhood experiences, yet we cannot seem to accept, as a society, that maybe that applies to a lot of other "disorders", too...
I know that my brain is fucked. I know that. But I also know that if there had been maybe a bit less trauma, in my life, over time, I could at least have managed it. Without those "traumatic life events", or even with, I dunno, maybe half of the shit that has happened to me, I honestly think I might have been OK... But unfortunately that isn't how life has worked, at least, for me...
Same goes for pretty much every depressed person I've ever met, in person.
I know there are supposed "exceptions", like celebrities who outwardly appeared to "have it all", and yet couldn't cope anyway. But the fact is, we just don't know. We don't know what people have gone through, and we don't know what trauma, or shitty memories and regrets, that they may have... Succumbed to.
Frankly, I just wish we... Didn't assume that drugs will "fix" people. Because they don't, and they won't. It might "neuter" them, as this study attests to. But it won't "fix" anything. Only a change in life circumstances can do that. Only somehow finding a way to forgive yourself can do that. And even then, it might not be enough. Drugs? As pointed out by others, drugs are more of a "mask" or a "pain block" - they won't take any of that away.
It was always and ever thus.
I'm told "at least we admit mental illnesses are real, nowadays!"
Sure. That's a start. But until we admit that experiencing a lot of bad shit will fuck most people up, and that feeling like shit is a reasonably "expected" response to that bad shit? Well, I guess we're just gonna keep medicating people, and pretend that a neutered, drug-dependent zombie is somehow better than someone who simply cannot cope.
Rant out.
Something else to consider. For all intents and purposes, I don't think I've ever heard pharmaceutical companies or doctors ever posit the question of just what would happen if the production and manufacturing of these kinds of medications were to suddenly cease?
Maybe due to production costs, other economic/logistics problems, or even geopolitical issues. There has, to my knowledge, never been even a hint of a guarantee of any sort, to patients or the general public, that these drugs will always be available. That they have any intention to insure that they'll remain available. Let alone available with any kind of reliable quality assurance. That is a very dangerous and risky potentiality.