“If you watch a child playing outside they’re just doing so many physical tasks – they run for hours, dig, climb. If you told them to do it they wouldn’t, but they want to because they’re playing. You won’t get that level of physical activity with anything else. As far as their mental health goes, a child that doesn’t play is a frustrated, unhappy and unbalanced child.”
Here’s some depressing recent medical news: Antidepressants don’t work. What’s even more depressing is that the pharmaceutical industry and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have deliberately deceived us into believing that they DO work. As a physician, this is frightening to me.
Here’s some depressing recent medical news: Antidepressants don’t work. What’s even more depressing is that the pharmaceutical industry and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have deliberately deceived us into believing that they DO work. As a physician, this is frightening to me.
The glowing review of Judith Warner’s new book, We’ve Got Issues, in The New York Times this week didn’t exactly catch me by surprise — anyone who has read Warner’s guest columns in recent years knows her take on psychiatric drugs — but it did bewilder me.
“Our data should give some pause” to doctors and patients weighing antidepressants, Robert DeRubeis, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, said in a telephone interview. “They should give some consideration to other alternatives.” Exercise has been shown to be helpful to stem depression, as does psychotherapy, and even “self-treatment” with the aid of the plethora of self-help literature, he said.