A major debate is unfolding over the use of forced ECTon psychiatric patients. Should a mentally ill patient in distress be forced to undergo electric shock treatment against his or her will? It’s a question which goes to the heart of a growing debate over one of the most controversial and invasive procedures used in psychiatric care.
Antidepressants are supposed to be the magic bullet for curing depression. But are they? I used to think so. As a clinical psychologist, I used to refer depressed clients to psychiatric colleagues to have them prescribed. But over the past decade, researchers have uncovered mounting evidence that they are not. It seems that we have been misled. Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don’t cure it.
Taking Prozac, Paxil, or other antidepressants from the class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can cause delays in lactation in new mothers and difficulty in breast-feeding newborns, a new study says. Researchers from the University of Cincinnati found SSRIs can result in delayed secretory activation after giving birth. SSRIs regulate the hormone serotonin in the body to stave off depression, but the hormone also is crucial to the breasts’ ability to deliver milk when it is needed, the study’s authors said.
Clearly the drug industry needs New Year’s Resolutions–and to honor them better than the Corporate Integrity Agreements with the government it keeps breaking. How about: “We will stop upgrading anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder and bipolar disorder to ‘treatment resistant depression’ to sell drugs. We will admit that studies are beginning to show that the reason depression is sometimes treatment resistant is because it wasn’t depression to begin with but consumer advertising.”
Writing in the Guardian, Ed Halliwell examines the reason for this trend, noting that antidepressant prescriptions have increased more than threefold since the beginning of the 1990s, far outstripping the increase in the percentage of the population classified with a “common mental disorder.”