Reddit reviews The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth
We found 11 Reddit comments about The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
>Obesity is the result of many other factors. When some are stressed they overeat.
Overeating is a personal choice
>People digest food differently as they have different amounts and species of microorganisms in their digestive tracks.
Your microbiome is determined by what you eat and is therefore a reflection of your personal choices when it comes to your diet
>Additionally, the average lower class obese person is preoccupied with long hours working minimum wage and don't have the energy to learn and just want the pleasure from eating after a difficult day.
Again, personal choice. If you have enough time to keep up with the Kardashians and what other bullshit is on TV, you have enough time to sit down for one hour one day and learn the basics of nutrition, the glycemic index, and insulin response
>While there is a simple fix in a vacuum, it is more complex in actual practice.
No, it's not. It's all about making the decision to follow a healthful diet and applying yourself in that effort. More protein, less sugar. Less junk food. It's called junk food for a reason.
>I overate when I suffered from depression unmedicated, my weight stabilized when I got prescribed antidepressants.
Again, personal decision. You chose to eat. You chose drugs over a healthy lifestyle. You chose not to educate yourself. Put down the TV remote and pick up a book.
https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Drugs-Exploding-Antidepressant/dp/0465022006
>If people in similar situations can't afford antidepressants or have the privilege of having a support system in place, it will be harder to stop stress-eating.
Antidepressants are not medication. They do not work. There's something in between a placebo and an actively harmful chemical. The science is settled and anyone who says differently is either a fool or charlatan. Psychiatry is neither medicine nor science. You just have to make a decision. You have to have strength of will and a strong mind. You have to stop choosing to be a victim and stop evading responsibility for your own actions and decisions.
> How have researcher framed performance of a certain drug in research process?
I didn't read about this subject as much as I would like, but there is some evidence that antidepressants don't work, or in other words they aren't more effective than a placebo. And there is some evidence that there were a bunch of flaws in the approval process of them by the FDA. This book talks about this subject:
https://www.amazon.com/America-Fooled-Antidepressants-Antipsychotics-Deceived/dp/0977307506/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509910303&sr=8-1&keywords=america+fooled
And I didn't read this other book, but I think it talks about this same subject:
https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Drugs-Exploding-Antidepressant/dp/0465022006/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509910390&sr=1-1&keywords=emperor%27s+new+drugs
So antidepressants might be the focus of your research.
If you enjoyed that talk, you'd likely enjoy books from Irving Kirsch and Robert Whitaker. If you don't have a dozen or more hours to read both of these books, the NYBOOKS writeup is pretty good (and might convince you to spend the dozen hours, as it did me). Lastly, if your schedule/lifestyle better accommodates listening to an mp3 rather than reading a book, I cannot recommend highly enough a talk from UW School of Public Health senior lecturer Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, "Is America Driving You Crazy?" [10mb mp3 or low quality YouTube video].
For those who are too lazy to click the NYBOOKS writeup above, here's a brief excerpt that gets at some of the good stuff:
>For obvious reasons, drug companies make very sure that their positive studies are published in medical journals and doctors know about them, while the negative ones often languish unseen within the FDA, which regards them as proprietary and therefore confidential. This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.
>Kirsch and his colleagues used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FDA reviews of all placebo-controlled clinical trials, whether positive or negative, submitted for the initial approval of the six most widely used antidepressant drugs approved between 1987 and 1999—Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. This was a better data set than the one used in his previous study, not only because it included negative studies but because the FDA sets uniform quality standards for the trials it reviews and not all of the published research in Kirsch’s earlier study had been submitted to the FDA as part of a drug approval application.
>Altogether, there were forty-two trials of the six drugs. Most of them were negative. Overall, placebos were 82 percent as effective as the drugs, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D), a widely used score of symptoms of depression. The average difference between drug and placebo was only 1.8 points on the HAM-D, a difference that, while statistically significant, was clinically meaningless. The results were much the same for all six drugs: they were all equally unimpressive. Yet because the positive studies were extensively publicized, while the negative ones were hidden, the public and the medical profession came to believe that these drugs were highly effective antidepressants.
>Kirsch was also struck by another unexpected finding. In his earlier study and in work by others, he observed that even treatments that were not considered to be antidepressants—such as synthetic thyroid hormone, opiates, sedatives, stimulants, and some herbal remedies—were as effective as antidepressants in alleviating the symptoms of depression. Kirsch writes, “When administered as antidepressants, drugs that increase, decrease or have no effect on serotonin all relieve depression to about the same degree.” What all these “effective” drugs had in common was that they produced side effects, which participating patients had been told they might experience.
>It is important that clinical trials, particularly those dealing with subjective conditions like depression, remain double-blind, with neither patients nor doctors knowing whether or not they are getting a placebo. That prevents both patients and doctors from imagining improvements that are not there, something that is more likely if they believe the agent being administered is an active drug instead of a placebo. Faced with his findings that nearly any pill with side effects was slightly more effective in treating depression than an inert placebo, Kirsch speculated that the presence of side effects in individuals receiving drugs enabled them to guess correctly that they were getting active treatment—and this was borne out by interviews with patients and doctors—which made them more likely to report improvement. He suggests that the reason antidepressants appear to work better in relieving severe depression than in less severe cases is that patients with severe symptoms are likely to be on higher doses and therefore experience more side effects.
DFW was on old-school tricyclic antidepressants which have a host of horrifying side-effects.
You're dramatically overestimating the usefulness of antidepressants, which is understandable given the insane influence pharmaceutical lobbying has had over doctors and society at large. The Hamilton Depression Rating scale runs from 1 to 59, and antidepressants have an average impact of a boost in 1.8 points according to a study from Harvard doctor Irving Hirsch, compared to say, sleeping well, which tends to boost 6 points. For some people that 1.8 point bump is a difference maker, sure, but reducing his suicide to cessation of medication is wildly reductive at best and totally presumptive, since, you know, you never met the guy.
>Antidepressants allowed him to live a normal life and believe the stuff he was saying. He was wrong, clearly.
The stuff he was saying is basically mindfulness, which is widely accepted as having a positive impact on well-being and used productively by millions. Maybe it wasn't solely responsible for keeping him alive, but discounting it because he wound up dying doesn't make sense.
> Has anyone looked into the antidepressant vs placebo debate ?
I did look into it, but not in as much detail as I would like. I didn't study medicine or psychology, I studied engineering and started studying either books or scientific articles or reading whatever I found on the internet about psychiatry because the treatments I did were pretty crappy.
Of what I read about this specific debate of antidepressant vs placebo, there is the article you mentioned that is on the side that antidepressants work better than placebo. [This blog] (https://fugitivepsychiatrist.com/) by a psychiatrist is of the opinion that they work better than a placebo too, but I don't remember where exactly in the blog he makes his argument. If you search for "placebo" inside it, you find a bunch of his articles, some of them will be the ones that deal with this debate. The author of this blog is one of the moderators of the subreddit /r/PsychMelee/ , he is user u/fugitivepsychiatrist
There is this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0977307506/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=america+fooled&qid=1571429094&sr=8-1 that I read it all, and half of it is about the whole antidepressant VS placebo debate, and how big farma's influence pushed bad science as good science. According to him, antidepressants simply do not work better than a placebo, trials show this, and the trials that supposedly prove that they work better than a placebo are just bad trials with methodological errors. For instance, one error in those trials is that in some of them, the patient taking the antidepressant was also taking another drug to counteract the agitating effect of the antidepressant. If you search for "timothy scott antidepressant" on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=timothy+scott+antidepressant , you will find some videos on which the author talks about his views. There was a site where you could get one of the chapters of his book for free, I remember it being www.americafooled.com or the same site .org, but it's not on those addresses, and can't find it anymore.
There's also this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465022006/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=the+emperor%27s+new+drugs&qid=1571430255&sr=8-1 , which I only read a little of it, it's entirely about this antidepressant vs placebo debate, and the author I think also proposes that antidepressants are no better than a placebo in the book. If you search for the author on youtube, https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=irving+kirsch, you find some videos where he explains his findings.
There is also the psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who is pretty critical of all psychiatric drugs, he was involved as an expert witness in an lawsuit against Ely lilly when they were sued because a patient taking prozac killed a bunch of people with a gun and committed suicide, and he writes about what he found out researching the drug company papers when he was involved in the trial. He writes that the trials the company did to get the approval of the antidepressant had problems (he mentions the same problem I mentioned, that patients given antidepressant were also given another drug), but I don't remember in which of his books he writes about this, it was either one or more than one of these 3 books of his that has this information: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0738210986/ref=sr_1_3?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=peter+breggin&qid=1571430780&sr=8-3 ; https://www.amazon.com/dp/073820451X/ref=sr_1_7?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=peter+breggin&qid=1571430780&sr=8-7 ; https://www.amazon.com/dp/082612934X/ref=sr_1_8?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=peter+breggin&qid=1571430780&sr=8-8 .
I've also come across a page from the FDA on the internet saying that the trials to approve the antidepressants really show that they work better than a placebo, but I don't remember what the link to that page was.
So that is what I came across. But as I didn't read each of the individual trials that supposedly show that antidepressants either work better or don't work better than a placebo, I don't know who is right. I just know what the people who read those trials and/or read studies of people who read those trials has to say. I'm actually curious to study more of this subject to find out who is right in this debate, but I ended up not studying this any further due to a bunch of factors.
> Am I the only Person who takes this and I feel better?
There are probably many who see positive results
It didn't work at all for me
And...serious researchers are questioning whether it works at all
http://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Drugs-Exploding-Antidepressant/dp/0465022006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1416267741&sr=8-1&keywords=emperors+drug
https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Drugs-Exploding-Antidepressant/dp/0465022006
http://i.imgur.com/ieCRehl.gif
I don't really follow what you just said. Blanks that work just as well as bullets say nothing about bullets?
What I would say is the most important part is that it suggests what's in the pill might be irrelevant, and something outside of that is more important. Hope? Which would bring the discussion back to talk therapy and finding that hope again, not chemical solutions.
Also. Pharmaceutical companies cherry pick their data and corrupt science - that's the point to take home. Keep reading if youre not convinced
http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperors-New-Drugs-Antidepressant/dp/0465022006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_an_Epidemic
http://www.metafilter.com/113750/How-Corporations-Corrupt-Science-at-the-Publics-Expense
http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=1FEQ9E7PZVCNEAJT8VYM
That theory is quite new (Thats the first paper, 2004) and needs much more research.
Yeah, there's quite a few thats your classic nocebo response. There's more studies showing positive responses due to ethics. Its all around response expectancies, which pretty much are non volitional self confirming responses.
Open-Hidden (if you tell people the drugs stopped, the effect is much worse) morphine interruption (or really any drug), Benedetti et al. (1997, 2006) expectation-induced hyperalgesia in clinic + Ex setting, Dworkin et al. (1983) verbal suggestion alone changing direction of nitrous oxide action from analgesia to hyperalgesia (havn't read that paper yet, sounds pretty crazy), Response Expectancies are a universal placebo mechanism so they kinda show up everywhere.
The two most interesting papers on RE:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0050045
http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperors-New-Drugs-Antidepressant/dp/0465022006
> What's one thing that SSRI's, marijuana, and sleep deprivation do the same to a patient? Raise serotonin levels in the brain
I am in no way making the claim that neurotransmitter function isn't related to mental illness, that would be a crazy thing to say. I just bristle at "chemical imbalance" because I think it's a vast oversimplification and has been used as a marketing ploy for any number of things which may or may not actually be effective for the conditions they're marketed for, by companies who have largely been able to internally conduct essentially all of the safety and efficiency trials of those products. Reality is a lot more nuanced and complex. Even the statement "SSRIs raise serotonin levels in the brain" is a simplification, IMO -- yes, short term that happens. What happens longer term? Well, downregulation.... http://www.jneurosci.org/content/22/15/6766.short (the tl;dr from that is that to the extent it remains true long term, it has more to do with downregulation than the blockade action cited in various marketing slicks I've seen).
None of this means that these drugs are wholly ineffective, shouldn't be used, etc -- but we need a much higher standard of data, and, I think, much less direct-to-consumer marketing.
I basically like this book and think it's thought provoking; granted the author has a pretty strong anti-industry bias, but, everyone has a bias and that doesn't mean he's completely wrong (anymore than the fact that companies have cherrypicked their drug data in many cases means that the drugs themselves are wholly ineffective): https://www.amazon.com/Emperors-New-Drugs-Exploding-Antidepressant/dp/0465022006
Puh-leez. Wake up / grow up. Read => http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperors-New-Drugs-Antidepressant/dp/0465022006
"All is Mind," they say. Including depression. Including the antidepressant "effect"