Antidepressant drugs help few people

[roster]

But doctors prescribe them very often.

Study finds medication of little help to patients with mild, moderate depression
Only people with severe depression benefit from antidepressants, says research published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Others do better with nonmedical approaches.
LA Times report: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 5963.story

[secret agent girl]

.

[Autopapdude]

Agree completely with the article. My son is Bipolar II, and conventional antidepressants can cause severe mania in folks who are bipolar, yet doctors prescribe them. Amazing!

[roster]

....
(Disclaimer: I am not saying meds don't sometimes work for some people. I am not saying meds haven't saved lives. I am not criticizing anyone's choice to use meds. I am not saying any of the above applies to anyone in particular. YMMV)

Trying to head off attacks.

[Mary Z]

I'm one of those bipolar people and I attribute my life to a very good psychiatrist who prescribes meds, and a therapist. I also have neurological issues beyond bipolar,e.g. forgetfullness, poor cognition, getting lost while driving somewhere, or forgetting where I was going. I take Aricept for that - incipient dementia at 58 is scary. The meds work for me.
I work hard on my issues outside of therapy such as an online course on CBT. I'm 100% compliant with my cpcp and my meds.
I don't like depending on meds or cpap, but I feel like it's my life and I might as well live it out and hope for better if there is another after this one.
Mary Z.

[BlackSpinner]

Agree completely with the article. My son is Bipolar II, and conventional antidepressants can cause severe mania in folks who are bipolar, yet doctors prescribe them. Amazing!

But you are not supposed to take antidepressants for bipolar!

My daughter is on antidepressants, talk therapy alone wouldn't have kept her alive and going to school.
Her best friend was also on them and they didn't help because she was bi polar, a regular GP prescribing this stuff often can't tell the difference. She is now on other meds and back at school too.

[pmcall57]

Before I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, I had a couple of docs offer antidepressants for my mild-moderate "depression," which had been going on for many years. I declined, for various reasons.

After two months with my APAP, it's clear to me that the "depression" was in fact caused by my sleep problems.

I'm starting to think sleep apnea is hugely under-diagnosed and depression (and certain other conditions) over-diagnosed. Now I see that my routine physicals over the years have always included screening questions for depression, but never for sleep issues. I hope that will start to change with more awareness.

[Rustyolddude]

I believe this to be true for many medications, more so since drug companies advertise on TV. In particular the sleep aides. There are folks who simply want the meds because they see them advertised and there are folks that truly benefit from them due to an underlying cause. I believe the same is true for antidepressants, some folks suffer from brain chemical imbalances while others are just unhappy with their life situation or environment but can't make a change due to financial or other obligations. Responsibility falls on both the patient & doctor, support websites like WebMD with indepth symptom checkers and patient material goes a long way to assist doctors in diagnosis, especially so when today's docs are under pressure to produce and seem to have a grand total of 5 minutes to spend with a patient.

[Mary Z]

BlackSpinner, if you're not an accredited Psychiatrist I suggest you not give psychiatic med advice to people whose lives depend on it. My meds are mainly mood stabilizers and maybe I should have said that, but for someone with life long depression and diagnosed bopolar in 2005 I have gone through a lot of med changes and combinations. With a good Dr. I have finally found a combination of mood stabilizers and an antidepressant that works for me. These meds have literally changed my life and the combination was started when I was in the psych hospital because I was about to commit suicide and didn't want to do that. I don't believe in suicide. I also begged for ECT when in a place whre if something didn't change in my brain I don't know what would have happened. Bipolar is difficult to treat- my brother died from it- he commited suicide. I think with the right Dr. and the right meds he could have been helped.
Mary Z.

[scrapper]

Autopapdude wrote:
Agree completely with the article. My son is Bipolar II, and conventional antidepressants can cause severe mania in folks who are bipolar, yet doctors prescribe them. Amazing!

But you are not supposed to take antidepressants for bipolar!

My daughter is on antidepressants, talk therapy alone wouldn't have kept her alive and going to school.

Mary Z....
I'm not sure why you just slashed at BlackSpinner........what's really going on here? Is there some way that the board can help with whatever precipitated this?

[Mary Z]

I was angry because I think it's far too dangerous for a layperson who hasn't walked in my shoes to tell me how to do my therapy, or that I'm not supposed to take certain meds. Maybe if BlackSpinner had expressed her views in a different way, such as "maybe you ought to talk to your doctor about taking an antidepressent, it may precipitate mania" I would not have reacted so strongly. Bipolar is a cyclic disease and all I can do is try to stay on top of things, that doesn't mean I'm not going to have manic and depressive symptoms at times. There is no "cure".
Being bipolar and having struggled for years for the right doctor, therapist, med combination and having lost my brother to bipolar obviously I am sensitive on the subject.
Sorry, sincerely sorry ,for lashing out, but it's a devastating disease.
I realize this is a forum for CPAP users and that all advice doesn't fit , but I know it's well meant. Maybe I should have had the same attitude about my mental health.
Again, didn't mean to lash out.
Mary Z

[Judy R]

I'm not bi polar, but I am on a anti depressant. Depression does and can run in families, I sometimes think Dr.'s don't take a closer look at a patients family history. I have several people in my family who deal with depression, some never took drugs and did the talk therapy, some did both, for me personally I tried talking to a therapist and a physc. but neither seemed to be of any help. Maybe they weren't the right match for me, I don't know. I just know in my particular case, using Cymbalta and writing in a journal has done wonders for me. Everyone is different and has to do what's right for them.

[BrownEyes]

i am on 2 Anti-Depressants.

they, along with counseling and therapy hels alot.

[secret agent girl]

.

[roster]

.... e.g. forgetfullness, poor cognition, getting lost while driving somewhere, or forgetting where I was going. ....

That was happening to me and I am convinced it was caused exclusively by untreated sleep apnea. Things are slowly getting much better since getting a good CPAP therapy going. However, I am sure there is some permanent damage that will never be totally overcome.

See also:

UCLA researchers have discovered that people with sleep apnea show tissue loss in brain regions that help store memory.

.... the scientists discovered that the sleep apnea patients' mammillary bodies were nearly 20 percent smaller, particularly on the left side.

.... During an apnea episode, the brain's blood vessels constrict, starving its tissue of oxygen and causing cellular death. The process also incites inflammation, which further damages the tissue.

....

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/uc ... 51534.aspx

This new imaging technique reveals multiple areas of brain damage in OSA patients not known to exist until now. DTI revealed various sized color-coded yellow-orange patches of brain damage scattered throughout the brains of a group of forty-one men and women subjects with OSA. Their ages ranged from thirty-eight to fifty two years old and they had not yet been treated. The areas of nerve fiber injury were wide-spread, located in critical regions of brain including prefrontal, temporal and parietal lobes. The cerebellum and brainstem were equally involved.

http://doctorstevenpark.com/sleep-apnea ... rs-disease