What do you want out of life?

[Farm Boy]

Mental illness and depression in particular has been rising steadily in the last half dozen decades or so, right along with the rise in anti-depressant use.

Never underestimate the effects of widespread nicotine addiction, an antidepressant and its retreat in the western world. Never underestimate the retreat of relatively stable social organizations designed around the questions of dealing with converting some of the unavoidable sufferings of being a big meat slug and turning them into purpose. Never underestimate the retreat of socially valuable and necessary work that requires problem solving, physical activity, and quite possibly being active outside. Mix that in with massive dietary changes and you have an awful long list on of things going on at once. Obesity is better than malnutrition, but isolation is not better than community. Yadda yadda, so on and so forth. Good things in play too. Noticing negative impacts not to be confused with pretending positives are not there, further yadda yadda.

 

[Gorbles]

Also there's a very good argument worth exploring of people seeing a rise in diagnosis and acceptance of mental illness and depression, and simply better support for these conditions and recognition within official medical structures. To assume that "it's gone up which means something is wrong with society" is a very shallow take on the subject.

 

[Farm Boy]

Oh, that's possible. But we've tweaked just about every input that we know makes a difference. Assuming that this doesn't have an impact, and that observed rate differences in the wake of the changes is likewise vapid.

 

[Narz]

All I know is I'm hella glad I got my diagnosis and medication level figured out before I got into high school. I doubt I would be where I am today -living independently, good enough social life, well paying job- if it wasn't for my diagnosis and meds. Some people are given medication that doesn't work right, or has bad side effects, but to dismiss the whole thing as some sort of attempt to enforce conformity by an out of touch and vaguely malevolent intelligentsia borders on the offensive.

Reread my posts, I never said meds couldn't work for some people. In fact I explicitly said the opposite.

Not sure where you're getting "vaguely malevolent intelligentsia", sounds funny tho.

It's not that complicated, its mostly about profit like everything else.

Glad you're doing well.

Also there's a very good argument worth exploring of people seeing a rise in diagnosis and acceptance of mental illness and depression, and simply better support for these conditions and recognition within official medical structures. To assume that "it's gone up which means something is wrong with society" is a very shallow take on the subject.

So you don't think there's something wrong w society?

If half the population went on heart attack drugs and heart attacks went up 10fold anyway would you think maybe there is something else going on here?

 

[Narz]

I don't mean to be insensitive, but if those drugs didn't exist we would probably be more pressured to create a society which humans can actually function in. Suppressing the problem makes it a permanent one.

It's possible.

From a societal perspective I am still quite ill because I never got better and got back on the college/career track.

 

[Gorbles]

So you don't think there's something wrong w society?

If half the population went on heart attack drugs and heart attacks went up 10fold anyway would you think maybe there is something else going on here?

Me thinking where there is "something" wrong with "society" is an entirely separate question to questioning your correlation between mental health and a rise in (presumably) reported cases. You're the one making the assumption, I'm calling you out on it. Heart attacks are a completely different thing, with different root causes, and so on. It's a separate set of medical questions, that are handled by professionals who specialise in different fields. You can't just wave your hands and treat them interchangeably.

Well, you can technically I guess, there's nothing literally stopping you, but that doesn't mean you're right to do so.

 

[Narz]

I didnt say psych meds cause depression just that clearly they're not nipping the problem in the bud if it keeps rising despite more and more people choosing to meditate and "encouraging" their kids to medicate (another separate ethical issue, can a kid as young as 6 or 7 year really consent to treatment and understand the risks?)

 

[MaryKB]

Psych meds treat, they don't cure. Wider diagnosis doesn't mean a rise in illnesses, it means a rise in identification of things. Many people need corrective lenses, or take dietary supplements, and that doesn't mean there's a societal problem, right? Like @Gorbles said, heart attacks are completely different.

 

[civvver]

SSRIs have pretty severe side-effects so that's one reason to be against them.

They have much less and milder side effects than maois and other anti depressants, and less drug interactions. They are generally much safer/less severe.

First and foremost my personal experience but generally speaking these drugs have tons of side effects, are difficult to quit & yes they can lead to violence towards oneself & others (a # of school shooters, perhaps even most of them, including Eric Harris of Columbine infamy was on SSRIs). And, while I could never imagine what it must be like to be so far gone as to take such actions, I did feel a degree of coldness/repitilianess I might even say, while on Prozac in particular. Usually in school if kids messed w me I'd ignore it & go about my business. While on Prozac I did not tolerate it and allowed myself to be goaded into a fight that ended up w me ultimately dropping out of school (I was suspended for a fight in which I didn't even throw a punch, leading me to miss a track meet which was pretty much my only pleasure in school at that time & I was so fed up I simply quit school), I had less fear of consequence, I remember riding my bicycle crazy in the streets & then falling, skidding up the whole side of my torso & having an odd lack of concern over it. It's like my natural empathy/sensitivity, which made me susceptible to depression in the first place (along w ritalin from age 7 til 12) got turned down which indeed did "help" me become less depressed but at the price of part of my soul (I'm atheist but not sure how else to phrase it)


It's just a crap-shoot, even today there is very little understanding of how these drugs work & no way to predict how a particular person's brain will react to them. One of my psychiatrists admitted as much. I was put on Effexor as a kid and my blood pressure shot thru the roof & I had severe anxiety, an ex of mine as an adult was on Effexor and it had dramaticly different effects on her (and it was hell for her withdrawing from it even though she was on a very low dose, you can read threads 1000s of posts long about people's experiences withdrawing from this drug, technically an SNRI but with similar problems & side-effects).


For myself, yes. I was failed by it as was my best friend in college who was suffering severe depression & alcohol addiction & was "treated" by his psychiatrist by being doped up on a cocktail of anti-anxiety & anti-psychotic pills (he was not psychotic but prescribing anti-psychotics to manage anxiety & even for sleep is common practice, or at least was in the 90's/early 00's). These drugs didn't help him but did numb him out/sap his energy to the point where he gained about 80lb (alot of weight on a 5'6" frame). He eventually committed suicide (via alcohol poisoning combined w his psych meds), he was only 24 or 25.

I wish I could've been a better friend & of more support to him & for years afterward I'd have dreams he was still alive after all & I had one last chance to reach him.

In general, the psychiatric industry is corrupt, individual doctors may care & do their best to help, but the system they are part of is driven by $ not helping people. Anti-depressants certainly help some people. They didn't help me & it took me over a decade to get off all those drugs completely.

Telling someone they have a "chemical imbalance" and selling them drugs is... well, not science. "Self-medication" is a derogatory expression in psychiatry but I've found it much more helpful than entrusting my precious brain to the pharmaceutical industry who's motivation is profit. I'm not glorifying this, it sucks, having to try to heal myself by trial & error, reading all manner of psychology/self-development books (some great, many garbage) but I don't miss the stress all through childhood of wondering whether what I was feeling was really "my" feelings or some chemical generated anxiety/mania/insomnia/etc (on top of everything else I was going through at that time).

Mental illness and depression in particular has been rising steadily in the last half dozen decades or so, right along with the rise in anti-depressant use. The problem has gotten so severe that the average life-span of a US citizen has actually gone down over the last few years IIRC, and it's not due to lack of enough prescribed pills, quite the opposite.

I'm sorry those things happened to you and your friends but first all of your mentions are young people. There are severe risks that I don't think SSRIs and anti depressants in general are prescribed for teens as much. All of them carry huge warnings for people under 24.

Second all of your info is anecdotal. Although sever cases of trauma, it would be like one person dying from sepsis after an appendectomy and then telling everyone well appendectomy procedures are unsafe. Or like one person having a reaction to a vaccine and declaring vaccines unsafe and not worth the benefits. It ignores all the people who have been helped by these drugs.

Never underestimate the effects of widespread nicotine addiction, an antidepressant and its retreat in the western world. Never underestimate the retreat of relatively stable social organizations designed around the questions of dealing with converting some of the unavoidable sufferings of being a big meat slug and turning them into purpose. Never underestimate the retreat of socially valuable and necessary work that requires problem solving, physical activity, and quite possibly being active outside. Mix that in with massive dietary changes and you have an awful long list on of things going on at once. Obesity is better than malnutrition, but isolation is not better than community. Yadda yadda, so on and so forth. Good things in play too. Noticing negative impacts not to be confused with pretending positives are not there, further yadda yadda.

It used to be shell shocked for vets and just leave em alone. Now it's PTSD and we have treatments. Just one example. There's more emotional awareness now.

Personally I blame a lot of the rise in anxiety and depression lately on social media and constantly being online. Studies show direct proportional increases in anxiety and depression in relation to the amount of time spent on social media.

 

[Narz]

.
I'm sorry those things happened to you and your friends but first all of your mentions are young people. There are severe risks that I don't think SSRIs and anti depressants in general are prescribed for teens as much. All of them carry huge warnings for people under 24.

Maybe today, in the 90s kids were getting put on SSRIs all the time.

Second all of your info is anecdotal. Although sever cases of trauma, it would be like one person dying from sepsis after an appendectomy and then telling everyone well appendectomy procedures are unsafe. Or like one person having a reaction to a vaccine and declaring vaccines unsafe and not worth the benefits. It ignores all the people who have been helped by these drugs.

I'm not ignoring anyone.

Aimee asked me why I'm not a fan of SSRIs and I said I think they're unsafe and they felt unsafe for me

Also bad reactions to such drugs is hardly a statistical anomaly. Again, read about how many of the school shooters were on such drugs.

In the cost benefit analysis IMO those drugs are bad news, again I've said they might work for some (I keep repeating that and people still keep not seeing it...)

Personally I blame a lot of the rise in anxiety and depression lately on social media and constantly being online. Studies show direct proportional increases in anxiety and depression in relation to the amount of time spent on social media.

Its definitely part of the problem but depression rates were blowing up even in the 90s and early 00s before social media

 

[Gorbles]

I didnt say psych meds cause depression just that clearly they're not nipping the problem in the bud if it keeps rising despite more and more people choosing to meditate and "encouraging" their kids to medicate (another separate ethical issue, can a kid as young as 6 or 7 year really consent to treatment and understand the risks?)

All I'm asking is have you considered that the "rise" of depression and the like is because it's more acceptable to talk about it? We don't have to go back more than a century or two to go back to mental asylums. Mental health has never been treated as well as physical health, and this includes in popular culture as well as professionally.

Several hundred years ago we thought the human body was aligned with four humours, an imbalance between which contributed to a great range of emotional issues and actual illnesses. Nobody thinks that way anymore (well, hopefully), but it's also important to realise that this way of thinking was never correct. We didn't change as humans when we disproved this notion, we kept working in the same way the species always has. The same goes for mental health (environmental changes notwithstanding). This isn't to say that people can't do things, or fall prey to habits, that change their mental health for the better, or for the worse. I'm simply asking you to maybe question your assumption that that's the case. It could simply be that people are being more honest about what actually ails them, instead of shutting up and pretending nothing's the matter.

 

[civvver]

Maybe today, in the 90s kids were getting put on SSRIs all the time.


I'm not ignoring anyone.

Aimee asked me why I'm not a fan of SSRIs and I said I think they're unsafe and they felt unsafe for me

Also bad reactions to such drugs is hardly a statistical anomaly. Again, read about how many of the school shooters were on such drugs.

In the cost benefit analysis IMO those drugs are bad news, again I've said they might work for some (I keep repeating that and people still keep not seeing it...)


Its definitely part of the problem but depression rates were blowing up even in the 90s and early 00s before social media

That's not what you said initially thought, you just said SSRIs are unsafe in a giant blanket statement.

Anyway I appreciate your perspective and anyone on any meds should work closely with a dr they trust to figure out the issues and don't stay on something that isn't working. Trust your body.

Personally zoloft took the edge off for me so I wasn't as short tempered and annoyed with my family but it did nothing to fix the underlying issues of communication, boundaries, love and respect. Those things all require way more effort than just taking a pill. They require deep introspection and personal analysis. Change is hard.

 

[Farm Boy]

It used to be shell shocked for vets and just leave em alone. Now it's PTSD and we have treatments. Just one example. There's more emotional awareness now.

Personally I blame a lot of the rise in anxiety and depression lately on social media and constantly being online. Studies show direct proportional increases in anxiety and depression in relation to the amount of time spent on social media.

Exactly? Though "leave 'em alone" is a bit much. Grandpa's brother didn't get "left alone." The medications available have certainly gotten better. Nicotine probably wasn't awful for some of it, but depressants like alcohol and morphine and heroin(...and weed...) are unlikely to be great long term palliatives. At the very least, the can and do cause disorders themselves when used in significant quantity for significant term.

But yah. Study after study. Online socialization with the commensurate reallocation of sociability away from traditional cross-generational webs? Higher rates of disorder among higher users. Highest rates of disorder among the most aggressive users. Doesn't seem particularly new or novel reactions from people being people, but them being put in different conditions. I mean, not to be crude. But we're big mammals. From somebody that grew up helping keep a flock of large mammals, the conditions they're kept in matter. How things smell, how things taste, how things feel, who's around, how much sleep, shape of the rooms in which sleep happens, what type food, what type diseases, presence of fears, presence of lambs, it matters.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'm not where I wanted to be, and the world isn't either. I'm not doing badly, and one of the set-backs is very much not my fault.

My three goals in 21st century life are
1) to do good things, starting with offsetting my own damages
2) to see aging cured within a time-frame that works for me
3) to be able to fund my retirement in perpetuity

(3) is working out okay, but isn't working with (1). I could use your help in creating a more sustainable future. (2) is still a crapshoot, and I'm increasingly depending on exponential returns.

Longterm goal is to colonize my own starsystem.

 

[rah]

Failing at 1.
It too late for me with number 2
3 is accomplished

 

[Narz]

. I'm simply asking you to maybe question your assumption that that's the case.

I'm not assuming that isn't part of it. You are taking a point I didn't discuss at all and are assigning me an opinion on it so you can argue.

It could simply be that people are being more honest about what actually ails them, instead of shutting up and pretending nothing's the matter.

Yeah I agree that's part of it but definitely not all of it.

If that was all of it and people felt safer seeking help and happy w the help they were recieving suicide rates would not be at record levels.

That's not what you said initially thought, you just said SSRIs are unsafe in a giant blanket statement.

I do think they are unsafe.

Alcohol may help people socialize, unwind and meet mates but I would also alcohol consider alcohol unsafe.

Something can be unsafe and still help some people.

Anyway I appreciate your perspective and anyone on any meds should work closely with a dr they trust to figure out the issues and don't stay on something that isn't working. Trust your body.

Sure.

Its pretty hard for kids to do this though. Especially when doctors, schools and parents are all pushing for behavior modification.

The message alot of kids get is "you are disordered" (aka bad), take this drug so you can fundamentally change who you are to be more acceptable.

Hard to resist that sort of pressure especially when you are actually suffering and need relief.

And this isn't only kids. People are desperate not escape their pain not for the pain alone but because pain isolates and no one likes you when you're an Eyore.

Personally zoloft took the edge off for me so I wasn't as short tempered and annoyed with my family

Yeah, wellbutrin made me more calm and generally likable to others but it also gave me crazy insomnia.

Lithium also helped smooth my moods out a little and also slowed my metabolism so I could keep weight on more easily.

But ultimately I decided to discontinue all this stuff come what may.

but it did nothing to fix the underlying issues of communication, boundaries, love and respect. Those things all require way more effort than just taking a pill. They require deep introspection and personal analysis. Change is hard.

Word.

 

[Narz]

But yah. Study after study. Online socialization with the commensurate reallocation of sociability away from traditional cross-generational webs? Higher rates of disorder among higher users. Highest rates of disorder among the most aggressive users.

And yet here we are.

This type of communication is quick and easy.

And the more people who turn to it the less they are out in their communities the easier it becomes to click onto an online community instead of venturing out into our own.

 

[Gorbles]

I'm not assuming that isn't part of it. You are taking a point I didn't discuss at all and are assigning me an opinion on it so you can argue.

----------------

Yeah I agree that's part of it but definitely not all of it.

If that was all of it and people felt safer seeking help and happy w the help they were recieving suicide rates would not be at record levels.

1. I'm not doing it to argue, but it's funny to see you trying to dismiss my points by making a personal attack on my motives. You said mental illness and depression have been rising, and you directly linked this to prescribed medication. You didn't cite any other reasons. You didn't discuss any other reasons. You kept on this angle for multiple posts, and didn't raise any other explanations for a rise in mental illnesses. So, on some level, you must be assuming there aren't any. Otherwise you'd mention them, and / or not blame "psych meds" for not fixing the "issue" (not that medication can or should fix all issues, but it can definitely help. It's a delicate subject, and requires case-by-case evaluations. Not sweeping statements).

2. And now you're saying suicide rates are directly linked! I'm not putting words into your mouth here, this is what you are saying. Me saying "more people feel they can talk about it" is not the same as "more people are getting the treatment and therapy they need". It just means people are more open to talking about it. That's all.

You're lining everything up in a way that fits the conclusions you've already drawn. That's fine, but that's exactly why I'm trying to discuss the assumptions your making.

 

[Narz]

So, on some level, you must be assuming there aren't any.

Strange assumption...

2. And now you're saying suicide rates are directly linked!

Linked to feeling failed by society and the mental health system.

If more people than ever are seeking help AND suicide rates are at record levels you might draw the conclusion that business-as-usual mental/emotional health care is failing.

Not just the take-a-pill and call in 6 weeks style of health care, there are other factors as well and just because I don't discuss them all doesnt mean I don't acknowledge them.

I don't feel you're being honest, you're trying to fight. Its fine, I get bored too.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

They have much less and milder side effects than maois and other anti depressants, and less drug interactions. They are generally much safer/less severe.

Oops, I was thinking of my own experiences on quetiapine/Seroquel, but it's actually an atypical antipsychotic. (And blocks dopamine, so that probably wasn't very helpful.) The side effects were pretty nasty, so the doctor switched me off them pretty quickly.

(That was during my long hiatus from CFC.)