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Maven said:
I'm just saying, they don't know what effect these drugs will have on us as we get much older. The drugs have been around for a while now, so they might have more info, but they still don't know how 40 or 50 years of taking them will affect a person.

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That is indeed true. But, prior to the introduction of antidepressants, morbidity was at least 15% for depression. That's the life-time risk of death directly attributed to depression. Moreover, that completely fails to account for other known health effects of depression, which include higher rates of heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

The unfortunate truth is that there is no "untreated" control version of ourselves, experiencing life alongside the "treated" version, for easy comparisons. A living version of ourselves, aging alongside of us. Depression is a serious illness, in its own right, and it does have clearly measurable progressions.

There was a study of brain function that showed that a subject in remission, but using antidepressants, had normalized some areas of brain function (compared to what they believe healthy normal brain function is), but that other areas of brain function still looked "depressed". In other words, even when a person is in remission while on an antidepressant, the disease we call depression is still active. Antidepressants are an incomplete treatment.

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Maven said:
I had what I term "breakdowns" on an almost monthly basis for years. I never attributed them to the psych meds I was on. But I haven't had a breakdown in several months, since reducing my meds significantly over those months. I have much less depression. Those breakdowns made me feel hopeless and I'd wail--not just cry, WAIL. I realized after a few months of med reduction, that I hadn't been going through that anymore. I am much happier now.

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Not to be any way critical, Maven, but that is a different concern entirely......dose. I have never seen any justification for how they determine what is an effective dose for an antidepressant medication....what the "therapeutic dose" is. For example, when they studied Prozac, 5, 10, and 20 mg doses had almost identical efficacy. As you can imagine, though, fewer severe adverse effects were noted at the lower doses. Yet, when the drug was approved by the FDA, the "therapeutic starting dose" was set at 20 mg/day.

In my body, 20 mg is a severe overdose of the drug. Yet, when they found I was having such a hard time at 20 mg, guess what they did......they doubled the dose to 40 mg.

In any population of people, no matter what criterion is being selected, there is a middle ground where most people are found.....the normal curve, the bell curve, is exactly that. The further you get from the middle of the group, the fewer people you find with that particular amount of whatever is being measured. That "distance from the average" concept is called the standard deviation. One standard deviation out from the center only includes 68% of all people. 2 standard deviations includes 95%. That's the basis of the standard for significance, by the way......less than 5% chance that the result is outside two standard deviations....

But, 95% includes 19 people out of 20. One out of 20 people is not going to get the normal drug reaction. The effects could be severe. The required dose could be a tiny fraction of the "standard dose".

It behooves us to determine if we're one of those sensitive people. And then, we must insist that our doctors listen to us. And if that fails, don't ever forget that you are the gatekeeper of your own mouth. Just because your doctor will only prescribe 20 mg tablets doesn't mean you have to take a whole tablet, ya know?

Lar