pharmaceutical industry and their 'reinventions'

There is a certain irony here:

"Ugh, tricyclics! Low selectivity for the serotonin transporter over the noradrenaline transporter, and what's with all the antagonism at histamine, alpha and 5HT2A receptors? Dirty stuff! Thankfully this is the 90's, and we have Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors!"

"...eh, maybe you do need a bit of a noradrenaline boost on top. Thankfully this is 2000, and we have SNRI's!"

"...and maybe it would be nice to have some histamine/5HT2-antagonism-mediated anti-anxiety action, too. It's 2010, try some Seroquel or Mirtazapine on top of your antidepressant!"

"...and we do want some alpha1-adrenergic receptor antagonism to normalize the HPA axis! And some FIASMA / BDNF would be nice. R&D, get started! It's 2018!"

"...or just have a tricyclic."



I would not be surprised if they try to market anticholinergics as new groundbreaking anxiolytics in a few years from now...

Welcome to PC.

I'm not convinced that it's the pharmaceutical industry as much as it is a lack of knowledge about the exact functions of the brain. Medicine, particularly neurobiology, is far from perfect.

That may be true, but it is a shame that 50 year old drugs (Clomipramine, Nardil, Parnate) are still more effective than all that followed...

For some people those meds re more effective. Newer meds, for some people, work better.

Clomipramine didn't work for me. Zoloft has been life changing. I'm glad we have a variety of options as we are all different.

I’m glad we have more options than in the past. However, It is true that big pharma reinvents Meds to keep up cash flow. When my doctor suggests a new med I ask if there is a previous one that’s similar and been on the market enough to be available in generic.

Yes, but there is a certain dogma among psychiatrists to push SSRIs on everybody... for different types of depression there are different fitting antidepressant-classes, but many doctors try the "one size fits all" route...

If someone suffers from psychomotor retardation, hypersomnia, weight gain, then Sertraline, Duloxetine or Bupropion might indeed be the fitting med. But pushing the same med on someone with converse symptoms might be fatal.

There haven't been any breakthroughs in psychiatric drugs for years and years. The drugs we have and the new ones coming out all the time are simply tweaks on what else is out there. Luckily for us even those tweaks seem to make a difference as to effectiveness and side effects. Pharmaceutical companies, however, have seem to run out of new ideas and also have not have any financial incentive to spend the money to find them.

It's true that they don't even really know why these ones work, but that shouldn't stop further experiential testing.

On the other hand, they're not even working on finding new antibiotics that can fight off drug-resistant diseases, claiming the profits just aren't there. There seems to be something seriously wrong with our new drug modeling.

Good post. I agree.