“Julie,
Having been suffering from major depression since I was in high school, I do take an SSRI. I DO appreciate it.”

Now things are getting clearer. The fact is that you as an adult may be OK with SSRIs and dependent on them, hooked, but children (and adults) have died on them.

http://www.psychservices.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/55/10/1192

…Senior FDA officials acknowledged that the results of the new analysis were substantially the same as the conclusions reached a year ago by FDA drug safety analyst Andrew D. Mosholder. At a hearing in March 2004, the agency declined to make Mosholder’s conclusions public, citing a lack of confidence in his results. The March hearing resulted in FDA’s requiring manufacturers to change the drug labeling for medications used to treat pediatric depression to include a statement recommending close observation for the emergence of suicidality.

In 2003, U.S. physicians wrote 15 million antidepressant prescriptions for patients under age 18, according to FDA data. In the first six months of 2004, antidepressant prescriptions for children increased by almost 8 percent, despite the new drug labeling.

After the March hearing, FDA hired a group of suicidality experts at Columbia University to reanalyze the data. That analysis, which was the centerpiece of the September hearing, reached conclusions nearly identical to Mosholder’s. It found that 2 to 3 percent of children treated with antidepressants had suicidal thoughts or behaviors that were NOT a result of underlying depression but were CAUSED by the medications themselves…”

That explains a lot. Some people on psychoactive drugs become very afraid when those drugs are threatened because of the deaths they cause.

Sounds like you are projecting from your own experience. People can be “cured” from one MDD episode. People can, with medication and really good CBT, be “cured” from OCD–be weaned off the medication and therapy and not engage in the OCD behavior anymore. I know many, many people who feel their lives have been given back to them by the SSRIs, so that doesn’t really jive with your “numbing and dumbing” scenario, does it?

Julie,
Having been suffering from major depression since I was in high school, I do take an SSRI. I DO appreciate it.

I know it is like peeing into the wind, but I’ll say it again just to piss Dbear and Jay off. The SSRIs work. They don’t make people suicidal and homicidal. I know this because there are literally tens of millions of people on SSRIs in this world, and there are no more suicides and homicides than there were before the SSRIs. And no matter how powerful you think big Pharma is, they aren’t powerful enough to keep a story like that out of the news. People on SSRIs do commit suicide–it is an interesting question to ask why SSRIs don’t clearly decrease suicide (there is some evidence they do, but only lithium and Clozarel decrease suicide), when they clearly decrease depression. People on SSRIs do commit homicide, but then so do people not on SSRIs, and in greater numbers. I think I agree with Rush Limbaugh, who would point out that one thing all these people probably have in common is….carrots. They all eat carrots. Probably, it is the carrots that cause the behavior. Carrots are also responsible for many other awful things, like car accidents and falls from ladders.

Folks are giving their pets prozac, so one might consider this treatment.

I know I’ve said this before but when I adopted my coonhound he had developed some very severe aggression issues as well as some separation anxiety (only when I left him). I spent about 6 months working with an animal behaviorist who did put him on prozac (And then switched to elavil) which did help us work through a lot of his issues. He remained on elavil for a while and I kept working with trainers with great success. He’s been off the drugs for over two years (yes Lisa, we weaned him off the elavil) maintained additional training classes for a while and has done pretty well. Just like with humans, behavioral therapy is as critical as any pharmacological intervention.