I agree,.. well stated”

Well Lisa, thats nice. People like us are trying to protect children, like YOUR children, and you agree with NATHAN? Wow. No wonder you allowed YOUR CHILD to be put on drugs.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? There is precious little provision of psychotherapy (at least in the UK, on the NHS), for those with mild/moderate depression. If one can’t afford it privately, one doesn’t get it. As such, doctors prescribe drugs for conditions for which they are no more effective than therapy.

The Worshipful Company may say “hey, we just make the things, we’re not responsible for inappropriate prescribing”. And the quacks may say “hey, we just treat people with the resources available, if there’re no counsellors, we prescribe drugs”. And the regulators may say “yes, sir”. Could one of you halfwits actually take responsibility, instead of pretending that the issue isn’t yours, because, between you, you’ve created a mega-sized cluster fuck, and the patients are paying the tab, just now.

Matt

Doesn’t that depend upon how long a patient is prescribed the drugs (and also the difficulty that a patient might have coming off them)?

Counselling is about changing behaviour, such that a patient not only deals with the current issue, but also avoids recurrences. A drug can’t do that.

Matt

But the real problem is that this study says that the major portion of the patients were not helped any better than with a placebo. It does say that for those who were seriously depressed there was an effect. When the right drug gets to the right patient - well that is what we should all strive for. It’s the unnecessary over medicating of people going through mild depressions which by the way, tend to clear up by themselves within 12 weeks without treatment. For this patients population (which I would imagine is the largest portion)derive no benefit and suffer serious side effects and then become dependent. That is the real problem.

The other issue ignored here is cost. Even if therapy worked as well as the drugs, therapy was more expensive than the drugs when the drugs were still on patent. Now that the drugs are generic it’s a landslide cost victory for the drugs.

I know that people here have a lot of strong feelings about SSRIs. But the papers abstract makes the FDA look ridiculous. 80% of people here may enjoy seeing the FDA look ridiculous; the fact is that this group of authors, with all of its biases, with all of its digging around, still had to admit that antidepressants caused a statistically significant improvement in depression. Furthermore, their methods may include a lot of irrelevant trials. If you want to ignore the numbers and just go on your gut reasoning you can, I choose to look at the numbers.

I agree,.. well stated.

Alert… alert… alert… sarcasm follows:
I don’t suppose these profound changes would include the de-criminalization of off-lable marketing, together with the introduction of pre-emption nationally, would they?

Matt
“Be alert: the world needs more lerts.”