Welcome to From Insults to Respect. 

Regular readers to this blog know that I have some serious concerns about dealing with emotional experiences referred to as depression or melancholy with the so called antidepressants. Certainly, people should be free to make their own decision regarding whether or not to take these types of pills, and I recognize very intelligent people decide to take them. That said, because I have been employed as a PhD level psychologist, people from time to time have asked me for advice. This led me to evaluating the research on their effectiveness, risks, and side-effects. Having extensive training in evaluating this type of research, sadly, I’ve been dismayed at what I have, and continue to find.

There is an excellent site titled Mad In America that does an excellent job presenting the relevant science. Here, I’ll just say that the research indicates these drugs are not anywhere as effective as they are promoted to be, side-effects are worse than claimed, withdrawal effects are frequently awful, and there are safer, healthier approaches to handling these types of concerns than taking these pills. More and more troubling findings are regularly being revealed to the public. Just this week, The New York Times ran a story about numerous reports of a loss of sexuality from taking these types of drugs, and even upon stopping the drugs, the problem for many people persists.

The Times story provides the example of Dr. Audrey Bahrick, who started taking Prozac in 1993 when she was 37. At that time, she was struggling with a difficult job in a new city. Within one day of taking the pill, her clitoris and vagina felt numb. “It was like there was a glove over them — a very, very muffled sensation,” she recalled.

For a while, she said, the trade-off was worth it. The antidepressant made her feel energized and more resilient. But after two years, she stopped taking it for the sake of her relationship. The sexual symptoms persisted, however, and the relationship ended. “It never occurred to me that this would be something that would in fact, in my life, never resolve,” said Dr. Bahrick, who is now 67.

A major strategy that is used to convince people to start taking these drugs is terribly misleading. Doctors claim that it is crucial for depressed people to take antidepressants because depressed people are at an increased risk of committing suicide. This implies that the antidepressant diminishes the likelihood of committing suicide. The facts are just the opposite. The weight of the research evidence indicates these drugs increase suicidal thoughts, behavior and  likelihood of suicide (see HERE). To use the increase in suicides argument despite the evidence to the contrary has always been a very disturbing sales pitch to me.

Now, when reading about all of the serious concerns regarding this type of treatment, many folks who are already taking these drugs begin to consider chucking them. To help with this decision, and how best to go about doing so if they so choose, it helps to hear from people who have made that decision.

One Woman’s Personal Experience

May Cause Side Effects, by Brooke Siam, is one of the first books on antidepressant withdrawal to make it to the mass market. A wonderful interview with the author can be found HERE. Ms Siam’s work on antidepressant withdrawal has appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Post, Psychology Today, and many more. She is also an award-winning chef and Food Network Chopped Champion.

When asked in her interview how she first got involved in the mental health system, she replied:

“This was in 2001 and the timing is important for context as the world was a little different then. I was 15 years old and my father had suddenly passed away. When I look back now, I don’t see someone who was going down a terrible path. I wasn’t suddenly into drugs or hanging out with the wrong crowd, my grades didn’t tank, but I was different than I was before. I was very stoic. I was a serious ballet dancer, so the mantra of ballet is to smile through pain, and so, my reaction was concerning to the adults around me.”

Siam was then referred to a psychiatrist, and at her first appointment was given a prescription for a psychiatric drug.

“I don’t remember which one. I think we started with Prozac and then moved on likely to Zoloft since those were the two that were approved for use in children and teens at the time. I had obvious physical reactions to both drugs and so, in the end, we ended up on a combination of Effexor XR and Wellbutrin XL, neither of which were approved for kids and teens at the time and still aren’t.” 

This approach of deciding in one psychiatrist visit to start throwing one type of pill after another at her because of a very understandable reaction to the loss of her dad is all too frequent from what I have been able to see during my many years of psychological practice. Often it’s not just the loss of a parent, but other grief experiences as well that leads to perfectly normal reactions that lead to this prescribing practice. Sometimes people are normally built to have periods of melancholy, and this too is pathologized and one pill after another begins to be prescribed.

Eventually, Siam began to believe this drug approach wasn’t doing her any good:

“…the only frame of reference I had as an unmedicated person was as a 14-year-old kid, I was in my 30s and I was on the same cocktail of drugs. I didn’t wear the same clothes I wore in high school, so why in the hell was I still taking the same cocktail of drugs every morning? There was just something about that that just didn’t make any sense to me because I knew I wasn’t the same body. My brain wasn’t the same, so if the science was sound why hadn’t it adjusted over time? That was the question that put me on this path.”

It was at this point that Siam began her journey to wean herself off the drugs. She covers such topics as what problems one might face along this weaning journey and suggestions on overcoming them. Her story is well worth reading.

My Best,
Jeff

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.