Antidepressants can raise the risk of suicide, biggest ever review finds.

"Antidepressant use doubles the risk of suicide in under 18s and the risks to adults may have been seriously underestimated, researchers found.

After comparing clinical trial information to actual patient reports the scientists found pharmaceutical companies had regularly misclassified deaths and suicidal events in people taking anti-depressants to "favour their products".

Experts said the review's findings were "startling" and said it was "deeply worrying" that clinical trials appear to have been misreported."

http://www.telegraph.co....t-ever-review-finds.html

Finally found the original: http://www.bmj.com/content/352/bmj.i65

The findings are disturbing. Some people should be sued and brought to justice.


That's crap nobody really wants to ingest. I wonder why not ketamine as an antidepressant, the studies are promising.

Thank you very much for the links!
I'm still working on my first cuppa coffee, and haven't yet read the study, but I'm guessing it focused on patients younger than 18? Personally, I think these dangerous drugs are just as risky for adults. I have known. from personal experience that these things were poisons for years, it's time that the studies are done, published, and these things are yanked off the market.

It astounds me that in our culture, we are more trusting and acccepting of, drugs or medications that have dangerous side effects in order to receive some possible benefit, in the substances that have beneficial side effects – like making you feel good or getting one who ingests them high for a little while are considered the dangerous ones.

There is definitely a shift in attitudes occurring though. This paradigm is changing, and it gives me hope. Perhaps, not too far into the future, even some of the stimulus for young suicides will be gone – societal disapproval of alternative lifestyles for example – but there will still be people who suffer it and we need effective treatments.

To suffer the crippling effects of serious depression and to endure a life of inexplicable grief and pain is entirely and wholly unnecessary, The research and piles and piles of anecdotal evidence fully supports this. I think that all of us here already know where the cure is. And hopefully all members of future generations will have the opportunity to reach their full potential, and we will stop losing beautiful minds and lives unnecessarily.

I'm not sure I buy that this is as ground-breaking as the Telegraph article seems to think.

From the conclusions:



The results are generally: "we confirmed what was already known about antidepressants and suicidal ideation, and can't confidently break new ground, lets get more data."

Blessings
~ND

As much as I love K I've seen people totally lose themselves because of it, and I can name one friend off the top of my head who is no longer alive because of it.

It's certainly a valuable tool for the treatment of depression (and a fun way to explore consciousness), but in that regard so are SSRI's. I certainly wouldn't choose to take traditional antidepressants myself, but I won't pretend that I haven't seen them help numerous people. Every drug comes with risks, and while I think its important for people to be fully aware of those risks, I'm not going to parade around as if traditional anti-depressants are useless and make people feel bad for taking them.

I've seen SSRI/SNRI's, marijuana, ketamine, LSD, and MDMA help a lot of folks; and I've seen them turn people into zombies.

thanks Bancopuma for bringing this to attention again..


..people were saying this in the late 80s/early90s..even before the latest round of SSRIs..

the problem is driven by greed..and the private sector aspect of 'health'..
it started with looking for new compounds which could be patented (because natural ones are hard to), as a means to increase profit, not necessarily the 'more effective' treatment..
(and of course maois have dietary issues..how inconvenient)

the approach became increasingly about 'managing' (read 'shut-down'/inhibit) symptoms rather than trying to alleviate..
(from a indigenous healer p.o.v it is further clamping and dislodging a persons' 'spirit' rather than freeing it, which is the old approach to many 'psychological' conditions)

the shutting down of 'side-effects' or 'symptoms' like euphoria, spiritual beliefs, aspects of personality, even sexuality, is, in any common sense assessment, going to lead to potentially worse kinds of depressions, inescapable from within the pharmaceutical straight jacket..

and of course, if any negative evidence can be 'blurred', it will, because there is a point with the sheer nature of the industry where if commercial interests can be made to over ride science, they will be

when i was at uni, in the early 90s, i said/asked - 'what was wrong with natural MAOI treatments in the first place..?'
and never got an answer that satisfied by desire to actually try and 'help' people

from a clinical psychology perspective, for depression, ketamine i would not recommend...salvia divinorum (less potentially toxic), from what i've seen, potentially yes..the proper research needs to be done

but also, i recommend 'alternate' (lol) therapies like belief-system orientated ceremony ('clearing', exorcism etc...regardless of whether these perceptions have basis in scientific theory), breathwork, dance and nature connection..
and many senior psychologists will agree, off the record, that diet probably plays a big role..
.

ps. what i find particularly insidious is the increasing rate of prescribing these things to teenagers and children..whose hormones, brains and minds are still developing..
a huge market...which they've been pushing increasingly since i was psych student..

A classic: don't blame the substance, blame the user. You forgot the peeps who got some nightmare trips out of Aya (I include myself here).

10mg of K are enough and it doesn't produce any psychoactive effects:

http://ijnp.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/9/2111

But better don't take it, because TV is boring.

3 more reviews about the efficiency of K with regards to depression:

"Doctor, I am suicidal. Please help."
"Sure, take these pills that increase your chance of suicide!" (I think the doctor misunderstood the goal)

Our medical industry is the top killer in USA. Kills more people then heart disease according to CDC statistics.

My mother died from overdose with anti-depressants and Ambien (which also increases chance of suicide). Her doctor prescribed meds that certainly made a bad situation much worse.

Worse part is - there are way better more effective treatments out there which have way less side-effects. MDMA therapy, psilocybin therapy, San Pedro.... All much more helpful. Even microdosing many of these plants could get way better results without deep altered states.

But there is a lot about western medicine that doesnt make sense....

Now get ready for some incredible heresy here,


but

what if

these so called "chemical imbalances" in the brain were the result of eating a diet filled with neurotoxins and lacking foods containing actual neurotransmitters and neurotransmitter precursors.

and

what if

simply eating a diet full of nt and ntp rich foods like say, fresh fruits and vegetables, had significantly more effect at balancing these "chemical imbalances" than daily doping with pharmaceuticals.

I know, I know,

how unorthodox!

maybe in 50 years or so men and women in nice labcoats will statistically validate what common sense has told us is true all along.

probably not

dreamer042 wrote:

This

yes this..i was being consulted on some things by the head of psychology at the large hospital in australia a few months ago, and we came to a similar conclusion..the role of diet

the problem, from their point of view, was the system Psychiatrists...who are in the majority 1) not trained in or focused on an empathetic, open and listening approach to human beings in distress,
and hence just automatically prescribe meds, because many are 2) completely locked into the pharma companies unholy alliance with 'public' 'health' which involves lots of promotion, sponsorship, promotional 'offers' etc..

ultimately the system (mental health) has become the government policy wing of a commercially driven science of neuro-pharmacology which itself knows it is a very patchy understanding at present to say the least..yet pushes ahead with compounds previously unknown in nature to give vulnerable people

and when there are all these tried and tested old common sense methods like you say, dreamer042

.

hehe, this is a great comment on a serious issue! But it seems to me, and I am just an average dude who has watched people fly off the handle on pharmaceuticals from afar, that the chemical imbalance is likely antagonized by the anti-depression "medicine" itself. Now, I don't have any fancy research papers to reinforce this claim but I have watched two ex-girlfriends go from bad to worse due to depression subsequently followed by Dr. WhoCares prescriptions which led to suicide attempts and also homicidal tendencies...aka "I'll take you with me then!!!" That sort of mentality.

So seeing it firsthand and secondhand, and also hearing it on every anti-depressant medication commercial ever written, I'd have to say that I just don't trust big pharma...at all...why am I being forced to have health care insurance again....?




Edit: oh yeah, forgot this comment was about diet...eat right folks...that is all...

Yes...It seems that no matter how big the mountain of compelling research on the impact of diet gets, we continue to stubbornly neglect how dietary changes can help prevent/treat many physical and mental ailments...

And, on top of that, it is sadly far more profitable to have ambulances waiting at the bottom of the cliff rather than just building a simple fence at the top...

We are also far too used to the simple word diet too...It would more accurately be called unimaginably complex bio-molecular engineering, but that still fails to hint at what it is.... But I guess that, considering the junk we eat, the word DIE(t) is after all tragically accurate.

Your brain is the most complex and sensitive thing this side of the milky way. Take care of it. Trying to build it out of junk and expecting it to run the same is a failure to understand 4th grade level engineering logic.

Having said that, depression is in some ways a sane response to a more realistic awareness of our utterly insane and worrisome state of affairs on our home planet. But nevertheless a balance can be found within.

i have some personal experience with this subject and would like to share my experience.

i have been diagnosed with panic disorder, with and without agoraphobia at different times of my life. i have been prescribed benzos(absolutely horrible medication) and in conjunction with those, i have tried just about every ssri and anti depressant medication. i now REFUSE to ever take another one ever! the suicide risk is real, its not just an over dramatization of how one might feel on them. the last one i tried was prozac and OMG what doctor in their right mind would take the chance of giving anyone this medication!!!

i took that prozac for a few days, and started feeling much worse than i did in the first place. I let my doctor know the changes i was going through, he insisted i "up the dose" so i tried since i was at a loss for any other help. I tried so hard to get through the first few days of side effects(not sleeping, increased anxiety, panic attacks, hear palpitations, night mares, night sweat) the list goes on. eventually i said HELL NO, i cant deal with all of that added stress so i stopped them.

i remember trying to visit any, and all family members trying to distract my mind of self harm. i was extremely depressed, at the end of the road... ready to cave in. i remember driving home crying my eyes out every day because i couldnt handle it any more. which is extremely not like me. ive fought through many hell like times, but this was much much MUCH worse than i had ever felt. i really thought i wanted to die.

after this is when i came across dmt, nootropics and natural herbs to help my social anxiety with panic disorder. smoking dmt was kind of a mind F***, very hard to handle with panic disorder. eventually i tried aya and BINGO after the first aya experience i started to notice that it was my subconscious thought patterns causing me so much pain. i continued taking it(aya), when i felt up for it and i can say now im happily married, won custody of my child from an ex. have an amazing job/career etc. and i almost would have never made it here without a very strong will.

the suicide risk is more than real, and i hope if anyone reads this... if you need someone to chat with, need some advice etc. i am more than open ears. <3 please dont hesitate to ask for help when feeling down! ive been to very very dark places and know what its like to be completely lost and alone.

MUCH LOVE
Panda

Scurvy treatment occured first in 1753, the word protein first in 1839, serotonin was discovered in 1948. Before 1950 "nt and ntp rich foods" weren't even on the radar. Yet doctors had to do their best to treat the patient.

"validate what common sense has told us is true all along." You should write a paper and publish that, the scientific community will be delighted. And even then you'll find folks who a) can't even afford enough food (3.5B actually) or b) don't give a #$%§ what the whitecoats have say, because their internet guru says so and so.

My point is: for every whacked out herbalist, you'll find a golddigging doctor. You may call it Ufo's law.


I'm glad you made it.

Ufostrahlen wrote:


..i'm not sure that i understand this..? Ufostrahlen

one of the things which was coming to attention in the 80s/90s was the rise or increased incidents of 'depression' in the later half of the 20th century...the World Health Organisation declared it was reaching epidemic proportions, unprecedented..

this could suggest two main possible factors (possible both operating)

a) diet - an increasing overall change in world diet, towards processed foods with various chemical additives etc (&/or some kind of toxin in the environment) is contributing to this neuro-chemical imbalance..
as for 'affordability', not that far in the past, everyone's food was 'organic'..no chemical sprays etc...
what is generally considered to be poor diet by choice, by many health experts, really starts with the industrial revolution..
there is almost un-arguably a correlation between dietary metabolism and mood..

b) diagnosis and definition - increasingly looking to expand markets, and claim a 'solution', the mental health industry has begun to over-diagnose 'depression' as a condition... (particularly in teenagers)
..it could be said there is a difference between the ordinary, indeed sane, kind of depression, which universecannon alludes to, which is a result of stressful and insurmountable pressures of the industrialised society..and the chemical imbalance forms of depression, such as BlackPanDA describes, toxin like, in which there is an inescapable sense of destruction, despair, real un-locatable pain, system out of balance..

so vulnerable are such people, that it seems beyond grotesque to automatically prescribe such new, and really we should still say experimental, compounds as are many SSRIs..when we don't even know what's causing the condition..
and to give people psychoactive (yes) compounds which the experimenters have not tried to see what the subjective effects are...let alone a developed socio-philosophy around what effects such psychoactives (the meds) should ideally have, other than 'shut down symptoms/make someone manageable'..
.

also thank you BlackPanDA for sharing, your's is a hopeful story!

Spoke with a friend I made in New Mexico last winter, and it is the first I've heard of using ketamine for depression. Of course in my mind it doesn't sound much different from those reports of people microdosing dmt, lsd, mescaline, psilocybin, iboga.. But he sounds very enthusiastic. I mention him also because he appeared to be an incredibly healthy eater and very aware of what his body doesn't like, even schooling me in different home recipes and explaining the relationship he found between dairy products and subtle common allergic reactions.. so he is one good example from people I've met that is representative of the fact that diet isn't the only player in mental health problems. And although that seems to have been the general consensus vis a vis depression in this discussion, I understand that none of you are explicitly saying that. I just want to point out that while food is a huge factor, it isn't everything.

I would echo everything nen has said

and this:

there is no "one size fits all" solution. there are several factors at play, i.e. CYP expression, primary messenger (hormone) expression, genetic (family) history, etc. etc.

the rise of SSRIs can be traced back to a June 1990 ruling which banned the importation of l-tryptophan (due to a contaminated batch from Japan, the primary exporter), of course, Eli Lilly jumped on the opportunity to flood the market with Prozac. the SSRI model assumed mood was directly linked to serotonin. the problem with focusing on one secondary messenger (neurotransmitter) is that it creates an imbalance of other neurotransmitters, not to mention downregulation of the neurotransmitter being affected.

^..very good points by benzyme

the head of hospital psych i mentioned earlier pointed out that, in the wider context,
the distribution mechanism are GPs..

now, how is a GP, by definition, qualified to diagnose and prescribe psych meds..?

and no, often if not mostly, they don't really know what they're giving you..
it came with the latest promotion..
.