This is a really shitty attempt at a gotcha question, just so you know. I have depression, any neurologist with an MRI of my brain can tell you that, because there’s a softball sized cyst and the structural placement of it makes depression highly likely, it’s too big to be removed all the empty space would lead to shifting, brain bleeds, embolism, seizures, and strokes which would kill me really quickly. So shunt and valve and medication is my only treatment option. Anti depressants aren’t just for people who are having a bad week and don’t know how to cope, or people behind on their self care, or people who are facing a life challenge and just need a little pick me up. Anti depressants are being taken largely by people who go to their doctor and say ‘‘I’m so depressed I no longer enjoy the things I used to love doing, I’m struggling to remember what happy feels like, and I can’t stop contemplating the end of my life’’ it’s for people with clear diagnosable depression. Please stop acting like you have any room to jump up people’s ass about the maintenance meds they’ve been taking for years that get them results when nothing else did. Do you think a jog a day is the solution? It’s not at all. If that was the solution, this wouldn’t ever be a medical problem in the first place, easy solutions don’t require medical intervention. If you really think the average person on antidepressants didn’t spend YEARS trying to solve it without any medical aid, your delusional.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding that most folks have when it comes to anti-depressants. A lot of people think that you take prozac and it makes you feel “happy” or at least “better”. But the reality of it for me is, I take prozac, and stops my emotions from spiralling out of control.
My neurology is like an elderly person on an icy day, it has a tendency to slip and fall over. Anti-depressants are just a walker for my brain, gives me a good chance to not fall over and break a hip.
Yeah, my experience is similar - I take zoloft and it doesn’t make me feel good or happy all the time but it does make my otherwise crippling anxiety manageable by significantly lowering my base level of anxiety and decreasing the amount of anxiety “spikes” and “episodes” I get
Please stop acting like you have any room to jump up people’s ass about the maintenance meds they’ve been taking for years that get them results when nothing else did.
I’m not. My beef is with the doctors who prescribe antidepressants without proper investigation of the causes of the symptoms.
Do you think a jog a day is the solution?
There will be some cases where this is true. But a jog a day is much more effort than having a pill. Particularly if you are out of shape. A pill is much easier for a doctor to prescribe.
easy solutions don’t require medical intervention.
Unfortunately paying customers want a medical solution. So they get prescribed a pharmaceutical solution.
If you really think the average person on antidepressants didn’t spend YEARS trying to solve it without any medical aid, your delusional.
My beef is with the doctors that prescribe antidepressants as a generic solution to all symptoms. Not the patients.
Do you have something worthwhile to bring up or are you just trolling?
The fact that some doctors prescribe medications they shouldn’t is an ongoing issue for the medical industry that will never go away as long as doctors and patients are humans and we have incomplete knowledge.
It is not a reason to confirm a crazy anti-science vaccine denier as secretary of HHS.
Data guy here. You’re kinda running into the same rationale used by fascists, I mean republicans, to cut welfare. That being: there exists some number of people that game the system, so lets put rules in place to fight them. Sounds good right?
The problem is this: what’s the actual added value of these new rules? For this example, what’s the ratio of badly prescribed medicines to correctly prescribed ones? How many people that need the medication have to be denied it to validate catching one bad actor? Is it better to have a few bad actors to make sure everyone gets help, or is it more important to be punitive and make sure that only the right people get the resource?
Well, there’s a rational way to answer that. How scarce is the resource? If a solid gold bar was what was required to treat a condition, than yeah you’re gonna need to make sure no one is wasting it. But if the treatment is common as dirt, why are we getting in the way?
What’s the cost of the system as-is? People take medications they don’t need and may experience side effects of this medicine. Given that wellbutrin is hardly a party drug, it’s not as if people are seeking this out recreationally. They want to feel better. And if it isn’t doing anything, or is making them feel worse, than the discussion with one’s doctor should end up with “let’s try something else” (YMMV, doctors are sometimes bad, patients are sometimes bad, I’m talking how a typical case should go in a quasi-sensible world).
And you know what’s worse? Anyone that isn’t the patient and the doctor being involved in that conversation.
As a data guy we need to explain why 11% of Americans over the age of 12 take an antidepressant. The USA is, yet again, a world leader.
RFKjr has an alternative solution. If it’s small scale and voluntary then costs to society are minimal. If it’s large scale and compulsory then it’s very fascist.
My opinion is that the medical profession should focus on the cause of the above statistic. Not the solution.
My hypothesis is that lazy doctors are being paid to prescribe antidepressants. Whenever they can’t find a solution they identify “stress”.
With all due respect, depression and anxiety go back in my family lineage at least the three generations upwards from me, and down to the younger generation below me.
There’s a real genetic component to this, and brain chemistry is still not well understood.
Obviously we should fight the cause not the symptoms, but if the cause is genetic you can’t exactly fix it (sure there’s eugenics, but myself and lots of family members are well respected in our fields, from trades to sciences, some of the anxious traits make us excel at things).
When I started taking antidepressants last year my life changed. Colours seemed brighter, music sounds better, I can get stuff done better than ever, my relationships are better, I’m a much happier and more stable person.
I get what you’re saying, there are bad doctors, that goes both ways. I grew up with a doctor who didn’t believe in depression, so nobody in my family ever got treated or diagnosed for any mental illnesses. Imagine having an issue but because it can’t be clearly tested for, or some doctors are lazy, now you just don’t get any treatment. That’s not better.
But what leads you to believe they are being honest or will proceed in a scientific and humane way?
That is the real concern here. Conservatives describing their intentions in ways that sound good on the surface is the oldest and most practiced technique they have. That is why all the context and history around this craziness is so important.
Why is RFK Jr a reliable source for any of this? He’s hardly a reliable medical source. Dude promotes vaccine lies. He’s a lawyer by trade. He has no special medical knowledge or training. Why is he in charge of any of this in the first place?
My beef is with the doctors who prescribe antidepressants without proper investigation of the causes of the symptoms.
I feel like you haven’t gone through the process yourself. I got driven to the point of confessing I would be better off dead before I was considered for anti depressants, it’s not just a “I’m sad today” “ok here are anti depressants”
This is a legitimate conversation, but not the time and place. I have had similar issues with SSRI’s being the only solution presented to me (despite previous experiences + knowledge of my body’s previous reactions to these medication being articulated in my refusal) and this is very much due to having an AFAB body.
However, SSRI’s are an effective medication for many people, and the priority in this conversation needs to be on this deranged attack on medical expertise and established understandings of the science. There very much are serious issues with diagnoses/prescriptions being used as alternatives to acknowledging societal problems and a way to make invisible/medically gaslight the understudied chronic illnesses primarily experienced by women, but there are also people who are chemically depressed and are being served by the chemical treatment model - attacks on this fact are profoundly unscientific and harmful and the fact that they are being made by someone potentially leading the medical “establishment” = DEFCON 1.
your contributions are irrelevant to the topic, and also super shitty to bring up around a lot of people that’re scared for the mental health of their families. “your beef” isn’t worth sniffing, so please take it elsewhere. you should be able to tell from ratios alone that your comments are unwelcome, shameless, and tactless.
So, do you think it might be related to how the US isnuniquely the only industrialized nation with no universal health care, minimal (if any) social safety nets, a shit economy that only benefits the upper 1%, and the very obvious fascist heading our country is on?
YOU FEEL UNSEEN BY YOUR DOCTORS BECAUSE THEY DISMISS YOUR PAIN
that’s not related whatsoever, i’m sorry, i used to be in your position, i hope you get a real diagnosis for what’s wrong (mine was hEDS) because most doctors say it’s fibromyalgia when they don’t know and they’ve given up… that’s for-profit medicine for you… but, as i’ve covered elsewhere
people take anti-depressants for several problems, including fibromyalgia
as someone that was also given an Rx for antidepressants due to a “fibromyalgia” diagnosis, it’s a working theory that one of the reasons for that disorder is, in fact, neurotransmitter dysregulation (e.g., norepinephrine) so that’s not completely off-base… sorry. it sucks, but it has to be eliminated as a mechanism. is it possible you have undiagnosed hEDS? that was the case with me, and a geneticist was able to sus it out. please google it, because if you’ve been diagnosed with fibro it means you have a vague nebula of symptoms that could be any number of things (e.g., lupus) and requires an extensive differential diagnosis which usually ends up being something else (if you’re anything like me).
This is a really shitty attempt at a gotcha question, just so you know. I have depression, any neurologist with an MRI of my brain can tell you that, because there’s a softball sized cyst and the structural placement of it makes depression highly likely, it’s too big to be removed all the empty space would lead to shifting, brain bleeds, embolism, seizures, and strokes which would kill me really quickly. So shunt and valve and medication is my only treatment option. Anti depressants aren’t just for people who are having a bad week and don’t know how to cope, or people behind on their self care, or people who are facing a life challenge and just need a little pick me up. Anti depressants are being taken largely by people who go to their doctor and say ‘‘I’m so depressed I no longer enjoy the things I used to love doing, I’m struggling to remember what happy feels like, and I can’t stop contemplating the end of my life’’ it’s for people with clear diagnosable depression. Please stop acting like you have any room to jump up people’s ass about the maintenance meds they’ve been taking for years that get them results when nothing else did. Do you think a jog a day is the solution? It’s not at all. If that was the solution, this wouldn’t ever be a medical problem in the first place, easy solutions don’t require medical intervention. If you really think the average person on antidepressants didn’t spend YEARS trying to solve it without any medical aid, your delusional.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding that most folks have when it comes to anti-depressants. A lot of people think that you take prozac and it makes you feel “happy” or at least “better”. But the reality of it for me is, I take prozac, and stops my emotions from spiralling out of control.
My neurology is like an elderly person on an icy day, it has a tendency to slip and fall over. Anti-depressants are just a walker for my brain, gives me a good chance to not fall over and break a hip.
This, it doesn’t give me a joygasm, it just stops me from being overly paranoid
Yeah, my experience is similar - I take zoloft and it doesn’t make me feel good or happy all the time but it does make my otherwise crippling anxiety manageable by significantly lowering my base level of anxiety and decreasing the amount of anxiety “spikes” and “episodes” I get
You didn’t have to go that hard. You could have said “are you a doctor? ARE YOU MY DOCTORS? no? Then would you kindly stfu?”
Really they should have known better then to pick a gotcha out of an unknown situation
OK, so you are in the first category
I’m not. My beef is with the doctors who prescribe antidepressants without proper investigation of the causes of the symptoms.
There will be some cases where this is true. But a jog a day is much more effort than having a pill. Particularly if you are out of shape. A pill is much easier for a doctor to prescribe.
Unfortunately paying customers want a medical solution. So they get prescribed a pharmaceutical solution.
My beef is with the doctors that prescribe antidepressants as a generic solution to all symptoms. Not the patients.
Do you have something worthwhile to bring up or are you just trolling?
The fact that some doctors prescribe medications they shouldn’t is an ongoing issue for the medical industry that will never go away as long as doctors and patients are humans and we have incomplete knowledge.
It is not a reason to confirm a crazy anti-science vaccine denier as secretary of HHS.
Not trolling. My first post inb this thread acknowledges legitimate uses. I’m just pointing out the silver lining of this policy.
Reducing public dependency on badly prescribed medication doesn’t seem evil or anti science, but big pharma won’t like it.
Data guy here. You’re kinda running into the same rationale used by fascists, I mean republicans, to cut welfare. That being: there exists some number of people that game the system, so lets put rules in place to fight them. Sounds good right?
The problem is this: what’s the actual added value of these new rules? For this example, what’s the ratio of badly prescribed medicines to correctly prescribed ones? How many people that need the medication have to be denied it to validate catching one bad actor? Is it better to have a few bad actors to make sure everyone gets help, or is it more important to be punitive and make sure that only the right people get the resource?
Well, there’s a rational way to answer that. How scarce is the resource? If a solid gold bar was what was required to treat a condition, than yeah you’re gonna need to make sure no one is wasting it. But if the treatment is common as dirt, why are we getting in the way?
What’s the cost of the system as-is? People take medications they don’t need and may experience side effects of this medicine. Given that wellbutrin is hardly a party drug, it’s not as if people are seeking this out recreationally. They want to feel better. And if it isn’t doing anything, or is making them feel worse, than the discussion with one’s doctor should end up with “let’s try something else” (YMMV, doctors are sometimes bad, patients are sometimes bad, I’m talking how a typical case should go in a quasi-sensible world).
And you know what’s worse? Anyone that isn’t the patient and the doctor being involved in that conversation.
As a data guy we need to explain why 11% of Americans over the age of 12 take an antidepressant. The USA is, yet again, a world leader.
RFKjr has an alternative solution. If it’s small scale and voluntary then costs to society are minimal. If it’s large scale and compulsory then it’s very fascist.
My opinion is that the medical profession should focus on the cause of the above statistic. Not the solution.
My hypothesis is that lazy doctors are being paid to prescribe antidepressants. Whenever they can’t find a solution they identify “stress”.
With all due respect, depression and anxiety go back in my family lineage at least the three generations upwards from me, and down to the younger generation below me.
There’s a real genetic component to this, and brain chemistry is still not well understood.
Obviously we should fight the cause not the symptoms, but if the cause is genetic you can’t exactly fix it (sure there’s eugenics, but myself and lots of family members are well respected in our fields, from trades to sciences, some of the anxious traits make us excel at things).
When I started taking antidepressants last year my life changed. Colours seemed brighter, music sounds better, I can get stuff done better than ever, my relationships are better, I’m a much happier and more stable person.
I get what you’re saying, there are bad doctors, that goes both ways. I grew up with a doctor who didn’t believe in depression, so nobody in my family ever got treated or diagnosed for any mental illnesses. Imagine having an issue but because it can’t be clearly tested for, or some doctors are lazy, now you just don’t get any treatment. That’s not better.
Maybe it’s because the US is a uniquely depressing place with a semi functional health care system?
But what leads you to believe they are being honest or will proceed in a scientific and humane way?
That is the real concern here. Conservatives describing their intentions in ways that sound good on the surface is the oldest and most practiced technique they have. That is why all the context and history around this craziness is so important.
This is my issue with all these “common sense” conservative ideas.
Yes, often common sense is good, but reality has complexity and nuance and you don’t get to just pretend them out of existence.
I think this policy is pure RFKjr. It’s not in project 2025 and conservatives wouldn’t endanger their big phama paychecks.
Now. It may be hijacked and twisted in its implementation. And I don’t think an environmental lawyer should be running health policy.
I think you are right to urge caution. The upsides are minimal and the potential downsides are massive.
Why is RFK Jr a reliable source for any of this? He’s hardly a reliable medical source. Dude promotes vaccine lies. He’s a lawyer by trade. He has no special medical knowledge or training. Why is he in charge of any of this in the first place?
The same reason as most of the other cabinet positions, I’d imagine. Secret personal loyalty based ones.
Or ye olde “useful idiot”. Honestly more rhetorical to draw attention to the absurdity of relying on RFK Jr for health advice.
Because he was soaking up votes as a 3rd party candidate. 10% of Americans wanted him for president.
[ANECDOTAL]
https://time.com/7208914/symptoms-doctors-dismiss-anxiety/
I’m done discussing this with you.
Dude, writing a single word does not even begin a discussion.
I feel like you haven’t gone through the process yourself. I got driven to the point of confessing I would be better off dead before I was considered for anti depressants, it’s not just a “I’m sad today” “ok here are anti depressants”
[ANECDOTAL]
I’ve been down the other road. Countless doctors dismissing symptoms as stress rather than fibromyalgia and prescribing antidepressants.
https://www.northwell.edu/katz-institute-for-womens-health/articles/gaslighting-in-womens-health
This is a legitimate conversation, but not the time and place. I have had similar issues with SSRI’s being the only solution presented to me (despite previous experiences + knowledge of my body’s previous reactions to these medication being articulated in my refusal) and this is very much due to having an AFAB body.
However, SSRI’s are an effective medication for many people, and the priority in this conversation needs to be on this deranged attack on medical expertise and established understandings of the science. There very much are serious issues with diagnoses/prescriptions being used as alternatives to acknowledging societal problems and a way to make invisible/medically gaslight the understudied chronic illnesses primarily experienced by women, but there are also people who are chemically depressed and are being served by the chemical treatment model - attacks on this fact are profoundly unscientific and harmful and the fact that they are being made by someone potentially leading the medical “establishment” = DEFCON 1.
I highlighted this group at the top of this thread. My beef is with dismissive doctors, not their chemically imbalanced patients.
your contributions are irrelevant to the topic, and also super shitty to bring up around a lot of people that’re scared for the mental health of their families. “your beef” isn’t worth sniffing, so please take it elsewhere. you should be able to tell from ratios alone that your comments are unwelcome, shameless, and tactless.
Lazy doctors pushing big pharma sponsored pills is right on topic. It doesn’t apply to everyone, but it applies to a large number of people.
11% of Americans over the age of 12 take an antidepressant.
This is a problem that shouldn’t be ignored even if it is being raised by a right wing, brain worm eaten anti vaxxer.
So, do you think it might be related to how the US isnuniquely the only industrialized nation with no universal health care, minimal (if any) social safety nets, a shit economy that only benefits the upper 1%, and the very obvious fascist heading our country is on?
the reason you’re in this thread is because
YOU FEEL UNSEEN BY YOUR DOCTORS BECAUSE THEY DISMISS YOUR PAIN
that’s not related whatsoever, i’m sorry, i used to be in your position, i hope you get a real diagnosis for what’s wrong (mine was hEDS) because most doctors say it’s fibromyalgia when they don’t know and they’ve given up… that’s for-profit medicine for you… but, as i’ve covered elsewhere
people take anti-depressants for several problems, including fibromyalgia
SO MAYBE you should take a step back and chill
as someone that was also given an Rx for antidepressants due to a “fibromyalgia” diagnosis, it’s a working theory that one of the reasons for that disorder is, in fact, neurotransmitter dysregulation (e.g., norepinephrine) so that’s not completely off-base… sorry. it sucks, but it has to be eliminated as a mechanism. is it possible you have undiagnosed hEDS? that was the case with me, and a geneticist was able to sus it out. please google it, because if you’ve been diagnosed with fibro it means you have a vague nebula of symptoms that could be any number of things (e.g., lupus) and requires an extensive differential diagnosis which usually ends up being something else (if you’re anything like me).
It’s that the symptoms constantly change that is so frustrating. Thanks for the tips.
Im more concerned about TV docs prescribing cialis to 50 year olds…