#My Story -- thoughts

[FarmGirlWorks]

This week, depression became more visible with a spate of celebrity suicides. Today, Deborah Messing started a hashtag #MyStory on Twitter where people admit to their battle(s) with depression. I saw lots of "antidepressants saved my life." Not surprising and the first reaction from a lot of folks who are still in shock. I feel that depression/anxiety is so much more complex than simplistic ADs and that they are the wrong "medicine" for the illness. Glad however that this issue has a spotlight on it.

[Rosetta]

Yes, I used to think Celexa saved my life.  I really did.  I had no idea I could feel so much worse than I felt when I started taking it.  I suppose without the means to get any real help, anti-depressants are very tempting.  They are just like alcohol.  Imagine if a doctor said have a drink everyday, and at the next appointment he said, It's not working anymore?  Then you need two drinks a day.  After several visits, the patient is drinking too much and going downhill.  The doctor tells him to switch to cocaine.  That continues for a while and then the doctor prescribes heroin.  That's the way doctors are prescribing ADs, ADHD drugs and benzos now.  

[FarmGirlWorks]

That is a perfect analogy!

[manymoretodays]

This:  https://beyondmeds.com/2018/06/09/suicide-crime/

.......and my own commentary   In my area work is ongoing to get mental health teams out on suicide calls to reduce the trauma(CIT officers may be involved on the team, I don't know).  Improvement, in any case, and possibly diversion from the usual treatment.

........and also this..........

(Shared from a blogger)  Here is his site.  https://robwipond.com/archives/1783

 

I saw this information released today from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showing that suicide rates have been increasing in virtually all U.S. states since 1999. It’s getting a lot of news coverage accompanied by a lot of bluster and self-promoting from mental health professionals that more people need to get into psychiatric treatment. So I was interested to see how this trend (provided in a nation-wide format by the National Institute of Mental Health) mapped onto trends in antidepressant use over the same time frame. Below is what it looks like in a graph. (Note that the antidepressant use numbers from the CDC come in four-year blocks, so I filled in the intervening years in each case — the overall trend is clear.)

Of course, this only shows correlation, not causation. Still, it’s fairly compelling evidence that, at the least, antidepressants are not preventing suicides. Also worth considering is the fact that, in 2014, a highly dubious scientific article mapped antidepressant use onto a questionable surrogate marker for suicide rates in youth and showed the opposite correlation over a selected two-year period — and it got extensive global media coverage and launched calls from psychiatrists for the FDA to remove the suicide warnings from antidepressants. So we should hear even louder calls now to boost those warnings on antidepressants, right?

 

Edited June 10, 2018 by manymoretodays
commentary, additional link

[FarmGirlWorks]

3 hours ago, manymoretodays said:

Still, it’s fairly compelling evidence that, at the least, antidepressants are not preventing suicides.

Thank you, thank you, @manymoretodays... this is exactly what I suspected, just nice to see data around it. I did read the beyondmeds article and thought that was spot on. I am convincing a friend to not start ADs and I know seeing Michael Pollan got her over the fence but this kind of hard data should completely tip her over to no antidepressants.

[manymoretodays]

Good.  Good.

Love, peace, healing/inrecovery, and growth baby!

mmt

[LaurnaT]

FarmGirlWorks and Manymoretodays,

What an interesting chart! In the SSRI study I posted here yesterday,  I get into the issue of suicidal depression. Briefly, the otolaryngologist Guy Berard (e-acute) discovered that his suicidally depressed patients had a particular pattern or profile on their audiograms, usually in the left ear but occasionally in the right ear. The oddity was two "peaks" of hyperacusis at 2 and 8 kiloHertz with a trough of less sensitive hearing between those peaks. (I think the trough may be as significant as the peaks, in terms of energy loss to the brain.) When he treated them with his adaptation of the Tomatis Method, which actually had a stronger left-ear stimulating component than the original Tomatis program, the peaks flattened out, the trough lifted, and the suicidal tendencies disappeared. He had phenomenal success: 97.7 % of his 235 suicidal patients were healed, 90% of them within the standard 10 days of treatment. A few had to come back for one or two more courses of treatment. One committed suicide early in treatment and two who were examined but did not return for treatment took their own lives. As you will see from my study, I think antidepressants and many other types of drugs (and various other things) that cause depression do so by harming the ear(s). That's not the only part of the body those drugs harm, of course; but a surprising number of symptoms arise from ear damage alone. In terms of diagnosis, I found it interesting that vestibular symptoms (dizziness, vertigo, balance problems) seem to be a stronger indicator of suicidal tendencies than cochlear symptoms. The fact that almost everyone he treated recovered suggests that people with the same symptoms from medication damage might also benefit from using Focused Listening on the left ear or binaural listening to high-frequency music. If the person can get an audiogram, this is one of a few really clear diagnoses that can be made simply from the audiogram, although we are not yet sure why particular points of hyperacusis indicate very specific problems. He pinned down the profiles for mild and moderate depression, for certain allergies, and for aggression. I am sure from my own research that the range of right-ear "mental" problems I have seen cured with music must also have specific profiles because they, too, fall on a continuum of right-ear function. But I haven't been in a position to get enough audiograms to prove yet what those profiles look like. As I mentioned to FarmGirlWorks, balance problems from ear damage that is not reversible can be treated by shifting the sensory mechanism to the tongue, as Norman Doidge describes in The Brain that Changes Itself. He showed the video of the woman he writes about at a conference I attended and it was astonishing. The plasticity of the brain allows it to transfer the wiring it used to have in relation to the ear to a different organ: the tongue, in this case.

[Caspur]

Hello Manymoretodays,

 

That graph is remarkable and also very worrying as the overall trend is continually upwards. My wife works as a nurse in a school in the UK and she has several children who have recently been prescribed AD medication, in spite of the known risks of increased suicidality in younger people.

 

Please share your graph far and wide!

 

Cheers

 

Caspur