Researchers Find Antidepressants Increase Risk of Death (medicalxpress.com) 125
Artem Tashkinov shares a report from Medical Xpress: Antidepressant medications, most commonly prescribed to reduce depression and anxiety, increase the risk of death, according to new findings by a McMaster-led team of researchers. It's widely known that brain serotonin affects mood, and that most commonly used antidepressant treatment for depression blocks the absorption of serotonin by neurons. It is less widely known, though, that all the major organs of the body -- the heart, kidneys, lungs, liver -- use serotonin from the bloodstream. Antidepressants block the absorption of serotonin in these organs as well, and the researchers warn that antidepressants could increase the risk of death by preventing multiple organs from functioning properly.
Interestingly, the news about antidepressants is not all bad. The researchers found that antidepressants are not harmful for people with cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. This makes sense since these antidepressants have blood-thinning effects that are useful in treating such disorders. Unfortunately, this also means that for most people who are in otherwise good cardiovascular health, antidepressants tend to be harmful. The study has been published in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.
Interestingly, the news about antidepressants is not all bad. The researchers found that antidepressants are not harmful for people with cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. This makes sense since these antidepressants have blood-thinning effects that are useful in treating such disorders. Unfortunately, this also means that for most people who are in otherwise good cardiovascular health, antidepressants tend to be harmful. The study has been published in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.
Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
That may well be and it's good to know this, however it makes little sense lowering your risk of death due to serotonin absorption blockers when you in turn either run a risk of throwing yourself off the next bridge or don't have any fun living anyway.
Re: Sure (Score:4, Informative)
If they actually worked as antidepressants... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidepressants-just-placebos-with-side-effects/ [scientificamerican.com]
Re: Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
If they cause depression to lessen then they do work as anti-depressants
Re: Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
I've tried exercise, yoga, meditation, changing my diet, quitting drinking, CBT and many self-help books. The only thing that alleviates my symptoms effectively is drug therapy. I wouldn't take them if something else worked.
Re: Sure (Score:1)
You take your health seriously, you are the outlier. Most others, myself included, won't make healthy changes when a magic pill is recommended by their doctor that gives similar results. It took years for me step away from the pills and change my diet, etc.
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I've tried exercise, yoga, meditation, changing my diet, quitting drinking, CBT and many self-help books. The only thing that alleviates my symptoms effectively is drug therapy. I wouldn't take them if something else worked.
CBT? Who was your dom? What was your safe word?
(CBT stands for Cock and Ball Torture.)
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Placebos do work, I know it is popular on slashdot to misunderstand the placebo effect and to claim that they're useless, but actually it is a known thing you can look up on the interwebs.
When somebody says it is a placebo, they said that it works; that much should be obvious! However, if it has side effects, those might not be necessary in order to gain the same benefits. Placebos are the easiest class of medicine to reformulate.
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Yup, this. Which the chief side effects of antidepressants are depression and suicide, that doesn't mean they didn't do anything, it means they CAUSED those things to occur in higher rates in controlled trials. And when the ads say "GoodVibraxil is believed to work by adding funzones to your whizwhams and blocking your gloffin's ability to access to nega particles", you know it's a fucking sham.
The way it works now is they inject random shit into volunteers (the homeless, prisoners, etc.) and then if ther
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Well, let's say I was surprised how happy I was with the side-effect of a reduced libido :D.
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It is quite a relief indeed.
Re: Sure (Score:2)
It's a terrible study, having read the actual paper. Statistical fishing.
Consider the source (Score:2)
Re:Sure (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that those antidepressants may well make you throw yourself off a bridge.
The key problem with antidepressants is that they usually increase your drive and enable you to "act" before they improve your mood. Now ponder: What happens when you give a deeply depressed, suicidal person whose main reason to NOT kill himself is that he didn't even have the drive to do this a motivational boost?
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Only true for some specific classes of them. Others help almost right away.
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they usually increase your drive and enable you to "act" before they improve your mood.
In other words they probably don't improve you mood at all, its going getting up and actually doing something that improves your mode over time.
Which isn't to say the drugs are not therefore useful in treating depression just that name causes a lot of confusion about how and why they work. Maybe we should call them 'drive-booters' instead.
Paxil is the Devil (Score:2)
Paxil made me completely apathetic, with a diminished sexual interest, and lack of appetite among other symptoms. I'd rather be depressed and have periodic "black moods".
Limited usage of THC works wonders in comparison - with none of the anti-depressant symptoms.
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I hear prozac is also good for making you fall out of love.
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chmod -R 666 soul
make -j 666
Oops, typo! Meant to type "6", but force of habit (and too much Red Bull). Unfortunately, so many processes spawned, didn't see the ledge.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrr—
Like antidepressant - criminal psychopathy link (Score:3)
What happens when you give a deeply depressed, suicidal person whose main reason to NOT kill himself is that he didn't even have the drive to do this a motivational boost?
This reminds me of the sampling-error false link between antidepressants and criminal behavior, and the ethical dilemma some psychologists have when treating psychopaths.
Some psychopaths (just like some non-psychopaths) also happen to be clinically depressed. (It's apparently like being color-blind vs. being diabetic. No particular link,
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[you] don't have any fun living anyway.
Why do you suppose a group of people on a scale of millions are not "having any fun living"? Isn't the answer to that question the root cause of the problem?
Bioavailable Serotonin (Score:2)
If you would like to naturally increase your bioavailable serotonin, then the short answer is to take tryptophan supplements with niacin.
When tryptophan passes through the digestive system, it can take one of two pathways, processing into either niacin or serotonin (and then a portion into melotonin after further processing).
Taking niacin with tryptophan will maximize the serotonin pathway.
However, use great caution with these supplements in the presence of an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, i
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So basically a diet rich in grass-fed beef! I have know that was the path to happiness for a long time. Good to know the science behind why!
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Too bad that the cause of action is unknown and the hypothesis that the mechanism of action involves changing the serotonin levels are completely debunked.
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The real cure for depression is cognitive therapy, which I otherwise call 'learning to deal with your own shit effectively'. It te
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If we use only objective measurements and totally ignore the subjective experience then it is easy to say that you were much improved as a zombie.
Scary shit, IMO. Great advice with cognitive therapy, because regardless of it is measured to be "effective" it is still useful and doesn't have negative side effects. (when administered correctly, of course) That said, it isn't a "cure" and that is way over-selling it.
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Sorry dude, but 5HTP is a waste of money - if it would work, it would be sold as medicine, not as a dietary supplement. Real antidepressants work just fine, but it takes time to find the right one because people are different. So you have tried fluoxetine, it didn't work out for you and now all antidepressants must be crap. That is quite a stupid stance and no amount of bold text will make it less stupid. Had you tried something else, you'd just as well might be praising the meds now.
While the cognitive beh
Wow... (Score:3, Funny)
That's... Depressing....
Risk of death (Score:3, Funny)
This makes me wonder about the medical qualifications of the article writers:
"The researchers reviewed studies involving hundreds of thousands of people and found that antidepressant users had a 33% higher chance of death than non-users."
So, users of antidepressants have a 133% chance of death?
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Depends on the cause of death, though.
Threw himself off a bridge? Attribute to depression.
Organs shut down, autopsy showed severely reduced levels of serotonin to be the cause? Attribute to side effects from anti-depressants.
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It is the other way around. The most common antidepressants are serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so there is too much serotonin in the rest of the body, not too little. This is why a very common side effect of this kind of antidepressants is constant low level diarrhea.
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Serotonin levels are only temporarily altered, and they return to the prior balance before the medicine even becomes effective. That is totally debunked as the mechanism. The mechanism is unknown, and that is widely known.
Please stop repeating zombie pharma industry talking points from the past that died decades ago!
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It doesn't say anything about risk adjustment; for example, what proportion of the people on antidepressants have other significant health issues like cancer or Alzheimer's?
More importantly, from the summary it seems to be comparing the risks for antidepressant users to the risks for the general population. A more apt comparison might be to people diagnosed with depression who DIDN'T take antidepressants.
The relevant question is: If you're depressed, will you be more likely to die if you take them or if y
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It might well be a cause/effect error. From the summary it's impossible to know how the control group was selected...presuming it was. And if it wasn't, then it may be saying that depression is likely to lead to death.
I'm going to presume that there was *some* selection done to the control group, but I really doubt they did a study where some people diagnosed as depressed were randomly given anti-depressants and others not, and otherwise treated identically. So I'm going to doubt that this is a significa
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Risks are usually defined within a length of time. So a 33% higher risk over 1 year, over 5 years, etc.
Nothing to do with depression (Score:2)
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The drug industry chasing $$... (Score:2, Interesting)
Antidepressants block the absorption of serotonin in these organs as well, and the researchers warn that antidepressants could increase the risk of death by preventing multiple organs from functioning properly.
Is it just me? I find the whole idea of a pill curing depression rather strange. I think what we need is a more just society; a society that focuses less on material possessions or money but more on family -
whatever that may mean to an individual.
Let's remember that there are communities on this planet where depression is an unknown, especially the so called third world nations, despite their popluation's daily struggle to survive.
Re:The drug industry chasing $$... (Score:4, Insightful)
So in your opinion, brain chemistry has nothing to do with mental stability. And if you'd bother to read the literature, anti-depressants do not "cure" depression. The stabilize a person so they aren't functionally incapacitated....when they work. That's the other problem, everybody's body chemistry is different, what works on one does not work on another. And what works this year might not work next year on the same person. People are moving targets due to aging, and their diets also vary from year to year.
Depression is not a single condition. Pick up the Harvard Guide to Psychiatry, there are myriad disorders, i.e., paranoia, grandiosity, etc. One person usually does not have a single one but is some smorgasbord of different conditions. That makes picking drugs that much harder.
So go ahead believing a just society will cure depression. Just societies also generate serial killers.
Re:The drug industry chasing $$... (Score:4, Interesting)
Depression is not a single condition. Pick up the Harvard Guide to Psychiatry, there are myriad disorders, i.e., paranoia, grandiosity, etc. One person usually does not have a single one but is some smorgasbord of different conditions. That makes picking drugs that much harder.
So go ahead believing a just society will cure depression. Just societies also generate serial killers.
Believing the pill-pushing healers is also difficult to swallow due to the one constant that stands out; Greed.
Greed has infected the Pharma industry, and it wouldn't matter if the pill was as worthless as a placebo; if it generates revenue and comes with the benefit of being able to generate more revenue due to side effects, it's considered a good thing and the answer in our corrupt world of ruthless capitalism.
With regards to what a just society is capable of generating, Big Pharma is now the largest opium dealer on the planet, with Greed killing tens of thousands of people every year.
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So in your opinion, brain chemistry has nothing to do with mental stability.
I find that for many people they can alter their "brain chemistry" as you put it by practicing guided meditation and learn to control their thought processes to direct them more purposefully. I assume there is a group that has no ability to do this and their minds are random and chaotic but I don't think that's all of them. The mind appears to not have the structure required to purposefully guide it when you are young and only through diligent practice and training can you attempt to guide it and control
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Sadly, very few people are interested in this and seem to believe that everything external to them is responsible for altering their mental state.
These are lessons that often can only be understood after they are learned, and so there is no known effective way to teach it other than to motivated students who already do understand part of it.
It is like asking chimps to start their education earlier so that they might learn to read. How would they learn to value reading enough to focus on the lessons?
Re:The drug industry chasing $$... (Score:5, Informative)
Antidepressants block the absorption of serotonin in these organs as well, and the researchers warn that antidepressants could increase the risk of death by preventing multiple organs from functioning properly.
Is it just me? I find the whole idea of a pill curing depression rather strange. I think what we need is a more just society; a society that focuses less on material possessions or money but more on family -
whatever that may mean to an individual.
Let's remember that there are communities on this planet where depression is an unknown, especially the so called third world nations, despite their popluation's daily struggle to survive.
Yes it is just you! Although it's true that unhappiness can be a byproduct of social ills it is profoundly ignorant of you to confuse this with clinical depression. The former might trigger an epsidoe of the latter but depression, anxiety, bipolar specturm disorders, schizophrenia and other mental disorders have a neurophysiological basis.
Also, please keep the tired trope about third world nations to yourself as there is no evedince whatsoever to support the conjecture. People in third world nations who suffer mental illness are generally shunned. Those that come to harm generally have their cause of death misattributed,
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Actually it's not just them, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The view that a number of these 'mental illnesses' are actually just part of the human condition, not something that is ostensibly wrong, does have some support among some in science and medicine and that we may be medicalising relatively trivial bits of what it is to be human. I would agree there are certainly some serious conditions where therapy and drugs are necessary to manage and control. But as this is specifically about SSRIs used to
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The anti-psychiatry movement mostly consists of scientologists.
Re: The drug industry chasing $$... (Score:3)
Also apparently slashdotters who have never been nor meet anyone who was depressed. Which is incredibly depressing. I didn't realize basic treatment of depression has reached global warming levels of denial outside of scientologists and conservative Christians.
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Let's remember that there are communities on this planet where depression is an unknown, especially the so called third world nations
Uh buddy, hate to be the one to break it to you. But this was known back in ye olde roman times and earlier. The diagnosis was usually something like "malaise of the soul."
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I'd guess that most of the time it IS family that is the root cause of a person's depression. Giving him more thereof is probably not going to be the cure.
depression == family (Score:3)
That's not to say that finding better families for foster care wouldn't help a lot of kids w/ mental problems. (especially if there's one neglected kid who starts taking it out on the other kids, resulting in all ending up with issues) ...
But my first thought about this was 'doesn't suicide rate go up for the holidays?' Those are the times we spend with family. Now, maybe it's because people can't afford presents for the kids after getting laid off and they see themselves as a failure (so it's related to
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Is it just me? I find the whole idea of a pill curing depression rather strange. I think what we need is a more just society; a society that focuses less on material possessions or money but more on family
Well, the idea of living in a just society where depression is unknown is a worthy goal, but in the meantime . . .
My brother suffered from depression for decades. He's otherwise smart, talented, capable, and caring, and when he could force himself to work, he did well. But then there were the months when he just couldn't make himself leave his house. He would just sit inside all day petting his dog while the rest of his loving family fretted about him and wondered what we could do.
Then he found a therapi
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There are people that have intrinsic imbalances in their brain chemistry. The could have just won the lottery and fallen in love with a beautiful, kind woman and adopted a puppy and still be contemplating suicide. Their mental health is compromised and they are clinically depressed no mater what reality should indicate their mood to be. Those people definitely need medication, and medication often lets them function as productive members of society.
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Let's remember that there are communities on this planet where depression is an unknown,
Yes, every community that doesn't have a saturation level of psychologists and psychiatrists and a drug store on every corner, with insurance that pays for all kinds of things, has no depression. That's because there is nobody to diagnose it, and nobody to profit from it.
Until ADHD and ADD and such became the reason why Johnnie and Suzie couldn't read, nobody had ADD or ADHD, either. And now, people who are jittery and nervous have "restless leg syndrome", because there is a drug that treats it.
despite their popluation's daily struggle to survive.
In other wo
Medical Mental Health is Insane!!! (Score:2)
Let's start with something the computer literate ought to understand: Any computational problem at least as hard as solving the Halting Problem is certain to have no general solution. If we restrict to a finite Turing machine of a given size N (e.g. by looping the tape, or having the machine halt-and-reject in the advent of running of tape), any size we choose, the corresponding Halting Problem for that machine cannot be solved on that machine, only a much larger machine.
Once we reach the point where decisi
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Sorry, but even one drink will affect decision making ability, though not as much as two. So will a cup of coffee. Or being hungry. Or being tired.
I agree that the problem is difficult, but you are oversimplifying. And there are ways of resolving the problem which, though not guaranteed, *do* result in generally correct answers. Of a statistical nature. These involve having a well matched control group. Unfortunately, the summary gives no sign that such a group was well matched, and the nature of the
So... (Score:1)
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That Obama affects your mental health when he isn't even President any longer is worrying.
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You can't change neither Obama nor Trump.
You can only change yourself.
So why not start there?
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That Obama affects your mental health when he isn't even President any longer is worrying.
Agreed, and now he's even causing you to worry. Will his reign of chaos ever cease? Worst. President. Evaaar.
Risk of death is now 105% ? (Score:2)
Quite depressing indeed...
Not the study I was looking for (Score:5, Interesting)
The tittle had me excited because I thought they'd been studying the suicide risk of depressed people on anti-depressants vs. depressed people not on anti-depressants. There have been studies done, such as this one [sagepub.com] (open access, published in the journal of the Royal Society of Medicine) found that when selective serotonin and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors are given to adult healthy volunteers with no signs of a mental disorder, the suicide risk is doubled. Whether this doubling also occurs in depressed individuals is the real question, but this is hard to study ethically.
Anti-depressants are far more controversial than most people seem to think, and the medical field has slowly begun to admit it. Note that I'm not saying the study I mentioned or this study prove that their usage should be stopped, but at the very least they're clear indicators that more research is needed into their efficacy and potential alternatives.
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Generally speaking, antidepressants don't make you happy. They provide almost a removal or suppression of feeling (so you don't feel depressed but you don't feel happy to the same extent - or you find it HARDER to feel those things).
If you're taking antidepressants then I don't think that the death-risk is particularly significant (sure TWICE THE RISK sounds scary but it's a small percentage anyway). I think the only study to do is: Depressed people NOT on them vs. Depressed people ON them. Which, gener
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Absolutely, I agree with this 100 % which is why I said that more studies need to be done.
I mean, it's clear that there some depressed people who find anti-depressants very useful. But my understanding based on very cursory reading on the topic as well as some people I know who've
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They do numb all emotions somewhat, but the specific effect on the negative emotions is far greater. Even if they won't actually cure the depression, they still give a much-needed break from it and show the patients that yes, things can actually change for the better.
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Generally speaking, antidepressants don't make you happy. They provide almost a removal or suppression of feeling
For people with major depression, the SSRI anti-depressants are rarely prescribed alone. They're almost always given with valium derivatives that make people feel good in the sense of more peaceful and less anxious - and they're often also given along with anti-psychotics that can, among other things, suppress feelings. So it's often hard to tease apart the specific effect of each drug.
There's also the issue that SSRIs are claimed to sure depression on a time scale of weeks of months when pharmacologically
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I'm using an SNRI for ADHD and want to lower the dose, but my psychiatrist has other opinions on that. Because so much keeps changing without me changing the drugs around, I've elected to let him have that battle for the moment. I actually started sleeping well--I started having depression issues out of nowhere, so I took a weak NDRI with a short half-life to get rid of that feeling during the day (it wears off in 3 hours), then would just become lethargic and sleep all night. It was great for a few wee
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Then I start feeling high as shit. I need this stuff, but maybe in a lower dose--
So take less. Unless you're being physically restrained and force-injected with this medication, you can simply take less of it. It is your choice.
Pharmacies sell pill cutters. The active ingredients are rarely, if ever, concentrated in one place in a pill, they are distributed throughout, so truly, half a pill has half the dose of a full pill.
It is a bit harder to manage to double your dosage on a prescription med without a doctor's ultimate approval. You can do it until your current allocation of pills
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You can't cut the pill. Never, ever, ever open an Atomoxetine capsule. The drug is highly-caustic and will burn your hands, mouth, and eyes. You have to get the capsule down to your stomach (full of aggressive, organic-matter-dissolving acids and enzymes) and small intestine (full of aggressive, organic-matter-dissolving lye and enzymes) before it releases the drug.
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The tittle had me excited because I thought they'd been studying the suicide risk of depressed people on anti-depressants vs. depressed people not on anti-depressants. There have been studies done, such as this one [sagepub.com] (open access, published in the journal of the Royal Society of Medicine) found that when selective serotonin and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors are given to adult healthy volunteers with no signs of a mental disorder, the suicide risk is doubled. Whether this doubling also occurs in depressed individuals is the real question, but this is hard to study ethically.
Anti-depressants are far more controversial than most people seem to think, and the medical field has slowly begun to admit it. Note that I'm not saying the study I mentioned or this study prove that their usage should be stopped, but at the very least they're clear indicators that more research is needed into their efficacy and potential alternatives.
Indeed you are right! Antidepressants are far more controversial than most people seem to think. The reasons some doctors in the medical community are beginning to admit it (embarrassingly after 20+ years) is that the data for their effectiveness is really thin. Essentially, they don't work outside of patients with (maybe) really severe depression, and even in those cases the effect is largely minimal.
What's worse, like all good/new things once the first bits of data started to show they "helped" (mood in m
Re:Not the study I was looking for (Score:4, Interesting)
You should never make any health decisions based on individual studies, and most importantly never, ever go looking for studies which support a decision you are going to make, because you'll find them.
I like to say that science isn't about truth, it's about evidence. The difference is there is logically no such thing as conflicting truths, although two different truths may make you feel conflicted. Evidence, on the other hand, contradicts other evidence all the time. It's the normal state of things.
What you want to do is base decisions on systematic review papers published in high impact journals. The purpose of a systematic review is to review the state of evidence at the current point in time. You may disagree with the author's conclusions, but the evidence should be laid out right there.
Sure (Score:2)
"Interestingly, the news about antidepressants is not all bad. "
Sure, after a while the most depressed people are all dead, so there are less depressed people.
YOu have a choice (Score:1)
Choose your way to die, from a myocardial infarction or from hanging yourself.
Once again, association is NOT causation (Score:2)
The cause of this could be (Score:2)
While growing up most people learn, for better or worse to deal with their feelings and how to control the extremes. By changing your brains natural chemistry you will inevitably, in some people introduce a critically destabilizing change that sometimes causes the person to crash. I say this because it happened to me years ago when I worked for a not for profit mental health system. I was proscribed over the years several different types of antidepressants with very little in the way of real therapy. Som
Control group? (Score:5, Interesting)
The article doesn't mention a control group.
Clinical depression is an illness, and like other illnesses, it can cause a lot of physical problems. Could it be that the illness itself is causing the organ malfunctions, rather than the antidepressants?
Depression also leads to many bad habits, such as substance abuse and other addictions. Could it be that these bad habits are the real cause of the organ failures?
Antidepressants do have some nasty side effects. We've known that for decades. But this study doesn't prove it. And even if it's right, the risk of death and poor quality of life due to depression is far worse than anything caused by these side effects.
Psychiatry is medieval (Score:2)
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DBT is very interesting and a lot of folks that deal with the public might want to at least read part of a good book on same.
if you look long enough you might find the books by "Marsha M. Linehan" laying around
Nutritional causes of brain issues (Score:2)
Remember, the brain is mostly fat. Some inspiration of what may be possible: https://nutritionandmetabolism... [biomedcentral.com]
"We report the unexpected resolution of longstanding schizophrenic symptoms after starting a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet. After a review of the literature, possible reasons for this include the metabolic consequences from the elimination of gluten from the diet, and the modulation of the disease of schizophrenia at the cellular level."
And:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/lear... [drfuhrman.com]
"Depression doesnâ
A:B comparison (Score:2)
Risk of death from anti-depressants: Up a few percent over your entire lifespan
Risk of death from suicide: 100% the second you do it
I hope this BS doesn't discourage people struggling with depression from seeking help... If it does, those deaths are squarely on the people that ran this study.
Only have to lose once... (Score:2)
Depression is a battle that you only have to lose once. Just having depression can mean fighting thoughts of stepping out in front of a train or wondering if that knife would be sharp enough to cut your wrists before it hurts to stop.