Helen Fisher on Love at Ted.com

[aetrix9]

Helen Fisher talks about Infatuation, romantic love and attachment (At TED.com). Interestingly she speculates that SSRI use is hindering our society's ability to form long-term, deep attachment to other people due to modification of the serotonin system in the brain. (18:13) I don't quite agree with the generalizations she makes about maleness

Comments

SSRI

[therogon]

That is amazing. I actually read up on a drug called Wellbutrin because my pregnant now-fiancee was taking it and I wanted to know exactly what the FDA considers a safe Class-B (pregnancy safe) medicine. And this is interesting - Wellbutrin, an SSRI, isn't known to cause any physical fetal abnormalities, BUT there isn't significant statistical data to back that up because only so many of the trial test subjects (pregnant women taking the drug) reported back. Of course, I believe that the drug may indeed be PHYSICALLY harmless, but as Helen Fisher speculates, and I as well before I ever saw your post on the subject, the FDA cares about jack shit in relation to mental health it seems. Which is how I explained it to my fiancee so she would stop taking it, and now - in addition to ADD, ADHD, Autism, and a host of other high-rate of diagnosis childhood diseases, I firmly believe depression and anxiety to be on the rise do to un-conscientious medicating and a decrease in hands-on parenting (meaning parents who care about how their kids are affected by society, bad diets, media, broken homes, etc. enough to actually make positive decisions for their children.) As a new parent, this kind of thing is tantamount. Especially if I want my child to be well adjusted at all.

Re: SSRI

[aetrix9]

I think the problem isn't that the FDA doesn't care about mental health safety, but that clinical trials of drugs conducted by pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms aren't trying to answer questions about the mental health of their participants.

The problem is, as I see it, mental health affects are much more difficult to gauge than biological effects. With biologicals, it's easy to measure effects like decrease in measurement of blood cholesterol, size of tumor, reduction of body temperature, survival after disease, etc... However, with mental health, we have to develop these complex surveys and questionnaires in order to quantify the mental state and only THEN can we make comparisons. Because the only way to gauge mental health status also involves psychiatric evaluation by an expensive professional, most research studies, unless designed to directly measure mental health, won't add on mental health evaluations unless there's a serious concern about the effects on mental health (Say with chronic opiod use or with hypnotic sleep medications.)

Re: SSRI

[aetrix9]

(I'll post my three comments separately)

The problem with testing drugs on pregnant women is that we can't actually enroll pregnant women into clinical trials UNLESS the drug is specifically for pregnant women and can ONLY offer a known benefit to the pregnant woman. So if mental health drugs were specifically to treat a mental health disorder that only occurs in pregnant women, we could, after establishing a benefit of these drugs in normal people, give these drugs to pregnant women. But most drugs aren't actually tested in clinical trials that include pregnant women and our information on their safety is based, as you said above, on incidental reporting.

Re: SSRI

[aetrix9]

(3)
The toxic environment.

As much as I agree with you that there's a huge problem of broadly-defined psychaitric disorders diagnosed in children, I think attributing the causes solely to medication and parenting neglects an important aspect - the environment. We know there's more and more pollution in our environment, there's more processed foods, record high TV consumption and high divorce rates. All of this is also having an affect. It's hard as hell to raise kids now and I don't think it's all because of bad parents. It's easy to blame parents instead of making society-wide proactive changes to the environment.

Re: SSRI

[therogon]

True, but many parents can institute better control measures to keep the environment from adversely affecting the child. Not being a bad parent doesn't mean you can't do better. But I also agree that things definitely need to change, I only don't think that the people who could do it are willing to sacrifice what is necessary to make a real difference - not that they don't want things to be different, just that most aren't willing to go to extremes to make it better for anyone other than they and theirs.
Also, I think many parents lack the time and/or money to make positive changes for their children, ex - the switch to a healthier diet is expensive, and food prep is quite time-consuming compared with easier methods.

I also think a lot of people are lazier than they should be when it comes to being proactive about life. If not lazy, incredibly impatient to the point of not doing something because it requires too much time or commitment.

Hence why communication and honesty probably make the best relationships, and lack thereof is mostly responsible for bad ones, because actually putting long-term effort is a daunting idea sometimes - whether you believe you love someone or not.