The drugs don't work

[hirez]

... Or at least, they're just papering over the cracks, rather than actually fixing something.

However, if Serotonin theory doesn't hold up, does that mean the scare stories about MDMA leaching the stuff away are as reliable as the folklore about LSD and chromosome damage?

Comments

[yaruar]

it's a bit beyond my brain but my current neighbour is involved in running projects to use mri's and other such gubbins to test the effect on the brain of mental health issues and the drugs to treat them. apparantly he was saying no one in the past has considered this a good thing to research.

[markeris]

Despite it being very much held up as current understanding (with a footnote that the people with supposedly depleted serotonin levels seemed to be scoring jolly high on all measures of feeling chipper and upbeat compared to people with non tampered level (1) ) when I was doing psychopharmacology - and thus causing the young me to not go anywhere near the stuff - in as much as I`ve kept up with the field since I believe that the whole neurotoxicity of MDMA has since had a series of metastudies with the effective conclusion of "Yeah. In RATS brains. If you misread some of the numbers."

Also there have not, to my knowledge, been any of the to be predicted midlife crises from hell / out of the fillum Blue Sunshine, or at least none that have been sufficiently identified and collated into "a thing".

(1) Their familiarity with experiental extreme joy seeming to rather over ride their supposedly frazzled happy wires. Which was always a sign that things might not be as supposed that was freely admitted to at the time.

[hirez]

It may well be that the sort of people who went out and caned it of a weekend were perhaps getting out of it to escape a pre-existing life of grim pointlessness.

[valkyriekaren]

FWIW, when I was on SSRIs, I wasn't told, "This will fix a serotonin imbalance in your brain," I was told, "This will hopefully help you to not feel so low and weepy all the time."

To an extent, I don't much care how a drug is working, as long as it is. I don't really understand how ibuprofen gets rid of period pain, but if it works I'm going to take it.

[zotz]

Odd article. We're always being told that the idea of a chemical imbalance is wrong, without me hearing anyone recently saying that an imbalance was the problem. Straw man, anyone?

Her analysis seems to be based on intellectual rather than empirical factors, but fundamentally we don't give people antipsychotics because we theorise about their brain chemistry, we do it because in practice it seems to solve certain problems they have. The theorising is secondary to that, and comes later. My own observations are of course only anecdotes, but the friends I have who've taken their meds have done far better than those who are in the habit of refusing to. The obvious explanation is that the drugs have a tendency to work, although of course there are other possibilities.

I don't remember reading MDMA concerns termed as "leaching away" anything. Concerns on theoretical grounds are reasonable, as long as you bear in mind any lack of solid evidence.

[hirez]

I suspect a poor choice of words on my part. Perhaps 'The drugs allow you to function. (We're just not quite sure why)' would be a better start, with the last para reading something like 'I more or less remember scare stories about MDMA upsetting the natural balance of serotonin and the brain going "Well bloody sod yer then" and thereafter producing Not Enough out of spite.'

(Obviously everyone who went and had it large in the early 90s has a tiny Bobby Chariot hidden within their brain.)

[liz_lowlife]

You know my story.

I was hit by post traumatic stress on top of being rather SpeSHUL™ as it was.
Combination of speSHUL™ and breakdown=a bit bonkers for a protracted period.
Beta blockers semi controlled the shakes and the panic-central but they did not change the fact that I was slowly descending into depression mode as well.
I asked for CBT and instead was offered SSRIs.
You know the rest...I spent 3 months dying inside on a drug that should NEVER have been prescribed to a Synaesthete and ended up with "DO NOT ADMINISTER SSRIs" on her medical record.

Doctors do not always recognise the difference between those who NEED to face their demons and those who need to be somatised. Since I am not one of the latter, the article speaks to me that essentially, when it comes to malaises of the mind, modern Science still has no real clue. They will cure cancer before they cure the manyfold subtleties of mental illness....