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1 in 3 Adults In The U.S. Take Medications That Can Cause Depression. These drugs already list depression as a possible symptom:
If you take Prilosec or Zantac for acid reflux, a beta blocker for high blood pressure, or Xanax for anxiety, you may be increasing your risk of depression.
More than 200 common medications sold in the U.S. include depression as a potential side effect. Sometimes, the risk stems from taking several drugs at the same time. Now, a new study finds people who take these medicines are, in fact, more likely to be depressed.
The list includes a wide range of commonly taken medications. Among them are certain types of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) (used to treat acid reflux), beta blockers, anxiety drugs, painkillers including ibuprofen, ACE inhibitors (used to treat high blood pressure), and anti-convulsant drugs.
I often take Zantac or Rantab for acid reflux. I used to take the beta blocker propanolol for the hand tremor caused by the anti-convulsant Depakote.
About 15 percent of participants who simultaneously used three or more of these drugs were depressed. By comparison, among participants who didn't use any of the medications, just 5 percent were depressed. Even those who used just one of these medications were at slightly higher risk of depression: About 7 percent were depressed.
See also:
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday June 16 2018, @03:08AM (2 children)
-icide.
The very first happy pill I ever took was Elavil (amitryptiline), which I'm taking again now. In my most-recent depression I also tried imipramine and Latuda but nothing worked until I tried the Elavil again.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday June 16 2018, @09:32AM (1 child)
Sure, the article is talking about drug cocktails packing a magnified depressive punch when interacting, imposing depression on people who may have no real reason to feel depressed. But let's not forget that most of the time, depression doesn't just happen for no reason. Your girlfriend/boyfriend just dumped you, your employer gaslighted you then fired you for gross incompetence, you were evicted, and after struggling to pay it off for years you still have massive debt and several dozen debt collectors hounding you, lots of people are telling you you're a worthless loser and you should kill yourself, you suffered some great physical trauma and lost a limb or are now confined to a wheelchair, etc.
For those afflicted with the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect, smart enough to understand that there's a million things that can go wrong with anything of moderate complexity, it takes a lot of practice and experience to discern which goals may be reasonable and which are definitely not, which people are trying to tear you down out of jealousy and spite and really do not care if their criticisms of you and your work are fair, and to keep your paranoid fantasies on a tight leash and have reasonable confidence in yourself and to keep working towards various goals and being willing to shift the goal posts in light of new information or realizations and not succumb to despair. I constantly wonder if what I am thinking about is really new and still unsolved, and if so, can it be solved. If it isn't unsolved and I just didn't find these past solutions, then that may mean I'm reinventing the wheel, an activity most people regard as a waste of time. Yet, most of education is learning and discovering all kind of things others figured out long ago. All that is hard enough, without also having to worry about becoming unemployed and homeless, and, if not wanted, being stuck with bachelorhood, unable to find a suitable partner who is available and interested in you.
Then there's existential angst, that is, wanting very badly for life to mean something, wanting answers to the questions "what is the meaning of life?" and "why are we here?" and realizing that, maybe, there are no satisfactory answers, and becoming depressed about that. The less intelligent can turn to a religious answer of sorts, the old dodge that God has a Plan, but we are too stupid and limited to comprehend it, and never mind about speculating what the Plan might be, because He loves us anyway. Myself, I like to look on it in this light: rather than seeing the universe as a great contest between Good and Evil, or even Order and Chaos, in which the only sensible side to be on is Good and Order, perhaps it could be put as opposing principles, neither of which is self-evidently more virtuous than the other. Those principles are Purpose and Freedom. So maybe there can't be an ultimate Purpose, so what? That means we have more Freedom, and we don't have to worry about going to Hell if we didn't follow a plan we were not told and could not know. Hell or some equivalent is often advanced as the dire punishment thou shalt receive for having followed the "wrong" religion. For example, many Christians believe all non-Christians, be they Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindi, or people who lived before Christ was born, are in or going to Hell for that. Got to take others' opinions of what a proper relationship with reality should be, with large grains of salt.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday June 16 2018, @05:43PM
Depression NEVER happens without multiple causes. Merely being in a horrible situation doesn't necessarily make you depressed. It may make you angry, for example. It's cause is a combination of what you feel, what you tell yourself about what's going on, and how you see things as likely to happen. Certainly the chemical situation of your blood stream will make certain reactions less easy, but others will (generally) be possible.
The problem is, while you are depressed, you don't have enough available energy to deal with the depression. It seems to me that it should be possible to listen to what you're telling your self, and when you don't like it, to tell yourself to "Either shut up or change the subject!". You might still be too lethargic to do anything, but that's not as bad as depression.
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