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The British Medical Journal provides an editorial from Professor David Healy, Head of Psychiatry at the Hergest psychiatry unit in Bangor in which it is stated:
When concerns emerged about tranquilliser dependence in the early 1980s, an attempt was made to supplant benzodiazepines with a serotonergic drug, buspirone, marketed as a non-dependence producing anxiolytic. This flopped. The lessons seemed to be that patients expected tranquillisers to have an immediate effect and doctors expected them to produce dependence. It was not possible to detoxify the tranquilliser brand.
Instead, drug companies marketed SSRIs for depression, even though they were weaker than older tricyclic antidepressants, and sold the idea that depression was the deeper illness behind the superficial manifestations of anxiety. The approach was an astonishing success, central to which was the notion that SSRIs restored serotonin levels to normal, a notion that later transmuted into the idea that they remedied a chemical imbalance. The tricyclics did not have a comparable narrative.
Serotonin myth
In the 1990s, no academic could sell a message about lowered serotonin. There was no correlation between serotonin reuptake inhibiting potency and antidepressant efficacy. No one knew if SSRIs raised or lowered serotonin levels; they still don’t know. There was no evidence that treatment corrected anything.
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This lack of evidence-based practice was apparent to Thomas Insel, Director of the US National Institute Of Mental Health who announced in 2013 that the institute would abandon funding towards the DSM:
While DSM has been described as a "Bible" for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been "reliability" - each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.
In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.
Does this mean that psychiatry is finally moving away from a practice akin to leeches for everything?
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday April 24 2015, @04:12PM
Not to mention the ancients used drugs to treat mental illness back then too. Look up the Roman health spas, which were often prescribed for those suffering from various mental maladies....the springs where they came from? Heavy in lithium salts.
The fact is we are still in the dark ages when it comes to understanding how the hardware that is our brain works and it could be decades or even centuries before we get it all figured out. At this point in time its really more of a "lets see what this does" kind of approach and there is gonna be a lot of people that end up with outcomes worse than the disease, just as we messed up a lot of people learning blood types and transplants. Just as we look back on medical books from the 1950s and are horrified by some of the things they did then (such as giving cancer patients such high doses of radiation that some had to be buried in lead lined caskets) I'm sure that 50 years from now people will look back on the treatments for mental illness and go "OMG I can't believe they did that!".
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday April 24 2015, @04:42PM
Our bodies are host to a continuum of neurons extending throughout - internal and externally facing. The whole of our neurological being is largely discounted in the "brain science" electro-chemical theorizing. Much of what makes us "me" or "you" as distinct identities and dispositions lies outside our cranium. A large part of our psychological disposition and unconscious or reflexive behavior emerges systemically - or appears as a failure of our rational governing consciousness when responding to conditions from elsewhere in our wiring harness.
You want someone unreasonably grouchy and belligerent out of any cause or reason? Give him the wrong chronic signaling on the vagus nerve...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday April 24 2015, @05:16PM
That's a straw man argument, JC. It's well known in medicine and cognitive science that there are major changes in personality in cases of full and partial paralysis (for just one example).
Just what is necessary and sufficient for our minds is not clear. It's generally believed that much of it is indeed in the brain, but to put out the picture that cognitive scientists all assume and generally accept that a disconnected brain in a vat would have the same psychology as anyone else is going waaaay out there just to further your argument.
Besides. I think of myself more as an ice cream sandwich than a popsicle on a stick. ;)
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday April 24 2015, @08:05PM
There is a popular branch of "brain science research" that attributes everything to brain activity in loci and regions...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Friday April 24 2015, @05:24PM
Oh, I'd say it's even worse than that. I suspect we haven't even scratched the surface in some areas of science. Examples are: Physics where our best theories don't seem to say anything about 95% of the universe. Another is psychology and the understanding of consciousness where we can't even define what it really is we're studying.
I suspect that in both cases there is a vast dark ocean underneath the bit of foam on top that we can currently see.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday April 24 2015, @08:06PM
Well with physics its because...well we're blind as bats really, the things we could detect with traditional tools like telescopes was such a teeny tiny fraction of what is actually there it was like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. We are just now learning that on the very large and the very tiny, such as how stars warp spacetime with their gravity or quantum entanglement, the old rules really don't behave as we thought they did. There could easily be something similar with the brain, our understanding of how various chemicals interact with and against the composition of the brain could be likened to how much we have to learn on physics but I personally think that we are MUCH farther behind on that front.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.