Post-Prozac Nation: The Science and History of Treating Depression

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Post-Prozac Nation
The Science and History of Treating Depression
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/m...ry-of-treating-depression.html?pagewanted=all

Interesting analogy:

Pause for a moment, though, to consider the physiology of a heart attack. A heart attack can be set off by a variety of causes chronic high blood pressure or pathologically high levels of bad cholesterol or smoking. Yet aspirin is an effective treatment of a heart attack regardless of its antecedent cause. Why? Because a heart attack, however it might have been provoked, progresses through a common, final pathway: there must be a clot in a coronary artery that is blocking the flow of blood to the heart. Aspirin helps to inhibit the formation and growth of the clot in the coronary artery. The medicine is clinically effective regardless of what events led to the clot. Aspirin, as a professor of mine liked to put it, does not particularly care about your medical history.

Mood -> Behavior or Behavior -> Mood ?

But the most profound implications have to do with how to understand the link between the growth of neurons, the changes in mood and the alteration of behavior. Perhaps antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil primarily alter behavioral circuits in the brain particularly the circuits deep in the hippocampus where memories and learned behaviors are stored and organized and consequently change mood. If Prozac helped Dorothy sleep better and stopped her from assaulting her own skin, might her mood eventually have healed as a response to her own alterations of behavior? Might Dorothy, in short, have created her own placebo effect? How much of mood is behavior anyway? Maybe your brain makes you act depressed, and then you feel depressed. Or you feel depressed in part because your brain is making you act depressed.

 

[Esther12]

Thanks for that.

It does seem that as soon as you are classed as suffering from a mental health problem, lower standards of care become acceptable. The casual use of anti-depressant on people seems like a real scandal to me, but few people seem truly concerned, or to even see it as a moral issue.