Cort
Phoenix Rising Founder
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Check out this superb New York Times article about trouble many have people getting off antidepressants. Just as with opioid pain killers the antidepressant studies are almost always short-term and have rarely assessed the long term effects of the drugs despite the fact that millions of people are using these drugs for long periods of time. It's really incredible.
Let's not point the finger too hard at Big Pharma - they have no incentive (other than a moral imperative which businesses often lack unfortunately - to do these studies.
The federal govt is the real culprit IMO. Since Pharma won't do them it's up to the feds to do them and to help produce validated withdrawal protocols. Because they haven't many millions of people are essentially guinea pigs....and some really suffer.
This is not to say that long term antidepressant use can't be helpful. It certainly can be but for some people it can become a nightmare....
Fascinating reading...
https://www.nytimes.com/…/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac…
Let's not point the finger too hard at Big Pharma - they have no incentive (other than a moral imperative which businesses often lack unfortunately - to do these studies.
The federal govt is the real culprit IMO. Since Pharma won't do them it's up to the feds to do them and to help produce validated withdrawal protocols. Because they haven't many millions of people are essentially guinea pigs....and some really suffer.
This is not to say that long term antidepressant use can't be helpful. It certainly can be but for some people it can become a nightmare....
Fascinating reading...
Victoria Toline would hunch over the kitchen table, steady her hands and draw a bead of liquid from a vial with a small dropper. It was a delicate operation that had become a daily routine — extracting ever tinier doses of the antidepressant she had taken for three years, on and off, and was desperately trying to quit.
“Basically that’s all I have been doing — dealing with the dizziness, the confusion, the fatigue, all the symptoms of withdrawal,” said Ms. Toline, 27, of Tacoma, Wash. It took nine months to wean herself from the drug, Zoloft, by taking increasingly smaller doses.
“I couldn’t finish my college degree,” she said. “Only now am I feeling well enough to try to re-enter society and go back to work.”
https://www.nytimes.com/…/antidepressants-withdrawal-prozac…