How come antidepressants dont work

[yovanymunoz]

How come they and other heavy sleeping pills dont work and actually harm you? I swear, there is little to no help in society

[ajb]

I am sure there are individuals for which these drugs are no help, but do you have any evidence that these indivuduals are the norm and not a minority?

 

Antidepressants are probabilly handed out too easily, but that maybe another seperate issue.

[andrewcellini]

that is a pretty bold claim that they don't work as they do seem to have a positive effect on some individuals, granted there are some side effects which can be considered disturbing (suicidal and homicidal tendencies). it's true that depression is not well understood and part of the problem comes from practice of viewing the brain as having an imbalance of neurotransmitters as a whole rather than in certain specific circuits. this is probably because all the individual synapses, until recently, haven't been mapped out for the average brain (perhaps the depressed brain in the future?) and the way a psychiatrist typically diagnoses depression before prescribing medications (ssri, ssnri, sometimes maoi) is grounded in the observation of the patients behavior during therapy, qualitative tests, etc.

Edited August 18, 2014 by andrewcellini

[Phi for All]

How come they and other heavy sleeping pills dont work and actually harm you? I swear, there is little to no help in society

 

They may be keeping you from making an objective assessment, since observably there are many people in society these drugs help. You're generalizing quite a bit based on limited experience.

 

What does your doctor say about why they don't work for you?

[Arete]

The short answer is you're wrong and they have been extensively demonstrated to have statistically significant effectiveness:

 

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2002-02802-010

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=718734

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/12088162

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032704004392

 

etc.

 

And there's little evidence of any severe long term side effects - which are largely weight gain and sexual dysfunction.

 

http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/10401230209147454

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/14700451

[yovanymunoz]

Perhaps it is me, perhaps it isnt, but me being smart helped me realize that in order for me to be healthy and get 9 hours of sleep, i had to do excersice and stop taking those heavy seeping pills. It made my heart start working corectly again, because the pills made me have palpitaions or something. I think there also isnt a lot of study done on sleep science, or at least i didnt know anything until i started getting some heavy sleeping poblems.

[Arete]

Perhaps it is me.

 

This is why we call a single personal experience an anecdote. Most people's experience of a given treatment will fall within a distribution. In order to understand how well a particular therapy works, you need to conduct trials on many people to determine that distribution. Additionally, pulmonary irregularity is not usually a reported side effect of most commonly prescribed sedatives - indicating that if the medication truly did cause your palpitations it would indicate your experience is atypical.

 

I think there also isnt a lot of study done on sleep science

 

There are several scientific journals devoted entirely to sleep research:

 

Sleep - http://www.journalsleep.org/

Journal of Sleep Research - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1365-2869

Sleep Medicine - http://www.sleep-journal.com/

Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine - http://www.aasmnet.org/jcsm/

Sleep Disorders - http://www.hindawi.com/journals/sd/

Journal of Sleep Disorders - http://www.hoajonline.com/sleepdisorders

Journal of Sleep Disorders and Therapy - http://omicsgroup.org/journals/sleep-disorders-therapy.php

Sleep and Breathing - http://link.springer.com/journal/11325

Sleep Medicine Reviews - http://www.journals.elsevier.com/sleep-medicine-reviews

 

etc.

[Marshalscienceguy]

I am sure there are individuals for which these drugs are no help, but do you have any evidence that these indivuduals are the norm and not a minority?

 

Antidepressants are probabilly handed out too easily, but that maybe another seperate issue.

This might very well be the case here. There is so many over/misdiagnoses and the issue just seems to get worse each year. If you're are in US they generally seem to give you medication first and ask questions later. Sometimes you can go in and they talk for you 5 minutes ask you something like Hey how are you today? Did you get here alright? and just give you a prescription. Before giving you medication did they offer you any possible coping skills or other methods for dealing with your issues or did they just give you medication? Depending on your history though(Which you have not really given) you could be resistant to medication. I know my father is resistant to pain killers since other things which happened in his childhood.