Look, I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I fucking told you so. I could have told you this years ago. How many more times am I going to have to say I told you so?
How many times have I had to take fucking pills just to placate other people when I could have told you years ago (and did) that they're placebos? How many other things have I told you that I'm going to have to say 'I told you so' about later?
Don't force me to post more Morrissey clips:
Q,Yes you did. And you are right. I have seen at first hand the effects of depression. I read and hear that GPs prescrib anti-depressant pills but they have not always worked, not always been the solution to the problem in the longer term. There are cases where they ‘appear’ to work but only the patient can say whether or not that is true. I remember standing in line at a pharmacy and hearing and seeing someone in front of me asking about “side effects” and the pharmacist herself smiling broadly said. “These are OK, I take ’em myself”. The conversation went on and as I listened I heard some very unpleasant side effects being read out by the person in front of me. I cannot say with 100% certainty whether or not anti-depression drugs are “placebos” but I have little doubt about the fact that drugs companies have promoted their products and yet I read that depression is very widespread. There are obiously levels of depression, ranging from ‘feelings of hoplessness, anxiety, low self esteem, fear’ to ‘suicidal thoughts, endless worry, profound anxiety, unending feelings of not wanting to have contact with any other person’. You are right in what your opening sentence proclaims because this is your (?) experience or your held view and it is very clear you are also angry. I read the links you pointed to and I wonder what you personally think of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy? It would add more to your observations if you are able to give a view on this and it might then move forward from “I told you so” and reveal wheteher or not you feel there are real solutions to this illness.Thanks for posting and including those links. If we can all help each other through our informed, personal, or indirect experiences then not only are we doing something for each other but collectively we may be reaching solutions that will provide help and comfort and – yes – give real hope that all is not lost.On a personal level I wrote about the black dog in my poem at http://my.opera.com/lokutus_prime/blog/show.dml/1629275LP
Hello Lokutus.Thanks for commenting again.I often mention that I almost always write my blog posts in one sitting, and usually in an unpremeditated kind of way. The reason I tend to mention this is because the issues that I write about tend not to be simple, and it is very hard or impossible to deal with them comprehensively in the kind of blog posts I write. I think a real answer to depression is on a level with a solution to war in terms of difficulty. There are people who say that anti-depressant pills are a real life-line to them, and it’s certainly not my desire or my place to deprive them of such a life-line. However, as I have long felt and said, and as the recent study attests, the real efficacy of anti-depressant pills has been vastly overestimated. I feel that they are almost always prescribed out of laziness, convenience and for financial reasons. I’ve never undergone Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Psychiatry itself has received a great deal of criticism in recent years, and also for good reason, which can be summarised with this Fry and Laurie sketch (when it gets past the soundbite sketches):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4Sw4z8YXmgI think the problem comes in social definitions of things. If you diagnose someone as depressed and treat depression as an illness, then that limits your responses and thinking on the subject. To illustrate what I mean, I’ll take my example from a book whose title I have long since forgotten. There was a case of a mental patient who paced continuously up and down in a straight line. He never deviated from that line. The doctors in charge of him tried standing on this invisible line in order to see what he would do. He did not walk around them. He either had to push them out of the way or wait until they moved in order to continue his pacing on this line. From which the doctors concluded that he was, in simple terms, mad. They never asked themselves, however, how sane it was to stand on this invisible line to try to stop him walking along it. This is social interaction. One side (the side with the power) is socially defined as sane, and the other side (wihout the power) as mad. And I think this problem is present to a greater or lesser degree in most psychiatry and therapy. I’m not sure that ‘authority’ is really helpful here. I think there has to be a sense of equals working things out together, but that’s a vague sort of notion at the moment for me.I hope that goes some way to answering your question. I realise it’s brief. I might write more about this later. I’m just about to post another short blog post and then do some of my fiction writing.The black dog, eh?Have you heard this?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDnDxvVjBicLove it.
http://style.uk.msn.com/wellbeing/mindbodysoul/article.aspx?cp-documentid=7638713
“This announcement about anti-depressants bothers me in another way. Presumably placebos do actually help people but only if they believe that they are real medicine (either conventional or alternative). Now that the anti-depressants have been revealed as “just placebos” then the people taking them will no longer believe in their efficacy. Does this mean that their depression will return?”This is a really good point, and I was thinking about this too. I mean, presumably this announcement is going to do real damage to the anti-depressants industry. Well, that in itself doesn’t bother me, but yes, it is, in itself, a blow that affects the effectiveness of anti-depressants. Thinking about this in a very selfish way, I might have to re-write a section of my current novel which is all about pharmaceuticals. I mean, the section is about pharmaceuticals, not the novel. We might have switched tracks to a slightly different future.
Robin Davies writes:
This announcement about anti-depressants bothers me in another way. Presumably placebos do actually help people but only if they believe that they are real medicine (either conventional or alternative). Now that the anti-depressants have been revealed as “just placebos” then the people taking them will no longer believe in their efficacy. Does this mean that their depression will return? There was a great sketch on Smack The Pony about this. A doctor prescribed a placebo but the patient pointed out that it wouldn’t work because the doctor had told her it was a placebo. Then the doctor tore up the prescription and wrote out another one for a medicine with a name that she had obviously just made up. The patient was still unconvinced!