My Clinical Psychologist observed that CBT worked for me, and asked why I thought drugs might be a better alternative (I dont btw, its a rhetorical question and answer conversation we had). He also observed that there are two classes of drugs for depression, in shorthand one boosts a chemical, and the other supresses it. To his way of thinking, if you can "solve" the problem by both over and under stimulating something in the brain, you don't really know how it works.
I have mentioned this before. I was taken to task by people who have much stronger energy in the field, graduates, pharmacology experts, people who nit-picked the language or applicability of comment from a Clinical Psychologist to this praxis. I just repeat here, that there are practitioners in the field working with people who come in the door marked "depression" who don't like the exit based on drugs. And there are patients here who also don't like that choice, based on things.
I also know people very happy they can treat their anxiety and depression with drugs. People of all ages and sexes. We get to make choices. This is good.
Prozac was the revolutionary, groundbreaking, miraculous cure for depression. The first in its class of "SSRIs" where the makers told fairy-tales of serotonin as a neurotransmitter (ignoring that over 80% of it is found in the GI tract).
In reality, Prozac is fluoride. That is its active ingredient: fluoride. So, if you're fluoridating your water supply, and using fluoride toothpaste, and taking Prozac, all of these modalities are essentially delivering the same molecule to the patient.
It doesn't matter how "antidepressants" actually work. It doesn't matter whether or not they work at all. What matters is that they tick a checkbox on the list, saying "patient is being treated for X disorder" and "patient is compliant with treatment, appointments, prescription". SSRIs, at their inception, carried black-box warnings about homicidal ideations. Of course, those warnings were wildly unpopular and eventually needed to be suppressed. But they're still true. That's right, not merely suicidal, but the users of SSRI-class drugs are driven to thoughts and actions of homicide. Just ask the Columbine Kids.
Tamar Oostrom did a paper on drug sponsorship effect. Prozac was one of the examples (see page 3 of her feb 2024 pdf).
Closest thing I've read to an explanation of how Prozac works is that it activates and drives to the nucleus TFEB, upstream regulator of autophaggy/lysosomal genesis. Which many other molecules do as well, for example trehalose. I wonder if the long half life might cause problems. Seems like proteins like TFEB are usually conserved. Activated for some period of time then auto regulated into an off state. If they're just finding out the method of action now on some of these antidepressants decades after they put them out, they probably didn't factor that in (or much of anything besides profit sadly).
> activates and drives to the nucleus TFEB, upstream regulator of autophaggy/lysosomal genesis
> trehalose. I wonder if the long half life
> proteins like TFEB are usually conserved
> Activated ... then auto regulated into an off state
This is exactly what I mean by "fairy tales" and nobody really cares how/if/why the drugs work. The blithering word salad of tech jargon above means nothing to a "patient" who is suffering clinical depression. They call these "mood disorders", yet mood is something that is quite ill-defined. It is not a biochemical process. Mood is not something like digestion or pregnancy that can be empirically measured, observed, and described by physicians.
"Mood disorders" are the result of a feminization of mankind. The chief psychological symptom of menstruation is said to be "a bad mood" just before the flow arrives. Rather than address this bad mood in patient-centric terms, women are blamed and singled-out for being fertile, and the bad mood is seen as an obstacle and a detrimental effect. If a woman is having "bad moods" that aren't synchronized with the menstrual period, or heaven forbid, a man has "bad moods", then this must also be a "chemical imbalance" that can be addressed by the writers of fairy-tales and the manufacturers of bizarre, mysterious, but patentable substances.
Mood has nothing to do with this bullshit collection of conjectures. Nobody cares about the mechanism, and it is basically inventing a story to explain something that is immeasurable and unobservable in these terms. It is peak pseudoscience; phrenology and homeopathy are better rooted in reality than psychiatric pharmacology.
It is, ultimately, a bizarre mockery of Christianity, the priesthood, and sacraments. Since hospitals, medical treatment, and the vocation of physician were given their start in a Christian context, as well as the spiritual treatment of the soul. It stood to reason that eventually, they would cross the streams. That they would essentially photocopy the white coats, the prescription pads, the sterile clinics, the scientific diagnostics, and the mysterious substances, and apply them to a system that purports to heal the individual's soul.
Sadly, the mind and spirit do not always respond in the same way that a physical body responds to this sort of treatment. The real Achilles Hell is that spiritual maladies are never individualistic or limited to one unique human being. Mental health treatments are more akin to the Department of Corrections, and operate on a "Divide and Conquer" strategy that seeks to sort people into pigeonholes that are progressively smaller and smaller, dividing us and preventing us from any meaningful unity or communion.
If, for a generally known population, it causes positive result and does not have too many (and all tolerable) negative side effects, why not use it?
If you think of all of biology as being an area about the size of the surface of our Sun, all of human biological knowledge would take up about a square millimeter. We're still in the stone knives and bearskins era, especially in neurology, the topic of the posted article.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 3.2 ms ] threadI have mentioned this before. I was taken to task by people who have much stronger energy in the field, graduates, pharmacology experts, people who nit-picked the language or applicability of comment from a Clinical Psychologist to this praxis. I just repeat here, that there are practitioners in the field working with people who come in the door marked "depression" who don't like the exit based on drugs. And there are patients here who also don't like that choice, based on things.
I also know people very happy they can treat their anxiety and depression with drugs. People of all ages and sexes. We get to make choices. This is good.
In reality, Prozac is fluoride. That is its active ingredient: fluoride. So, if you're fluoridating your water supply, and using fluoride toothpaste, and taking Prozac, all of these modalities are essentially delivering the same molecule to the patient.
It doesn't matter how "antidepressants" actually work. It doesn't matter whether or not they work at all. What matters is that they tick a checkbox on the list, saying "patient is being treated for X disorder" and "patient is compliant with treatment, appointments, prescription". SSRIs, at their inception, carried black-box warnings about homicidal ideations. Of course, those warnings were wildly unpopular and eventually needed to be suppressed. But they're still true. That's right, not merely suicidal, but the users of SSRI-class drugs are driven to thoughts and actions of homicide. Just ask the Columbine Kids.
> activates and drives to the nucleus TFEB, upstream regulator of autophaggy/lysosomal genesis
> trehalose. I wonder if the long half life
> proteins like TFEB are usually conserved
> Activated ... then auto regulated into an off state
This is exactly what I mean by "fairy tales" and nobody really cares how/if/why the drugs work. The blithering word salad of tech jargon above means nothing to a "patient" who is suffering clinical depression. They call these "mood disorders", yet mood is something that is quite ill-defined. It is not a biochemical process. Mood is not something like digestion or pregnancy that can be empirically measured, observed, and described by physicians.
"Mood disorders" are the result of a feminization of mankind. The chief psychological symptom of menstruation is said to be "a bad mood" just before the flow arrives. Rather than address this bad mood in patient-centric terms, women are blamed and singled-out for being fertile, and the bad mood is seen as an obstacle and a detrimental effect. If a woman is having "bad moods" that aren't synchronized with the menstrual period, or heaven forbid, a man has "bad moods", then this must also be a "chemical imbalance" that can be addressed by the writers of fairy-tales and the manufacturers of bizarre, mysterious, but patentable substances.
Mood has nothing to do with this bullshit collection of conjectures. Nobody cares about the mechanism, and it is basically inventing a story to explain something that is immeasurable and unobservable in these terms. It is peak pseudoscience; phrenology and homeopathy are better rooted in reality than psychiatric pharmacology.
It is, ultimately, a bizarre mockery of Christianity, the priesthood, and sacraments. Since hospitals, medical treatment, and the vocation of physician were given their start in a Christian context, as well as the spiritual treatment of the soul. It stood to reason that eventually, they would cross the streams. That they would essentially photocopy the white coats, the prescription pads, the sterile clinics, the scientific diagnostics, and the mysterious substances, and apply them to a system that purports to heal the individual's soul.
Sadly, the mind and spirit do not always respond in the same way that a physical body responds to this sort of treatment. The real Achilles Hell is that spiritual maladies are never individualistic or limited to one unique human being. Mental health treatments are more akin to the Department of Corrections, and operate on a "Divide and Conquer" strategy that seeks to sort people into pigeonholes that are progressively smaller and smaller, dividing us and preventing us from any meaningful unity or communion.
If you think of all of biology as being an area about the size of the surface of our Sun, all of human biological knowledge would take up about a square millimeter. We're still in the stone knives and bearskins era, especially in neurology, the topic of the posted article.