[lbo-talk] SSRIs

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Fri Nov 18 10:43:12 PST 2005



>
> What's vulgar about biochem explanations of
> psychological disorders
> is that they assume that the chemicals are the cause
> - that once
> you've identified some chemical configuration or
> process, you've hit
> the bedrock first cause.

That's vulgar but sort of uninteresting.

But what if the chemicals
> themselves are an
> effect, a reflection of environmental influences? Or
> what if the chem
> configuration interacts with a particular set of
> environmental
> influeces to give rise to depression?

These all may be true in different cases.

And I don't
> mean just personal
> history - Carl's right that capitalism causes
> depression. And I'll
> bet that the anomic, individualistic American kind
> is more
> depressogenic than others.

I agree. People with depressive tendencies are likely to be more depressed in these circumstances.

Recently therewas a book that suggested that the US may be capitalistic in part _because_ it attracted an unsuallly high number of bipolar and cyclothymic individuals who emigrated to places where their could do more in their "up" or manic modes. I wonder if this is entirely silly. It might not be, though I would not, of course, propose that as the main explanation for the class character of our society.

If you're life is fucked,
> it's *your*
> fault! Just pull up your socks, pick up a self-help
> book, and get on
> with it.

Well, actually, talking about drug treatment for depression is really progreess over treating depression as a character flaw, don't you think?


>
> Personal history and social structures are also
> materialist
> explanations. They're just more complicated ones.

Yes, and they surely interact with chemical ones.

However, it's not that much use telling people who have mental illness that they would not have it under socialism, since we are not going to get socialism anytime very soon. In the meantime, we can mention thsi point -- it was mainstay of the critical psychiatry movement taht was big in those long-ago days when we were in college and grad school, Doug --and suggest drug treatment too. I would suggest that anyone cares about his or her sex life approach SSRIs with great caution.


>
> And yes, the drugs "work" to a certain extent. But
> as the conclusion
> of the article pointed out, the relapse rate is
> higher than with
> cognitive-behavioral therapy.
>

Depends on with what. Manic depression or bipolar disorder is totally impervious to talk therapy. The only thing talk therapy can do with bipolar patients is to help keep them on their meds. Whatever the deep cause of bipolar disorder, once you got it, drugs are the only thing that work. See, e,g., Goodwin & Jamison, Manic Depressive Illness, Oxford 199?, older but still authoritative, a fat treatise.

jks

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