Rotating Bitch wrote:
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> Finally,a t the edn of that article, they say "For many, SSRIs help little,
> if at all." Anyone know what "for many" means, percentage-wise?
Minimum 30% in the most favorable studies. Probably higher. Also, of course, with an illness such as depression it is really difficult to define precisely what constitutes "help."
The issue is confused by using the phrase "chemical imbalance." That has _never_ been a technical term, but merely used as a very rough-and-ready way of helping a patient come to terms with his/her illness. Wherever the article uses that phrase it is irrelevant to its own topic. Begley is a pretty good science writer, but this article operates in part by announcing as new what has been discussed for years in all the literature I've read on depression and its treatment. As one article some years back put it, the brain is simply awash in serotonin and the _level_ of serotonin in the brain can't be involved either way.
Incidentally, for a number of years an anti-depressant frequently used in Europe has the opposite effect from an SSRI; it quickens rather than blocks re-uptake.
No one has the slightest idea _why_ Xanaflex prevents migraine, but it certainly works for me. It was developed for some other illness (perhaps MS), and it was accidentally discovered that it helped with migraine. Migraine is sometimes described as an "electrical storm in the brain." Probably that's not a bit more accurate than "chemical imbalance" for depression, but one does need shorthand expressions to describe what is happening, even when we only have a rough guess what is happening.
I can't remember the details now, but there were some articles a few years ago pointing out that the drug companies in their tests of some of the SSRIs had fudged by messing around with defining the relevant population of patients.
But none of this has any relevance to a debate with a (mostly) non-existent army of biological determinists or what-have-you. Whatever "causes" mental illness has to effectuate that by altering brain states. And it can't be too often emphasized that ordinary thinking proceeds in the same way. Some neurons have to fire for me to compose this sentence, and it is meaningless to say either that the thought causes the neuronal firing or that the neuronal firing causes the thought. That language is just too clumsy.
Carrol