"farmelantj at juno.com" wrote:
>
> Placebo effect, I would think. Most of the studies that I
> am aware of concerning the efficacy of antidepressants,
> claim that they take at least several weeks before they
> take effect.
I stopped SSRIs two years ago, and they did not help me in my last 'plain vanilla" depression 1998-99; I probably should have stopped sooner.
But the first anti-depressant I took (not an SSRI) was amitriptylene (Elavil) back in the mid-80s, and it quite possibly saved my life, though it gradually lost its effectiveness and had undesirable side-effects.
At that time, about 10 minutes into an afternoon class on a Wednesday my voice suddenly began to wind down, and I ended the class
Next morning I was sitting in my office at 5 minutes to 9 wondering how in the hell I was going to get through the next 50 minutes when almost with a click my mind was back in operation. Later I realized that that was exactly 5 days after I had upped the dosage from 125mg to 150 mgs.
If you look at your fingernail you make a physical change in your brain. If you spend enough time looking at it in a certain way you will establish patterns in your brain linked to that focus. There is nothing complicated about that. If you have more dramatic experiences, like continuous infantry combat or being raped by your uncle you establish patterns in your brain. Hypothetically, one could speculate that the _ideal_ way to change those patterns would be through further action, talk, what have you, that changed or suppressed those patterns. And there is sometimes success with some forms of talk therapy (though I doubt with psychoanalytic therapy), especially with depression, more rarely with bpolar. Seldom if ever with schizophrenia but there are rare cases where perhaps social therapy somehow worked with that. But there are also rather large numbers of people who have never responded to _any_ kind of therapy. I still _cannot_ answer a phone unless I know who is calling and the parameters of what that particular call might concern. Neither ADs nor therapy have ever put a dent in that. (Of course hearing loss is also relevant to that situation.)
Carrol