The D Word.

Misconception: Medical drugs like anti-depressants make everything better

Firstly, any good doctor should not start you off with drugs. Secondly, different anti-depressants work with different people. And lastly, they can make your life worse. You can essentially become a zombie, no depressive emotion - yes but not capable of any emotion. However, you can still get a good combination of drugs that work.

Good work, but I think with this first one there can often be the opposite misconception too. For instance, that if you take antidepressants it means that you're crazy, or that it's weak to turn to medications, or that all antidepressants will turn you into a zombie, affect your personality, etc. There seems to be a lot of stigma out there around medical drugs for depression. But clinical depression is an illness, and like many other illnesses, drugs can assist. They certainly won't 'make it all better' but they can help to 'take the edge off' to allow the individual to do the other hard work involved in turning thought patterns around.

Misconception: People who say you're just thinking negative.

It's not as simple as that. There are actual chemical imbalances (don't know much) within your brain. You should never disregard someone's depressive problem as thinking negative, instead you should help them focus on the core of their problem - or just listen. Listening can make all the difference. Many depressed people just don't have anyone to talk to so they build up the emotion and their problems. What seems hopeless becomes more hopeless, and you're stuck in a vicious circle.

The chemical imbalance theory (that depression is due to a lack of serotonin/5-HTT in the brain) is ultimately unproven and improvable, due to the fact we cannot look into a living human brain. It is my opinion that depression has been medicalised so that pharamaceutical companies can make billions of profit. What depressed people need is counselling/CBT- not medication. See about publication bias within the antidepression literature (e.g. Turner et al. (2008) who found that 31% of 74 studies on ADs were not published due to finding non-significant results, and a proportion of those that were published were published to convey a positive result when this wasn't the case).

Learnt a lot about it on my course, and done lots of reading around the topic. It gets me so wound up when depression is conveyed as a mental illness and anti-depressants are the first thing people think of to cure it. The vast majority of depressed people can identify what is making them depressed- why a biological cure for a non-biological cause? Alternatively, when people experience depression for no apparent reason, psychoanalysis has been shown to uncover the source of depression (see Breggin, 1992 if interested).

Depression.
What are some common misconceptions about this illness?

Misconception: It's there for life
No, treatment of it can eradicate it completely

Oh hey.

Yeah, don't ever think it's never going to go away. It may die with time, or it may take a great deal of personal willpower or just small efforts day by day. I know plenty of people who had severe, clinical depression - they spent years thinking it would consume them for the rest of their lives. But some of them are better now, much better.

Weed and alcohol make it worse. Promise.

White doctors tend to be nicer than asian doctors (just a generalisation from personal experience).

Most people brought up in countries out of the EU will think its "made up" and its all in your head and you dont need drugs for it. (personal experience)

Citalopram does give you suicidal tendencies.

A point you seem to have missed is that, although we might not know how antidepressants work, we still know that they do work. In a lot of cases they don't of course, I was on six or seven different ones over the course of two years before I found one that worked, but once I started that one I went almost instantly from being severely depressed to feeling absolutely fine.

If I had my way, those with only mild depression would automatically receive talking treatment, which would hopefully prevent them from becoming more depressed. I'd reserve drugs for those who were more severely depressed, alongside some form of counselling. But this is unlikely to happen any time soon, so until then we'll just have to put up with the overprescribing of antidepressants, for want of anything better.

What I was trying to get across was that antidepressants are being hailed as the answer to depression when in reality there is not a wide body of scientific evidence to show that they are much better than placebo, and this is obviously not well known to the public. The fact you tried 6/7 before finding one that works would support this.. There's also this thing called the enhanced placebo effect, where more side effects are associated with a better outcome.

I agree this would be good. Although I wish people knew the facts about the pharamaceutical industry and depression before they decided to start medication. I also think that although I don't have experience of depression, if I'd experienced a particularly traumatic event or had extremely low self-esteem I'd benefit from interacting with inspirational people who have been through similar things to give me hope, and there should be a lot more organisations like this.

At the end of the day things are not going to change because of the great power the pharmaceutical industry now has- more and more drugs will be released before more effective psychological treatments become available, which is really sad.