Are Antidepressants Bad for You? - Part III

Yesterday, we looked at a review article by Giovanni Fava and Emanuela Offidani that introduced the idea of "oppositional tolerance" in regard to long-term antidepressant use. According to the authors, the few long-term studies we have indicate a three-month limit to antidepressant treatment. Staying on these meds any longer appears to have no impact on avoiding a recurrence. Indeed, in some cases, long-term use may make our depressions worse and set us up for future episodes.

The reason for this, the authors hypothesize, is that as our brains build up a tolerance to these meds, various processes are set in motion that counteract the drug's initial effect which in turn may "propel the illness to a more malignant and treatment-unresponsive course."

The authors note, however, that oppositional tolerance needs to be considered in the broader context of psychiatry's highly suspect diagnostic criteria for mood disorders. This portion of the conversation begins in Robert Whitaker's "Anatomy of an Epidemic":

In Chapter Eight, Whitaker cites community surveys from the 1930s and 40s that found "fewer than one in a thousand adults suffered an episode of clinical depression each year." According to Charlotte Silverman, author of "The Epidemiology of Depression" (1968), and others, depression was primarily an "ailment of middle aged and older persons." Most of the "depressed-only" patients observed by Emil Kraepelin in the early twentieth century experienced just a single episode of depression and only 13 percent had three or more episodes. Even as late as 1972, Guze and Robins of Washington University (St Louis) noted that only one in ten became chronically ill.

Then came the antidepressant era in full force. For some patients, these meds proved to be magic bullets, at least in the early going. But it wasn't long before researchers began reporting on their inordinately high relapse rates (the scientific term is "Prozac poop-out"). According to Whitaker, psychiatry decided this had to do with the course of the illness rather than the effects of the drug. Overnight, psychiatry changed its party line to the effect that depression was everywhere, and that the old epidemiological studies were "flawed." In the words of the American Psychiatric Association, "depression is a highly recurrent and pernicious disorder."

Says Whitaker: "In the short span of forty years depression had been utterly transformed," going from a rare illness with good outcomes to an epidemic that kept visiting havoc its victims.

Giovanni Fava was a lone voice back in 1994 when he dared suggest in an editorial that we need to be paying attention to the man behind the curtain, wondering if meds "may actually worsen, at least in some cases, the progression of the illness which they are supposed to treat." Since Fava was merely posing this as a hypothetical he was easy to dismiss. Whitaker asserts that Fava's concerns "needed to be hushed up," but the APA is not exactly a Star Chamber.

Sixteen years later, Fava is still beating the drum, this time far less tentatively. Fittingly, it is Whitaker in his blog Mad in America who drew attention to Fava's latest contribution. Clearly Whitaker is onto something. In his book, he makes the telling point that if our meds worked as well as Pharma would have us believe, then we wouldn't have illnesses like depression to kick around anymore. Or, at the very least, thanks to treatment, depression would be very rare and relatively benign. This is a point that other commentators have raised as well, including David Healy of Cardiff University.

Instead, in the face of overwhelming evidence that depression has - defiantly, it seems - refused to yield to repeated antidepressant bombardment, psychiatry has changed its tune on the illness. Suddenly, it's everywhere and is highly malignant. Again, Whitaker and Healy and others are in harmony.

Do you see the dots starting to connect? Namely: Problematic meds to treat a vaguely defined illness advanced by those with strong monetary interests, leading to this major fallacy - If it's depression, then one must always treat it with an antidepressant.

But what if it's NOT depression, even if it looks like depression? Or what if not all depressions are the same? And who, precisely, are these people, anyway, these anomalies of psychiatry, who are put on meds that may make them worse rather than better? Why are they being lumped with everyone else?

These are questions that badly need to be asked, that hardly anyone seems to be asking.

Next: We ask the questions ...