If you or a loved one are taking anti-depressants, then you don’t want to miss this article about the why’s and wherefores of these new guidelines and what you can do instead.
It’s official – antidepressants are dramatically over prescribed, coming off them has to be done a LOT slower than previously recommended and the reports of their effectiveness has been deliberately exaggerated.
I’ve summarized this from a Guardian article and I’ve fact checked through other reputable sources, including doctor’s organizations:
1. There’s new guidelines for coming off anti-depressants safely that were adopted in Australia last Wednesday and it’s mega slower than previous recommendations. Dr Mark Horowitz, who almost died coming off anti-depressants himself, is a contributing author to these much slower guidelines for coming off anti-depressants.
2. Many of the people prescribed anti-depressants, shouldn’t be, because they’re not useful for that type of depression. That’s straight from the President of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Dr Nicole Higgins. I’ll link to the full article that contains the direct quotes further down.
3. Long term anti-depressants use is not generally advised – Dr Higgins again. That’s a dramatic bit of Aussie understatement – Dr Horowitz said that the longer people have been on them, the more likely that they’ll experience severe withdrawal symptoms. Up until recently those severe withdrawal symptoms have been largely unrecognized in medical circles as being caused by the antidepressants themselves.
4. It’s official – the effectiveness of anti-depressants has been exaggerated with unscientific trial methods. The manufacturers selectively repeated and picked trials until they got the results they wanted – until they got the results that would make people think the drugs worked better than they do. Again you’ll find Dr Higgins’s direct quote on the link to The Guardian further down. And the fact checking I did has doctor organizations all over the place talking about this quite bluntly sometimes.
5. For mild to moderate depression, non-drug treatment was often as effective as prescribing drugs. That’s a quote from Dr Barbara Mintzes, a professor of evidence-based pharmaceutical policy at the University of Sydney. There was one study in particular where the researcher was expecting that the combination of exercise and antidepressants was going to give the best outcome, who was astounded when exercise gave a MUCH BETTER outcome than antidepressants. That was about twenty years ago. Keep your eye on this blog (you’ll see the rss feed in the sidebar -if you’re on a phone the sidebar is underneath the article), because in this series I plan to bring you a heap of non drug options for relieving depression.
6. These new Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines also advise on safely deprescribing stress, anxiety and insomnia medications as well as the meds used for seizures, nerve pain and restless legs syndrome.
Oh mannn I can’t help it, I LOVE being right!
I could spend PARAGRAPHS telling you about how so many of us working on the coal face with depressed and anxious people already knew all this and have been gaslit for DECADES, but being a smarty pants isn’t going to be useful.
I’d also like to know how we got there. How could a mega billion dollar industry be built on the back of unscientific evidence and – according to Dr Horowitz – harm so many people? And how could this happen AGAIN because I can think of half a dozen more trials off the top of my head that turned out to be “less than good science” too. And no I don’t think it’s because the drug companies are full of bad people.
See, I think these pills to fix us feeling crappy have been driven by US – and I’m talking about me too here, because I was on anti-depressants for quite a while, back when Prozac was new. I think this whole situation of unnecessary and sometimes harmful anti-depressants has been created by US wanting ANYthing that would get rid of those awful feelings and that’s because we didn’t know there was a better easier way.
And we drove the creation of those pills because nobody taught us there was a better easier way.
“What IS an easier way?”
What we do here with horses IS an easier way. Horses helping people and people helping horses IS an easier way.
Read what Julia tells you herself in a blog yesterday where she wrote just how how easy it was for her to get rid of a long term depression and PTSD. She said “Physical problems and events, which for 20 years had brought me to tears just thinking about them, have just evaporated like steam from a kettle after my sessions with Jenny.” Yeah well, her sessions with Jenny were that quick and easy because she’d already learned her Feel for her horse and she followed up when she needed to. Read her own words here.
She solved PTSD and depression with her horse work
If you don’t have access to a horse, this unusual book will have you EXPERIENCING an easier way to understand and eliminate depression.
Holy Shit is that really true?
Here’s the link to The Guardian for the full article and the direct quotes from the doctors in this article.
Click here for the full Guardian article that includes the direct quotes
yes , I knew that about exercise well before Dr Barbara o’Neil did a podcast on it. problem is that there is no money to be earned from telling people to exercise!!!!! Or doing anything healthy in fact!!!The government even banned insurance companies from covering natural therapies a few years ago thereby forcing more people to use drugs instead of natural therapies which probably included exercise where beneficial
Yeah we all knew about that hey and lots of other natural ways to boost the feel good hormones. Was that banning during the big C or before?