Yes it's Prozac time again
/Fluoxetine is coming up to its 20th birthday which is a great excuse to drag out the Prozac cuttings again and indulge in some lazy, journalism.
First up is someone called Anna Moore, writing in The Observer yesterday: 'Eternal sunshine'.
She pastes together a typical bit of Sunday supplement lite-reading with
'20 things you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world'. It's an undemanding jog around all things Prozac but, as usual, amongst the throwaway stuff about parrots on Prozac and Tom Cruise, there are serious errors which perpetuate the old anti-Prozac fallacies.
It's sold as happiness in a blister pack - a cure-all that has changed the way we think about wellbeing. -
Well, she got one thing right, it is sold in a blister pack.
'Depression has deepened'
- I don't even know what that sentence is supposed to mean.
'In 1971, when LY110141 - the compound that became Prozac - was developed, depression was rarely discussed and antidepressants largely restricted to the psychiatric unit.'
- just plain wrong, but then I suspect Ms Moore was just an egg sitting in mummies tummy in 1971 so she wouldn't be aware of the horrible, ineffective drugs that were used then in an attempt to treat depression. Why are Prozac and similar drugs prescribed so often now? Because they work! And you don't have to suffer three month's of unpleasant side-effects before you get any positive results.
Serotonin was not well known 20 years ago. Now, if you ask the person sitting beside you what it is, he or she may tell you it is linked to happiness, that levels get low in depressed people ... that Prozac tops them up...
- Prozac doesn't 'top-up' serotonin and nobody has suggested that it does. It works by inhibiting the re-uptake of serotonin, big hint in the term coming up, Ms Moore, SSRI - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
And so she goes on. The usual guff. It doesn't work for some people, a woman in Michigan had weird thoughts after taking it, celebrities take it so, well you know..., it was in Michael Hutchence's bloodstream when he committed suicide/killed himself in a wanking experiment that went wrong, and to top it off, this: Anna Nicole Smith died after what is thought to be an accidental overdose of prescription drugs - including Prozac. Five months earlier her son Daniel had died after mixing two SSRI antidepressants with methadone. (emphasis mine)
If Ms Moore had been concerned about deaths from widely available drugs she could have written about Nurofen and other NSAIDs, on which thousands of people are dependant and which cause hundreds of deaths a year. I wouldn't normally wish depression on anybody but I'll make an exception for Ms Moore. If it does hit her I hope her GP follows the anti-Prozac line and offers her Frosties, chocolate, yoga or a long walk in the park, anything, that is, but a 'happy pill'.
In today's Times there is another article on the same subject - Britain becomes a Prozac nation Geddit? Jeez, what happened to sub-editors?
It's by David Rose who hedges somewhat by quoting others without comment, including well known anti-Prozac campaigner and one-time ECT practitioner Professor David Healy who 'said that while the drugs were of benefit to patients with severe depression, the risks outweighed the benefits in those with less serious problems.' Which is the exact opposite of what supporters of Prozac claim. The SSRIs were found to be effective in cases of mild to moderate depression and it is at this group of patients that Prozac is targeted.
Whenever I read the opinions of psychiatrists I always think of Dr Garth Wood who wrote 'The Myth of Neurosis'. Rich, good-looking, Harrow and Cambridge educated, one-time mercant banker, Harley Street practioner to the rich and famous, Wood thought we should all pull our socks up and try what he called 'Moral Therapy'. 'He maintained that all these so-called disorders indicated a person's failure to live correctly, caused by mistakenly expecting life to be easy and by confusing unhappiness with mental illness.
He killed himself in 2001 after avoiding treatment for depression for several years.
Boom, boom!
First up is someone called Anna Moore, writing in The Observer yesterday: 'Eternal sunshine'.
She pastes together a typical bit of Sunday supplement lite-reading with
'20 things you need to know about the most widely used antidepressant in the world'. It's an undemanding jog around all things Prozac but, as usual, amongst the throwaway stuff about parrots on Prozac and Tom Cruise, there are serious errors which perpetuate the old anti-Prozac fallacies.
It's sold as happiness in a blister pack - a cure-all that has changed the way we think about wellbeing. -
Well, she got one thing right, it is sold in a blister pack.
'Depression has deepened'
- I don't even know what that sentence is supposed to mean.
'In 1971, when LY110141 - the compound that became Prozac - was developed, depression was rarely discussed and antidepressants largely restricted to the psychiatric unit.'
- just plain wrong, but then I suspect Ms Moore was just an egg sitting in mummies tummy in 1971 so she wouldn't be aware of the horrible, ineffective drugs that were used then in an attempt to treat depression. Why are Prozac and similar drugs prescribed so often now? Because they work! And you don't have to suffer three month's of unpleasant side-effects before you get any positive results.
Serotonin was not well known 20 years ago. Now, if you ask the person sitting beside you what it is, he or she may tell you it is linked to happiness, that levels get low in depressed people ... that Prozac tops them up...
- Prozac doesn't 'top-up' serotonin and nobody has suggested that it does. It works by inhibiting the re-uptake of serotonin, big hint in the term coming up, Ms Moore, SSRI - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
And so she goes on. The usual guff. It doesn't work for some people, a woman in Michigan had weird thoughts after taking it, celebrities take it so, well you know..., it was in Michael Hutchence's bloodstream when he committed suicide/killed himself in a wanking experiment that went wrong, and to top it off, this: Anna Nicole Smith died after what is thought to be an accidental overdose of prescription drugs - including Prozac. Five months earlier her son Daniel had died after mixing two SSRI antidepressants with methadone. (emphasis mine)
If Ms Moore had been concerned about deaths from widely available drugs she could have written about Nurofen and other NSAIDs, on which thousands of people are dependant and which cause hundreds of deaths a year. I wouldn't normally wish depression on anybody but I'll make an exception for Ms Moore. If it does hit her I hope her GP follows the anti-Prozac line and offers her Frosties, chocolate, yoga or a long walk in the park, anything, that is, but a 'happy pill'.
In today's Times there is another article on the same subject - Britain becomes a Prozac nation Geddit? Jeez, what happened to sub-editors?
It's by David Rose who hedges somewhat by quoting others without comment, including well known anti-Prozac campaigner and one-time ECT practitioner Professor David Healy who 'said that while the drugs were of benefit to patients with severe depression, the risks outweighed the benefits in those with less serious problems.' Which is the exact opposite of what supporters of Prozac claim. The SSRIs were found to be effective in cases of mild to moderate depression and it is at this group of patients that Prozac is targeted.
Whenever I read the opinions of psychiatrists I always think of Dr Garth Wood who wrote 'The Myth of Neurosis'. Rich, good-looking, Harrow and Cambridge educated, one-time mercant banker, Harley Street practioner to the rich and famous, Wood thought we should all pull our socks up and try what he called 'Moral Therapy'. 'He maintained that all these so-called disorders indicated a person's failure to live correctly, caused by mistakenly expecting life to be easy and by confusing unhappiness with mental illness.
He killed himself in 2001 after avoiding treatment for depression for several years.
Boom, boom!
