Are Drug Side Effects Driving Depression Rates?

madinamerica
By Peter Simons September 18, 2018

According to new research, between 2013 and 2014, 38.4% of adults took a medication that lists depression as a potential side effect, and 9.5% received three or more such medications. About 23.5% took a drug that listed increased suicidality as a side effect. The researchers found that the use of these drugs was associated with people developing depression and suicidality.

“Use of prescription medications that have depression as a potential adverse effect was common and associated with greater likelihood of concurrent depression,” the researchers write.

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), was led by Dima M. Qato, PharmD, MPH, PhD, at the Department of Pharmacy Systems, Outcomes and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, and also included Katherine Ozenberger, from that same institution, as well as Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist and public health specialist from Columbia University, New York.

Numerous medications include depression and suicidality as a potential side effect, including hormonal contraceptives, beta-blockers, proton pump inhibitors, anti-anxiety medications, and, paradoxically, “antidepressants” themselves.

The researchers found that rates of depression were higher in those taking medications that listed depression as a side effect. They controlled for numerous other factors, including gender, race, age, education level, socioeconomic status, marital status, employment, and multiple medical conditions (e.g., hypertension, cancer, diabetes, and many others).

The authors also controlled for potential confounds and reverse causality by using a statistical method called sensitivity analyses. For instance, the researchers conducted additional analyses to test if removing those who used psychotropic medications would alter the outcome, or if removing those who had hypertension (which is also associated with depression) would alter the outcome. In all of these cases, the association between medication use and depression continued to be statistically significant.

These results indicate that even when removing potential confounding cases (such as other psychotropic drugs, or people with illnesses linked to depression), there was still a link between medication use and the development of depression.

The connection between these drugs and depression were even more powerful for people who took three or more medications that had depression as a side effect. In fact, according to the researchers, about three times as many people who took three or more of these drugs developed depression when compared to those who were not on such medications:

“The estimated prevalence of depression was 15% for those reporting use of 3 or more medications with depression as an adverse effect vs 4.7% for those not using such medications.”

Their finding was not merely due to medication use in general—there was no difference in depression symptoms between those who took no medication and those who took even three medicines that did not have depression as a side effect. Thus, only drugs with depression listed as a side effect were associated with the development of depression.

According to the researchers, some of these medications are available over-the-counter (such as proton pump inhibitors and emergency contraceptives) in the US, and their packaging is often not thorough enough to describe the association of these drugs with depression and suicidality. Thus, consumers may not be aware that the medications they are taking could be responsible for their altered emotional state.

Additionally, the researchers note that calls for screening for depression have expanded considerably—yet screening instruments do not ask about potential medication side effects. Thus, screening for depression may result in someone receiving a diagnosis of depression (and potentially receiving antidepressants) when what is happening is that they are experiencing the side effect of another medication.

****

Qato, D. M., Ozenberger, K., Olfson, M. (2018). Prevalence of prescription medications with depression as a potential adverse effect among adults in the United States. JAMA, 319(22), 2289-2298. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.6741 (Link)



Thank you Mr Simons and MIA.

Mental Health First Aid: Another Psychiatric Expansionist Tool

Dr Phil Hickey

On December 25, 2016, the Baltimore Sun published an excellent article titled Drug companies prey on children, by Patrick D. Hahn, PhD.  Dr. Hahn is an affiliate professor of biology at Loyola University, Maryland.  Here are some quotes:

“I recently attended Youth Mental Health First Aid Training at a local public school. It was an eye-opening experience.”

“Youth Mental Health First Aid Training, sponsored by the National Council for Behavioral Health, is intended to enable teachers, parents and others in contact with young people to identify potential ‘mental illnesses’ in order to facilitate early detection and treatment by our mental health care system. My fellow attendees were surprisingly open about their own experiences with that system. One mentioned that her son became manic after being diagnosed for ADHD. Another said that both she and her roommate became bipolar after being diagnosed for depression. Neither our facilitators nor anyone else present pointed out that mania and bipolar disorder are toxic effects of medications commonly prescribed for ADHD and depression.”

“Our training manual didn’t say anything about this either, although it did claim that depression is caused by a deficiency of serotonin — a fable that by now has become as discredited as the phlogiston theory of chemistry. It also stated that mental health interventions are ‘evidence-based’ and ‘scientifically tested’ — neglecting to mention that much of that evidence is put forth by drug companies who have a fiduciary duty to do everything they can to maximize sales of their products.”

“So is all this a scheme to push more drugs to more kids? The 2013/2014 annual report for the National Council for Behavioral Health, titled ‘A Legacy of Excellence and Impact,’ gives us a hint. It lists the organization’s supporters as including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) along with no fewer than 12 different drug companies. Would these folks be ponying up the cash if they weren’t confident this program would increase sales? And do the parents and teachers who attend the council’s training program — no doubt with the best intentions in the world — realize that they are essentially sitting through an eight-hour infomercial bought and paid for by the drugmakers?”

“One out of 13 American children between the ages of 6 and 17 has taken a psychotropic medication within the last six months, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Meanwhile, youth suicide rates are at their peak going back at least as far back as 1999, while the number of children receiving disability benefits for mental illness is at an all-time high.”

Please take a look at Dr. Hahn’s article, and pass it on.  Mental Health First Aid is not a good thing.  Rather, it is just another psychiatric expansionist tool.

Continue Reading.

Thank You Dr Hickey 

And bookmark Dr Hickey's URL.

Gitmo Prisoners 'Thought It Was The End Of The World' on Election Night, Asked For Tranquilizers

weaselzippers


Hilarious.

Via Free Beacon:

Prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba “thought it was the end of the world” the night of the presidential election and asked their guards for tranquilizers and sleeping pills, CBS correspondent Margaret Brennan reported Thursday.

David Remes, the lawyer of one of the prisoners at Guantanamo, recounted to Brennan what his client told him about election night.

“He said that many detainees thought that it was the end of the world and felt terrible and that many detainees asked for tranquilizers, sleeping pills because they were so distraught,” Remes said.

Keep reading…

Thank You Free Beacon and Nick. 

Clinical Depression.

Get them a Diagnosis and a cocktail of Medicare Funded $500 to $5,000 or more per month drug addictions.

• Violence (23)

Did Someone Say 'Depression'? Labor Force Participation Rate Drops To 62.8% In April: 94,044,000 Out

CNSNews
Depression, it's not only inheritable, it's contagious. 

You catch this highly infectious disorder from the stupid left behind in voting booths.

By Susan Jones | May 6, 2016 | 6:40 AM EDT

(CNSNews.com) - The number of Americans not in the labor force last month totaled 94,044,000, 562,000 more than in March -- and the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.8 percent (near a 38-year low), following four straight months of slight improvement.

When President Obama took office in Janaury 2009, the labor force partipation rate was 65.7 percent, after hovering in the 66-67 percent range for much of the George W. Bush presidency.

The recession inherited by the Obama administration officially ended in June 2009, but the labor force participation rate continued to drop during Obama's two terms, hitting 62.4 percent in September 2015, its lowest point in 38 years.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the economy added 160,000 jobs in April (compared with 215,000 in March). Over the prior 12 months, employment growth had averaged 232,000 per month.

The April unemployment rate held steady at 5.0 percent. (It was also 5.0 percent in March, up a tenth of a point from the 4.9 percent in January and February.)

In April, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, reached 252,969,000. Of those, 158,924,000 participated in the labor force by either holding a job or actively seeking one.

The 158,924,000 who participated in the labor force equaled 62.8 percent of the 252,969,000 civilian noninstitutional population.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 5,793,000 people in April as "persons who currently want a job," up from 5,712,000 in March.   

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for Hispanics increased to 6.1 percent in April, while the rates for adult men (4.6 percent), adult women (4.5 percent), teenagers (16.0 percent), Whites (4.3 percent), Blacks (8.8 percent), and Asians (3.8 percent) showed little or no change.

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) declined by 150,000 to 2.1 million in April. These individuals accounted for 25.7 percent of the unemployed.

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (also referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was about unchanged in April at 6.0 million and has shown little movement since November. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

In April, 1.7 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, down by 400,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

Among the marginally attached, there were 568,000 discouraged workers in April, down by 188,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.1 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in April had not searched for work for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities.

Thank You Ms Jones and CNS.

U.S. Has Lost 191,000 Mining Jobs Since September 2014

Unemployed W. Va. Coal Worker Confronts Hillary Clinton About Promise To Put Coal Industry Out Of Business

Not An Onion Study: Laughing Gas vs Air For Treatment of Depression

madinamerica;

December 25, 2014

“Nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, has shown early promise as a potential treatment for severe depression in patients whose symptoms don’t respond to standard therapies,” stated a press release about a widely-reported study that was published in Biological Psychiatry. The press release also stated that over a third of the patients improved after being given air.

In the study, Washington University School of Medicine researchers identified 20 patients with “treatment-resistant clinical depression,” and alternately gave them laughing gas and “a placebo mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, the two main gases in the air we breathe.”

Of the 20 patients, 7 reported “mild improvement” and 7 “significant improvement” for a day after receiving the laughing gas, stated the press release. The researchers expressed hope that there would be more studies into laughing gas, and said they found it “kind of surprising that no one ever thought about using a drug that makes people laugh as a treatment for patients whose main symptom is that they’re so very sad.”

The press release also noted that, after receiving the air, five patients reported mild improvements, and two reported that they felt “significantly better.” However, one patient experienced worse symptoms the next day after receiving air. Conversely, the researchers wrote, “No patients said their symptoms worsened after treatment with nitrous oxide.”

Laughing gas studied as depression treatment (Washington University in St. Louis press release, December 9, 2014)

This entry was posted in Featured News, In the News, Placebos, Psychiatric Drugs by Rob Wipond. Bookmark the permalink.

Related Posts:

• Music Therapy Reduces Depression in Children and Youth
• Brief Depression Questionnaires Double Depression Diagnoses
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• Mice Without Serotonin Do Not Display Depression
• Type of Treatment for Depression is Less Important than Engagement

Thank You Mr Wipond and MIA.

Nice to know the Pros from Dover are on the job, isn't it?

usdebtclock.org

Enough Is Enough Series: An Hallucinogen For Depression? Psychiatry Is Testing Ketamine (Special K) For Depression

madinamerica;

Well isn't This just 'special'? Here we have a Dr who Teaches Psychiatry, and He's throwing the BS flag right on the 50 yard line. 

Robert Berezin, MD

December 18, 2014

The article, “Special K, a Hallucinogen, Raises Hopes and Concerns as a Treatment for Depression,” by Andrew Pollack in the New York Times, December 9, 2014, tells how far afield my field, psychiatry, has really gone that it is even a consideration to use an hallucinogen for the treatment of depression.

Let’s start at the beginning. Depression is not a biochemical disorder. It is actually a manifestation of personality when too much anger gets directed at the self and crosses the line into a symptom.  See – “No its not the  Neurotransmitters, Depression is not a Biological Disease caused by an Imbalance of Serotonin.” Human suffering is not a brain problem, but a human problem. Psychotherapy addresses what ails us, not drugs. Unfortunately big Pharma and the APA have manufactured a house of cards that seems to be believed not only by most of psychiatry, but by the general public as well.

There has never been any link between the suffering of depression and biochemistry. Yes, of course, all our mental states are reflected in the brain. But they are not caused by a brain disorder. When psychotherapy addresses the salient issues, our brains then reflect a different state of mind. The brain does not lead anything. It follows.

It’s bad enough that people are subject to the SSRI’s and other ‘antidepressant’ pharmaceuticals. These are mind altering psychoactive drugs that numb and harden us. Once a person is unconflicted about being selfish and not caring, his so-called depression may seem to diminish. This is a dehumanizing process. We need to be fully human, not the other way around. Not only that, but antidepressants are very addictive. When patients try to stop the drugs, their so-called depression seems to get worse, because they are habituated to the supply of serotonin. These patients then end up believing that they truly have a brain disorder. They’ll need the drugs for life and thank god they have them.

Of course, if a patient tries to detox from the antidepressants they commonly have horrific withdrawal symptoms that are almost never publicized. An array of frightening neurological symptoms appear when trying to detox — vertigo, lightheadedness, burning or tingling sensations in the skin, difficulty with gait and balance, blurred vision, tremors, twitches and restlessness. Sometimes there are hallucinations. Patients, understandingly, get terrified from these symptoms and conclude that something really is dangerously wrong with their brain. To detox from antidepressants has to be done very carefully, under proper supervision, over the course of a year. It is bumpy and hard.

But it keeps getting worse. Eventually patients get habituated to the antidepressants. They don’t seem to be working. The supply ceases to keep them numb. They need more serotonin. The psychopharmacologists then expertly add in other antidepressants. Than maybe a benzodiazepine. Or maybe an antipsychotic. And if the ‘depression’ gets really bad, they may need to be shocked.

And now we turn to hallucinogens as one more agent to treat a synaptic-biochemical disorder that doesn’t exist? The fact that it is even a question as to whether Special K might be constructive is absurd. Dr. John H. Krystal, chairman of psychiatry at Yale and a pioneer in the study of ketamine for depression says,“ Synaptic connections that help us to cope seem to grow back.” I would be very interested in finding a synaptic connection to help us cope. Depression is not a synaptic problem in the first place. Pharmacologists have redefined the hallucinogenic effects as side effects. They say, “Pharmaceutical companies hope to solve the problem by developing drugs that work like ketamine but without the side effects, which are often described as out-of-body experiences.” This is nonsense. We are talking about a hallucinogen here. What’s next, LSD for depression?

We have a huge drug problem in the United States, both illegal and legal. Cocaine was in, disappeared, then came back with a vengeance, advertised as having no negative effects, no addiction, just a free high. Amphetamines were huge in the sixties and seventies and then fell into disrepute, only to be resurrected and promoted again for the fictitious ADHD. Marijuana is back, becoming legal, and is far more powerful and destructive especially for teenage brains. And on its heels we want to bring back the psychedelics? Hallucinogens are incredibly disruptive to the very intactness of the personality.

I never fail but to be amazed that so many people are genuinely concerned about what they eat and drink, and are careful to not put toxins in their body. And they tend to be at odds with and suspicious of huge corrupt organizations. And yet with drugs, this is completely disregarded, and people swallow what Big Pharma puts out there.

Robert Berezin, MD

Robert Berezin, MD. has been in private practice and taught psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School, for thirty years. If you have a sense that drugs are not the answer. If you are tired of the destructive direction and misleading promises of the DSM-5, and the pharmaceutical industry. If you have the intimation that human struggle, and your struggle and pain is a human problem, not a brain disease – Dr. Berezin presents a unified field theory of human consciousness which includes psychiatry, neuroscience, dreams, myths, religion, and art. He is the author of “Psychotherapy of Character: The Play of Consciousness in the Theater of the Brain.”

You can see more of his blogs at  www.robertberezin.com

This entry was posted in Adult, Antidepressants, Blogs, Depression, Disorders, Featured Blogs,Psychiatric Drugs, Uncategorized by Robert Berezin, MD. Bookmark the permalink.

Thank You Dr Berezin and MIA.

Graph: Reagan's Recovery Vs, Obama's Recovery

weaselzippers;

Graph: Reagan's Recovery Vs, Obama's Recovery

It’s almost like conservative economic policies work.

Via IJ Review:

. . . Consider these three important comparisons of economic indicators, then and now:

- Unemployment was at 10.8% versus 7.7%

- Inflation (Consumer Price Index) was at 13.5% versus 2.7%

- Interest rates (prime rate) was at 21.5% versus 3.25%

In other words, Reagan inherited a bigger mess.

Keep reading…

Thank You IJ Review and Zip.

Hmmm,  . . . Economic Depression, . . . . Psychiatric Depression, . . . . but it's Genetic, or a Brain Chemical Imbalance, . . .