h a l f b a k e r yAsk your doctor if the Halfbakery is right for you.
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Antidepressants have improved many people's lives, including mine. That said, only a few specific things normally depress me. It seems like overkill to take a medication that changes my entire personality; I'd much rather take medications for those specific issues. With all of our modern medical science,
surely we can develop pills to counteract distress over things like unemployment, the world economy, Internet ads, country music, or whatever. (These are sample issues only.)
The effect of country music on suicide (PDF)
http://www.uta.edu/...8/music-suicide.pdf
One of the papers honored at the 2004 IgNobel awards. Discounting for other factors such as poverty, divorce rate, and "southernness", urban whites tended to kill themselves more frequently in areas with more country music on the radio.
Take 45min of Jonathan Richman and call me in the morning. [jutta, Oct 14 2004]
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Good to see you, Ander - it's been a long time, hasn't it? |
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Not sure I concur with your idea, however... not sure if there is even an idea there. |
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Better living through highly calibrated pharmacology. I like it. |
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Since you've brought it up, this would be my drug of choice right now: an anti-pointless-fury- regarding-that-weenie- in-the-White-House concoction. 50 mg twice daily should just about do it. |
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Note that I do not want the removal of the more useful aspects of my anti-Bush fury. If it's the kind of thing that makes me choose to participate in a peace march, volunteer for a campaign, etc., I'll take it. What I need less of is the sort of rage that makes me send off emails to whitehouse.gov addressed to "you puny self-righteous inarticulate vengeful judgmental asshole", and the like. |
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Shades of the anti-unrequited-love drug! If you know what's wrong, take your medication and suggest your practitioner modify the dose to your particular degree of angst. There are well studied examples of small drug cocktail adjustments that improve the chances for recovery in a patient, such as the notion that T3 supplementation converts a third to three quarters of antidepressant nonresponders to responders. |
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There is the more insidious belief that the regularity and uniformity of psychiatric symptoms within a diagnostic class points to a syndrome of symptom development that is mirrored among patients with a chronic diseased state -- successes and setbacks seem familiar within a similarly diagnosed catchment. |
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Are these similarities byproducts of the tenacious disordered thinking held to by a sick mind? Do the codeveloped symptoms signify the color that professional interviewing adds to the patient's subjective reports? Perhaps the answers to the same questions the sick are asking themselves are the answers we ask of each other and there is no social alternative but to see ourselves subjectively in the image of our peers. |
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No, we really don't see enough odd mental cases to offer us any doubt that a group diagnosed with a mental or emotional disorder will benefit from the least theraputic interaction. There are too many drug combinations possible now, and too few cutting-edge applications. |
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The general anti-depressants have some specific (and for folks like us rabbits) very undesirable side-effects, which I will not mention here in deference to the sensibilities etc. It would be great if an anti-depressant could be developed that was free of those very undesirable side-effects. I am just writing this in case some pharmaceutical companies are listening in.
For the kinds of things that depress Ander, those are intrinsically depressing things (except for country music), and maybe it would be good to ameliorate those depressing things, rather than taking a pill that will numb the natural response to such things.
To deal with country music and suchlike, if it depresses you, you can avoid it. A simple cure.
To deal with unrequited love, find another love. Not so simple or easy, but that is the one and only cure. After a while, you'll get the hang of it.
To deal with intrinsically depressing things of an overall sociopolitical nature, I suggest that someone develop an activist activating pill, that will give you the specific kind of untiring and optimistic energy that will enable you to mobilize your community against specific injustices. There is nothing like moral righteousness and one or two small victories to make you feel good about yourself.
Must add a cautionary postscript - the energy of moral righteousness is dangerous and sometimes lethal. For that reason, the activist activating pill must always be taken together with a self-questioning pill, an anti-hypocrisy pill, an attraction-to-other-points-of-view pill, and a porosifying-of-ego-boundaries pill. Take all these pills, and you should be fine (everybody should always be fine, after all) or if you're not fine, you will be different from what you were. And if what you were was unbearable, something different couldn't be a whole lot worse, could it? It is your decision.
Alternatively, snap out of it by your own energies, and get a life.
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Sorry, forgot about Vitamin M. Works better than anything for everything. But it costs so much!
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There's a science fiction story which proposes just this sort of thing. I'll try to find a link. |
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Just how specific are these anti-depressants? For example, do they go down to person level? Suddenly you can feel a whole lot brighter about that important meeting with the boss you simply cannot stand. Could you administer specific depressants too - "you are just too bouncy for me, hold on a mo'". |
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" Discourage Inbreeding - Ban Country Music " |
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[UB], [BC] - there's PhD funding in there if you combine thise two ideas. SHouldn't be difficutl to show a statistical correlation between Country Music, Inbreeding, and Self-immolation. |
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Suggested mechanism: Exposure to country music destroys the will to live of anyone with an IQ larger than their shoe size. Not surprisingly, they end it all. The survivors breed with one another, producing hordes of droooling, slack-jawed morons who all have twelve toes and play the banjo. |
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By a mysterious process, these individuals then invariably attain high political office. |
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<droooling, slack-jawed moron>budda-ding-dang-dong</droooling, slack-jawed moron> |
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UnaBubba - You are right, and I agree, that "snap out of it" is the wrong thing to say to a depressed person. Don't know why I popped that in there. I guess because it is just as reductio as my preceding paragraph. |
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Well, okay, I'll be more specific: Wellbutrin is better than the other a/d's I've tried, in that it doesn't make me more depressed (though I could appreciate the irony). However, it has this, er, rather sexual, i.e. aphrodesiac---okay, I said the "A-word"---side effect, and my wife simply has too many private clients these days, in addition to her regular caseload, to properly accommodate me. Otherwise I can't complain, though, really. Aside from the sex thing. [This annotation posted for clinical purposes only.] |
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Good intentions, but it somewhat worries me. If your specific issue is just a manifestation of clinical depression, then use a general antidepressant. Stopping the issue without treating the disease will just make a new issue come up. However, if you are not depressed, and the issue is just a thing you have yet to come to terms with (relationship problem) or something that is wrong with the world (country music) then drugs will do more harm than good. Its better to fix the problem. Don't get me wrong, antidepressants are a wonderful thing, but they are highly overprescribed already. This would make it worse I fear. |
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I think those drugs are on the way, but not for a long time. At least research is now focused on, say, lowering cortisol as opposed to just altering levels of monoamines. I would settle for something that would just block (effectively) the sexual side effects of SSRIs! |
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Don't like a family member?? That's OKK!! Take a pill! Bad day at work? No problem! Take a pill! Oh, man..I'm broke again....Let me take a pill! This is soooo funny!!!!!!!!! But I'll give you a plus! |
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I thought this would be a post about targeting more specific parts of the brain and therefore avoiding more side effects. The fact is I would almost classify this as a WIBNI because we're pretty far from really understanding how the current antidepressants work. Sure, seretonin, norepinephrine, but real hard brain chemistry that would target very specific emotions is a long way off. I seem to be the only one thinking this though so I will remain neutral. I am just glad that antidepressants are as good as they are now. I just got put on fluoxetine and I think it is starting to work, but if all that was availabe were MAOIs I think I would have rather been miserable than risked the side effects and cross reactions. So far the only side effect of the fluoxetine is the desire to create very long run-on sentences without any commas whatsoever in them at all. |
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No, you're not the only one thinking that. |
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