Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

The problem with suicidal depression is that if someone has created the thought pattern that death is best, then removing the symptoms of depression (lethargy, lack of energy, no willpower) now gives the person the ability to actually follow through with the act.

Medications almost always target symptoms and never address root causes.

Suicidal ideation is a risk for many CNS drugs, and not unique to Prozac as far as I know. But yes this is a major risk factor that needs to be taken in account before such kind of treatments.

Nature is healing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian#References_in_pop...

It's even more fascinating when you have first hand experience with how much unmitigated guesswork goes into selecting psychiatric meds and their dosage.

I used to share your opinion, and in a way I still do, but after having 3 children and seeing how horrible some of these behaviors and habits can get, I completely understand why people cave in to get some relief. The stress of dealing with severe behavioral issues day after day can easily destroy a marriage and family.

Same here, after struggling for 39 years, glp-1 + SSRI + ADHD meds have made me a normal productive human, and 2 years ago I had pretty much given up on the possibility.

Having a child forced me to fix my life, and I'm incredibly happy because of it.

Placebo works very well for many people too! That's precisely the thing. That's what makes these studies tricky.

If you're a doctor, and if Prozac helps your patients, then it's obviously excellent. You should keep writing prescriptions.

If you're a scientist, you obviously want to distinguish between "real" drugs and drugs that help because people believe they should. So, you do these kinds of tests.

And then, from the perspective of ethics, once you know it's just placebo, you kinda shouldn't keep giving it to people, even if it helps? Maybe? I don't know. That's the weird part.

Hopefully people don’t see articles like this (for depression) and think the results are the same for anxiety disorders.

I think it’s important to note the headline that it’s specifically about children. Maybe Prozac is effective for adults but not kids in that range?

I have tried prozac in my teens and zoloft in my 30s. Prozac made me dissociate pretty hard, I found myself between classes not knowing where I was coming from or going. Zoloft did nothing but give me the zaps when I came off it.

There have been some serious efforts made to reproduce the original groundbreaking results that showed how effective SSRIs were, without much success. Anecdotally, I know plenty of people who have benefited from them, so I would not say they are ineffective as a blanket statement. I do think it’s important to understand that nobody really knows how these drugs will impact any one individual, and it’s trial and error to find something that may help.

Spitballing here. I always understood stuff like this as "the system doesn't care about you, it cares about the masses." If the result is overwhelmingly looking no better than a placebo, then the small number of people it actually helps is sort of irrelevant. The exception might be cases where people are willing to drop a bomb of cash for lifesaving drugs for rare diseases (Pharma Bro got a lot of flack for massively jacking up the price of one of these drugs.) I don't know what implications such a study may have in a complex space. I imagine the drug will still be available for those who want to try, but far less prescribed as a sort of safe default. I doubt drug companies will care much for this, since the patent has long expired.

This seems like bias against the placebo effect.

You should have tried placebo first

Placebo can be life changing

Do you have a plan to get her off, or is she on the maintenance drug for life?

Sometimes girls get depressed when their periods start. Girls often don't ovulate regularly, which can cause problems until their cycle stabilizes. Sometimes pediatricians don't allow girls' cycles to stabilize. The doctor says to the girl, "you're a woman now, so we're going to regulate your irregular period with birth control."

Women often get depressed due to the progestins used in all the birth control prescriptions.

SSRIs never help because of boosting serotonin. When someone benefits, it's from the drug's other physiological effects.

Use more words.

Even for people with legit ADHD, like myself, medication isn't always a home run. I think something like 10%-20% of people do not respond well to any medications. I personally am only a 'partial responder' in that I only really get an improvement in focus/concentration -- not really anything else. But hell, that is still better than life without medication.

One needs to not work and be able to remain at home for about a week or so to see if the side-effects are manageable. One shouldn't simply continue on with operating machinery or working a job while titrating up a new psychiatric medication. Honestly, employers should offer medical time off for this.

> I've got a prescription for an NDRI on my desk, and I still won't take it. ... something about anti-depressants just doesn't sit well with me.

At first it sounded like your antipathy was with SSRIs specifically (which I largely share), but it seems like it's anti-depressants in general.

FWIW, I used to think similar to you, and roughly agree with the gist of your second paragraph, but I've come to think of antidepressants as useful in a specific way: people say "it's a crutch" as a negative thing (about a lot of things including antidepressants), but a crutch was very useful to me when recovering from a fracture, and helped me enormously with my progress; similarly, even if "depression is just a symptom of my situation", it can and does often lead to a cycle where the depression itself feeds into the situation and in turn sustains itself. An antidepressant that works for you is a good way to be able to see things more clearly, feel the motivation and insight that depression clouds out, and thus be able to break out of the cycle.

It doesn't have to be a "cure" that counters a disorder, it can be a tool that you use for its purpose and then throw away (and it does sound like you're well-motivated to do that).