orpheus wrote:
I'm not that familiar with schizophrenia. But I'd like to see the research that supports what you say about mood spectrum disorders, as I've never heard those conclusions. And even if they're true, how does the damage you speak of compare with the brain damage caused by untreated episodes of depression and/or mania? As I said above, we know that left untreated, those often recur, and further recurrences become much harder to treat.
Most of us are aware that synaptic function is the means by which drugs effect their effect. Hammering these repeatedly renders the synapse unable to function without the drug. Anybody who understands neurons knows that a synapse is operated on and effected on by multiple processes, enzymes and feeback loops involving these such that the for the average neuron to fire requires a magnitude less of the single hammer such as the reuptake inhibitor used by many drugs. i.e. Moods are the combination of numbers of factors operating on our complex brain..i.e. we become depressed not because of a single chemical hammer going wrong, but complex reasons including our health, social world, diet etc..which finally causes the imbalance.
That is why drugs have effects such as "poop out", where the drug simply stops working at all due to hammering synapse far more than they were naturally designed for, or such heavy withdrawal that seizures can occur, where it can take years of gradual withdrawal and struggle for the synapses to get used to working at their original baseline levels. i.e Alcohol, SSRi, cocaine, heroin, Benzo withdrawal.
As professor Giovanni Fava and others have pointed out drug administration may cause irreversible damage and turn a single episodic condition into an acute and lifelong one. You can see his many publications here.
http://www.biomedexperts.com/Profile.bm ... nni_A_Fava
Or an easier read book on the subject here which points out that as drugs are introduced to treat minor depression, these cases transformed into bipolar disorder far higher than any previous numbers. American has one of the highest rates of bipolar, and this occured in precise step with the prescription of SSri, which hammer the mood system. Correlation is not Causation as we know with autism, but Autism does not churn out stats like 1 in 10 of the population affected with bipolar, when 1 in 10 of those also had prozac, ritalin and various variants prescribed to them.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/cultu ... us-mad.php
It makes perfect sense. Bipolar disorder is a dysregulation of the control mechanism which keep mood in check. As neurotransmitter levels rise too high the neurons tire out and fail to operate, which gives rise to the mood crash. Hammering the synapse is more likely to worsen the situation if the patient is not very carefully dosed and monitored. This kind of depth of care rarely occurs, as the focus is heavily on fix the problem right now.
Prof Fava points out drug companies selectively frame studies such that all the negative aspects are not published so that 50/50 looks like 100% Ok (link below). So how can you conduct treatment if all clinicians have is glowing reports of efficacy ?
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7658/1405
As psychologist bruce Levine tells us in his books being so careful with dosage on even psychotic patients only happens in finland, where they have the best long term outcomes in the world.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN ... punchmaga