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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Anti-depressants literally saved my life. I tried to manage my anxiety / depression for years with diet, exercise, therapy, mindfulness, and meditation without great success. 2 weeks of lexapro was a night and day difference. Don't be afraid of medication if other options fail.

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I concur. Don't be afraid of the medication, just make sure to consult a (good) qualified professional that helps you figure out the right prescription for your particular scenario, and don't fall in the overuse/abuse trap.

Same here. Lexapro made most of my depression and anxiety go away. With that initial chemical help, I was able to double down on my exercises and good dieting. Before SSRI's, I did not have enough "drive" to exercise hard or eat well.

> 2 weeks of lexapro was a night and day difference.

My girlfriend thought that lexapro had helped her years before she met me...

She escaped from the psychiatrists who only cared about making her feel worse with their "anti-psychotics", and got her new medical providers to prescribe lexapro instead. After a week she realized that her new rapid heartbeat was certainly caused by the lexapro. She took her last benzo (class of "anxiety" drug that makes anxiety worse over time), and it was all downhill from there...

SSRIs were approved on the basis of fraudulent science. The legal profession was recently able to secure a $3 million verdict against Glaxo Smith Klein - a rather successful lawyer jumped in front of a train after a few days on Paxil. Here's a writeup: https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/05/change-in-chicago-the-d...

So Glaxo Smith Klein misrepresented adverse effects of paroxetine. This doesnt mean at all that the science behind SSRIs is "fraudulent". SSRIs are among the best researched psychopharmaceuticals. And it is true that benzos make anxiety worse, long term, but that doesnt mean that they arent a valuable medication to treat anxiety.

Prozac was always defective too. The German FDA refused to approve it, way back when.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14281643

The drug industry has a habit of coming out with a new "class" of drugs as soon as the patents for their old drugs expire. Or they patent a new combination for old over-the-counter chemicals. My father recently got prescribed something with a retail price of >$1000. He said he could buy the two OTC pills for about $15... this was something for his stomach + an nsaid, iirc.

The "German FDA" has certainly approved of fluoxetine (Prozac), which is simply sold under a different name there.

maybe they eventually approved it, but they passed on it in 1984:

  – Three years before Prozac received approval by the US 
  Food and Drug Administration in late 1987, the German BGA, 
  that country’s FDA equivalent, had such serious 
  reservations about Prozac’s safety that it refused to 
  approve the antidepressant based on Lilly’s studies 
  showing that previously nonsuicidal patients who took the 
  drug had a fivefold higher rate of suicides and suicide 
  attempts than those on older antidepressants, and a 
  threefold higher rate than those taking placebos. [1]

[1] http://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/media/boston_globe_prozac_revi...

Two more links from this site ("note-to-self"): https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/prozac-time-line/ https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/our-successes/advocacy-campai...

There's no "maybe" about it - Prozac is available in Germany, just under a different name.

>She took her last benzo (class of "anxiety" drug that makes anxiety worse over time)

Can you elaborate here please?

There are questions about long-term benzodiazepine use, and among the more reliable studied results is that their efficacy can decrease over time. Benzos are useful for acute care but depending on circumstances might not be a sound long-term treatment.

basically what tptacek said... Benzos' are sometimes useful for acute anxiety, but this is not how they're commonly used.

Benzos: A Dance With the Devil - https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/07/benzos-a-dance-with-the...

Benzodiazepine category - https://www.madinamerica.com/category/psychiatric-drugs/benz...

Wow, that's scary, the one about a grand mal seizure with Xanax in particular. I used to take that, but only for occasional acute anxiety, never on a regular basis. It seemed to help a lot, and unlike the SSRIs I've used, it didn't have any obvious side-effects at all. I never took it long enough to get any build-up though, just occasionally if I was having a really bad episode.

This is also my story. Tried everything and only the meds helped.

In the presence of the medical industry's status quo of "we have no studies demonstrating any harm from this drug", and the presence of next to no safety studies at all, all you can really say is you lucked out in the genetic lottery.

The fact is, these drugs do harm people. There's a reason homicide and suicide are listed as a side effect in the drug insert of all SSRI's. Your testimony is correlation. But that in and of itself does not establish causation of a positive outcome for everyone.

So? I hear all sorts of bullshit from armchair psychiatrists trying to scare people from using SSRI's. I'm saying, it might work for you, like it did for me. Or it might not. Might as well try if other things don't work.

You zealously omitted the "it might not" part from your comment.

Do you have a way of knowing whether the Lexapro was more effective than a placebo would have been?

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