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Comment by codingslave | Hacker News Reader

Really doubt this. Instead I would look into the connection between anti depressants/anti psychotics and suicide. There's research of strong connections, but immunity is claimed by the drug companies, "because they were already depressed/mentally unhealthy when put on the drugs". Mental health professionals and managers at large drug companies need to start going to jail for over-prescribing psychiatric drugs.

The next big culprit is other drug addiction, like fentanyl and heroin. Stemming the flow of cheap fentanyl dumped into the United States by China and throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.

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> Stemming the flow of cheap fentanyl dumped into the United States by China

OK, and how's the "war on drugs" going thus far?

> Mental health professionals and managers at large drug companies need to start going to jail for over-prescribing psychiatric drugs.

Really? You want to put people into jail for trying to treat depression?

> throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.

And now you want to imprison doctors for treating pain and taking care of patients?

You can't be serious, I hope you are merely ignorant rather than that punitive.

BTW, prescriptions have nothing to do with illegal fentanyl overdoses, and virtually nobody prescribed painkillers becomes addicted to them. This is well studied but largely ignored by the political posturing, media hysteria, and moral panicking about an imaginary prescription crisis, data shows it does not exist.

"Overall 675,527 patients underwent urological surgery, of whom 0.09% were diagnosed with opioid dependence or overdose."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00225...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27400458

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3z98b/big-pharma-didnt-c...

Read facts and change your mind, or don't and remain ignorant. You have that freedom.

> OK, and how's the "war on drugs" going thus far?

The case with fentanyl is not like heroin, well established factories make it in China. It is within the Chinese governments power to stop the flow, this is a foreign policy issue. The fact that its not at all in the news is disturbing.

> Really? You want to put people into jail for trying to treat depression?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Secondly, this isnt "trying to treat depression", its a profit driven industry. SSRIs commonly do not outperform their placebo. Most of the recent adolescent mass shooters were on SSRIs!

> throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.

If Boeing engineers design an unsafe plane to squeeze out more profits and then line their pockets, which results in airplane crashes, they should go to jail. The same is true for healthcare.

Claiming that prescription opiods are not fueling the heroin and fentanyl crisis is a radical opinion. There was a massive lawsuit against the big pharma companies making money off these drugs. I'm not going to google research, its plain and simple.

Criminal doctors have been prescribing these drugs and making money off them. This has caused mass deaths and suicides.

Look at the chart of opion consumption on this page:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/nov/...

The number of opiod prescriptions year by year looks like the price of bitcoin. I dont need some study to try and convince me otherwise.

I'm doubtful the discussion will go anywhere productive but I think part of your argument is an assumption, "And now you want to imprison doctors for treating pain and taking care of patients?" because filling a role of a job to just prescribe medication isn't really trying and when we don't actually know what the outcome will be. Following a protocol isn't really trying is all.

Research from the past few years has been questioning if the brain will just adapt overtime while on medication to the point of becoming oversensitive when off the medication and where the normal state of the person gets worse. I've only read this about antipsychotics more so than antidepressants.

In any case much if not all research in the topic of mind altering medication is still in the infant years and should be read while being skeptic. Multiple unique life factors can make research very difficult to get right in this topic.

Pardon my French but what the heck do you think is driving rising depression rates and opioid addiction if not economic pressures? Do you really think those are unrelated?

A large volume of research shows depression/suicide/drug abuse/etc are directly related to economic stress, but that's a much harder topic to address so it's ignored in favor of easy scapegoats and bogeyman.

I couldn't agree with you more. Its sad that so many people have dismissed this possibility out of hand. Even the FDA agrees that there is a risk (which is why there are black box labels on antidepressants).

There are also many cases of drug companies going to court and losing over suicides and murder-suicides. Leaks during those trials have shown horrible cover ups such as Study 329.

The whole thing is really is too horrible to imagine. The idea that we could give drugs to people making them want to kill themselves, which I think is why so many people don't want to believe it could be true.

Are you claiming that a $1/hour increase in your wage makes you less likely to be on an SSRI? I'm not sure I follow your logic here...

SSRIs saved my life, I don't like such wild claims. Don't be afraid of psychiatric drugs if you are hurting.

Are you still on them?

8 years and counting, same dose, 10mg lexapro / day

+1, antidepressants are not magic and don't work for everyone, but they worked amazingly for me.

I was put off for so long because I had read so many people saying that antidepressants were evil or bad or whatever. I wish I asked my doctor about them earlier.

It's OK to take them. It's ok to not want to take them. I wish they were less stigmatized because they do help some people a lot.

These things are not mutually exclusive:

> studies showed that children and adolescents taking antidepressants were almost twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts or to attempt suicide, compared to patients taking a sugar pill.

http://www.center4research.org/antidepressants-increase-suic...

Not arguing either way, as I don't think I am knowledgeable enough on the subject to do so, but I feel like there is a lot of potential to confuse correlation and causation. It simply could just be that "children and adolescents taking antidepressants" are already in a high risk group that is 3 times as likely "to have suicidal thoughts or to attempt suicide", and antidepressants reduce that number to "twice as likely".

This is, of course, the very first thing any reputable study tries to control for; presumably the placebo and active populations are both taken from populations with comparable diagnoses.

Right and this is where plausible deniability comes in from the point of view of the pharmaceutical companies. Drug studies are problematic because nothing happens in a vacuum.

Ironically, this happens because the medicine is working. FTA:

> When a person’s depression starts to lift, he or she may feel less hopeless and helpless. That sounds like an improvement, but when people feel less helpless but still feel depressed, they may think about suicide as a way out, whereas before they were too immobilized to make a suicide plan. For that reason, a decrease in the symptoms of depression can increase the risk of suicidal thoughts or actions.

While plausible, that paragraph is speculation; it's also plausible that antidepressants push some subgroup of patients toward suicidal ideation.

I'm unaware of any study that answers this question definitively, but I'm interested, so if anyone sees something useful, please chime in.

I couldn't agree more about psychiatric medication but that doesn't mean there aren't multiple causes. Also, drug addiction in many cases is caused by low wages and terrible economic conditions so addressing the addiction needs to address the underlying issues which are low wages and a terrible economy for normal people.

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