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Comment by teammatters | Hacker News Reader

For me and others close to me anti-depressants proved to be a joke/a placebo.

I was on five to six different drugs to cure an odd social anxiety, that went away as I got older and grew more comfortable in my skin. How in the world can a drug cure an odd internal social behavior that leads one to feel anxious/uncomfortable? Answer for me is .. it can't.

Another example being my g/f. We started dating six years ago and up until a year ago she had been on 4 different anti-depressants each year. Her doctors would say oh that one isn't working lets try this one and so on. Finally she realized this stuff isn't helpful, what's the point?

For those it has helped that's good to hear, but for me, my g/f and many others I know... these drugs are just lining the pockets of the drug companies.

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> How in the world can a drug cure an odd internal social behavior that leads one to feel anxious/uncomfortable?

I'm sorry the drugs didn't help you, and I'm glad you got better regardless. Please don't talk like drugs helping with social anxiety is absurd on the face of it, because it isn't.

> up until a year ago she had been on 4 different anti-depressants each year. Her doctors would say oh that one isn't working lets try this one and so on.

What would you rather they do? Say "can't be fixed, tough shit?" Say "I don't care that it's not working, you have to keep taking it?"

As long as you keep asking a doctor for solutions, they will keep doing their best to provide one. For some people the first drug tried works; for some people it takes a few tries to find the right one; some people never find a solution. It's not simple and satisfying like we'd prefer, but it's how medicine works. It's how a lot of things work.

> How in the world can a drug cure an odd internal social behavior that leads one to feel anxious/uncomfortable? Answer for me is .. it can't.

I can't tell you how, but I can tell you that they do. A friend of mine went to the psychiatrist with a case of social anxiety and after the second or third drug they tried, the problem disappeared. Poof. Like that. With all the somatic effects he had.

So whatever he got in the end, eventually worked. But this is how it works with psychiatric mediation - people have a lot of different responses to drugs and doctors can't predict them in advance, so initially the therapy is mostly matching drug to patient.

Anti-depressants didn't ever do anything for me, either. Although I suspect that the only anxiety attack I've ever had could very well have been caused by them.

In his awesome book Bad Pharma, Ben Goldacre also hints that the link between depression and serotonin levels is not very well established. For those of you that don't know, Ben Goldacre is not some quack that pretends that science is wrong or something like that; in fact, what he asks for is precisely more rigorous science (specifically, more rigorous medical trials, all made public).

On the other hand, apparently there are a lot of people who have had a measurable level of benefit. My non-educated hypothesis is that there are several causes of depression and serotonin levels may be only one of them.

I agree if it's helping people great, but for me it, you and many others I know it's hocus pocus. The brain is an incredibly complex organ!

It's probably best to view depression as a symptom. It could have several immediate causes (i.e. the physical processes that make you feel that way) as well as many other root causes (i.e. what leads your body to be in the state that is causing you to feel depressed).

The funny thing is that if you take a bunch of different antidepressants then you will become bipolar.. perhaps.

Then you need more and different medications.

Is there a scientific study pointing to this being a cause for sustained bipolar disorder?

It's true that some antidepressants tend to shoot a bit over the target, but that can be easily taken into account. One such "manic episode", which isn't really called as such because it is drug-induced, doesn't make a bipolar disorder.

It's from Mercola if you want to read more about it.

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