Medicalisation

version

Well-known member
Anyone have any thoughts on this stuff about the "serotonin theory of depression" allegedly being disproved?


Here's the study itself,

 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I'm not familiar with this study, or with the thesis it is disproving, but my initial take on any neurotransmitter-based theories of emotion is that they'd need to be pretty holistic to be saying anything meaningful. There is just so much combinatoric complexity, plus synaptic logic can be excitatory or inhibitive, so a given neurotransmitter can ostensibly have opposite effects in different circumstances.
 

version

Well-known member
Other studies looked at the effects of stressful life events and found that the more stressful life events a person had experienced, the more likely they were to be depressed, showing the important impact of external events.

Mark would probably feel vindicated reading this.

 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
You might expect to see it in a population overly exposed to mdma over consecutive decades but nope

It’s a bit like drugs like paroxetine/seroxat - profoundly ineffective based on (now) ancient data. Had a client once who’d been on paroxetine for 22 years without a single medication review

Couple of significant issues are the levels of undiagnosed trauma and acute stress within any given population, where depression presents (despise that term) as low mood but not enough life mapping is conducted. Millions of people are given medication instead of being referred to a specialist for a deeper dive into their minds
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
@WashYourHands what do you think about guided psychedelic therapy sessions?

all for it, questions abound about context for seeking it, suitability of guides, screening for undiagnosed schizo-affective conditions

ideally love to see the NHS involve or graft these processes into its systems somehow but immediately you’re into an industrial scale operation and therein be dragons

ironically @Clinamenic emdr 2.0 has taken the psychedelic guide session model and adapted its framework for trauma work - conclusions equate to shorter durations for healing, more intensive sessions with a team rather than a single therapist and therefore less “sets”

 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
I don't get it - what does EMDR 2 involve that EMDR doesn't? Psychedelics?

emdr = 1 patient and 1 therapist over months

emdr 2.0 = 6 patients, 3/4 therapists + support team over a week

they took all the psychedelic session models and used emdr instead of specific compounds

solid results with at least one British health board completing successful trials in March
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Canada legalising assisted suicide for the mentally ill is opening a real can of worms.
Really tricky one, that, because according to some people's idea of what mental illness is, anyone depressed enough to be suicidal is severely mentally ill, and therefore in no fit state to be making decisions about their own treatment. A literal Catch-22, in other words. But really, if someone has, say, an incurable condition that means they have no quality of life at all, then wanting to die could be considered the only rational option - or, to flip it, you could say someone would have to be mad to want to live like that.
 

version

Well-known member
Pharmaceutical giants are pouring tens of millions of pounds into struggling NHS services – including paying the salaries of medical staff and funding the redesign of patient treatment – as they seek to boost drug sales in the UK, the Observer can reveal.

Drug firms are simultaneously funding groups that lobby for greater investment in their disease areas, and in some cases are paying generous consultancy fees to influential healthcare professionals, including GPs who have worked as clinical leads for NHS England and have received as much as £480,000 each from industry since 2019.

The spending is revealed in an investigation that lays bare the growing role of Big Pharma in the UK’s health sector, with analysis of more than 300,000 drug company transactions since 2015 showing a surge in spending on activities other than research and development (R&D).

Payments to UK health professionals and organisations, including donations, sponsorship, consultancy fees and expenses, reached a record £200m in 2022, excluding R&D with companies seeking to promote lucrative drugs for obesity, diabetes and heart conditions among the biggest spenders. The total spending was almost double the £108m paid by the drugs industry in 2015, while payments to healthcare organisations in the same period nearly tripled to £156.5m.

The payments include more than £29m in funding to NHS trusts, as well as millions more to GP practices and companies that support NHS care. A further £43.7m was paid to doctors, nurses, pharmacists and admin staff.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Sounds like conspiracy theory; didn't covid teach us that the pharma giants were all sweetness, probity and light?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Sounds like conspiracy theory; didn't covid teach us that the pharma giants were all sweetness, probity and light?
This critique applies just as well to food as it does to vaccines. Is there room in your worldview for a position between "food manufacturers are charities that exist because the people who run them get a warm glow from knowing we're all well fed" and "food manufacturers are cartoonishly evil and want to poison us for the sheer hell of it, which they get away with because no laws prevent them from doing otherwise"?

I mean, if you take the latter approach, then fine -- but I can only assume you subsist as a completely self-sufficient smallholder or hunter-gatherer. Because if not, then you're obviously full of shit.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Which we knew already, of course, but it's nice to be able to prove it in a watertight way.
 
Top