Quotes About Antidepressants

While anti-depressants can work for some people, I became a little too reliant on them - if you forget to take one, you feel awful.

Perhaps 10 percent of patients who are prescribed antidepressants are really benefiting from the drugs' active ingredients.

There seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.

I'm very anti-antidepressants. It's not the chemicals of my brain that's a problem; it's reality. I don't think tricking my brain into reinterpreting reality is going to help.

The moment of the print button for biology is nearing. Effectively, this could also mean that in a not-too-distant future, smart pharmacology will permit us to receive a continuous supply of antidepressants or neuroenhancers every time our dopamine level drops.

The conventional wisdom is that episodes of major depression strike women twice as frequently as men. The drug evidence is stark. A survey found women nearly three times as likely as men to take antidepressants—with usage as high as one in every four or five women. If those characterizations are right, yoga should resonate strongly with women as a way of fighting the blues.

The big bulk of the response to antidepressants is the placebo response.

I've had our paper's gossip column since last month. It is egalitarian. I look for people who are quite obscure, and report who is breaking up with whom and where they go and what they wear. The person who invented this new form for us is on antidepressants now. He lives in Illinois. He says there are people in southern Illinois who have not yet been covered by the press.

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were. Antidepressants might be indicated for psychiatric patients, for those of weaker stock, but not for us. It was a costly attitude; our upbringing and pride held us hostage.

One the one hand, the simple fact that there are children and that I do have an effect on them has been one of the most potent antidepressants that I've ever had. And on the other hand, there are moments when I feel imprisoned by the reality that I can no longer make my decisions just for myself, that I have to consider the interests of others.

I actually have a great deal of respect for antidepressants; I think they can be enormously mighty tools toward recovery.

The reason you take antidepressants is to feel calm. And romantic love is not calm -it's elation, it's mood swings, and you're killing all that when you take the drug.

The yoga mat is a good place to turn when talk therapy and antidepressants aren't enough.

I had a couple years of depression. I started drinking too much. I had to up my antidepressants. I cried all day, every day, and I lost weight. But I had to take care of two kids. It wasn't about me anymore.

nevertheless pleaded guilty to criminal charges and paid a $3 billion fine for promoting its antidepressants for unapproved uses and failing to report safety data about a top diabetes drug. It was the largest settlement recorded involving a pharmaceutical company. The agreement also included civil penalties for improper marketing of a half-dozen

In my civilian world at home in Los Angeles, half the people I know are on antidepressants or anti–panic attack drugs because they can't handle the stress of a mean boss or a crowd at the 7-Eleven when buying a Slurpee.

The three books were The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker; and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat.

An epidemic had come of age, and history reveals that it rose in lockstep with the prescribing of stimulants and antidepressants to children.

Should they remain on the drugs for years, they are at high risk of becoming chronically depressed. They may also develop—as the American Psychiatric Association warns in one of its textbooks—an "apathy syndrome," which "is characterized by a loss of motivation, increased passivity, and often feelings of lethargy and 'flatness.

You can't escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can't be filtered out of the water we drink every day. We are literally awash in these drugs.

Antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect, in clinical trials, as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain.

Later, one of the world's leading medical journals, the Lancet, conducted a detailed study of the fourteen major antidepressants that are given to teenagers. The evidence—from the unfiltered, real results—showed that they simply didn't work, with a single exception, where the effect was very small.

Very few scientists now defend the idea that depression is simply caused by low levels of serotonin, but the debate about whether chemical antidepressants work—for some other reason we don't fully understand—is still ongoing. There is no scientific consensus. Many distinguished scientists agree with Irving Kirsch; many agree with Peter Kramer.

How could I still be depressed when I was taking antidepressants? I was doing everything right, and yet something was still wrong. Why?