God, I was on Ritalin for fucking years. They only took me off after the voices came…
And then they found out I never had the condition to begin with.
Fucking jackasses.
The condition doesn’t exist. Its a problem like many others in psychiatry: you have a something you can use to somewhat pharmacologically pacify individuals into an arbitrarily defined norm. Its like with depression: depression became a big deal when treatments came out for it. Marketing does the world wonders in shaping public opinion.
They work as well as anti-smoking pills. Which are also nothing more than re-packaged anti-depressants. The funny thing about these medications is that they tend to make peoplehomicidal maniacs.
Also to the comments above. There are some people that happen to wish/wonder what it would be like if they had a penis to make prozak enlarged =p
No one is outright rejecting everything it was supposed to do - yet. It just puts a big shadow over it though. You are right though; it has been alleged that they are the only thing that helps quit people smoke. Is that a big smoke and mirror show though? Is there any expectation due to the history and cultural significance of the drugs? I don’t know.
definitely, but antidepressants as far as I have seen have either made people turn near-homicidal, or sink further into depression and kill themselves, or… break up marriages (mostly due to one being a homicidal masochist). It’s just that not enough people have known people on the medication to really judge for themselves but from my real-life observations they all appear worthless. I’m sure others may possibly have had opposite experiences but I have the misfortune of being a curse on others around me that either love or respect and have not managed to see any positive effects of such drugs.
I was on Celexa for a while. It fucks with your serotonin levels. It’s like smoking weed, and it’s pretty hard to be depressed when you’re trippin’ balls, trust me 
I would be very very interested in reading the entire study when it comes out.
I am curious though, they mentioned that:
“Given these results, there seems little reason to prescribe antidepressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients, unless alternative treatments have failed.”
I am wondering what constitutes a depression being ‘severe’; really who can define that other than the individual? Why are antidepressants only worth the risk on severely depressed individuals? That also beings up who is deciding what exactly is considered risk; I mean this entire study could have been done perfectly, under a different definition of what ‘risk’ is.
The article leaves alot to be desired, but it raises some interesting questions.
:kissy:
Suicidal patients. You want to be careful with people that are this depressed. The big question is “what is the cost of not doing anything”. You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The article of the study is here I think.
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392
Ritalin definitely works!
You have to put it up your nose though. Fun times. Try it, kids. You can feel like the God of Ideas.
(By the way, if you have any still lying around, leave me your number.)
Yeah no shit it works, that’s like inhaling a weaker cocaine straight into your brain. That’s not the point though.
As a note, I’m going to try to have you banned for that little stunt.
Speaking as one of those severely depressed people, I’m not sure what to think about prozac not working, but that’s mainly because I never took that. There’s a chunk of my life when I was taking and switching pills so often, I can’t even remember most of the names. I took Ritalin growing up, and for the last couple years, have been taking Wellbutrin for my mood. I’ve had varying results, depending mainly on if I take my pills regularly or not. Recently, over the last six months or so, I’ve given it up, and I seem to be doing fine, although I know it’s only a matter of time before I get so depressed I try suicide again. I like to think the medication helped me… but then, it’s the thinking part that gets ya, isn’t it?
That’s the whole point. A lot of people think and expect the medication to work. That’s the placebo effect. The whole notion behind the placebo effect has to do with a lot of things revolving around the setting in which you see your doctor, the appearance and demeanor of your doctor, specifically what your doctor tells you and the tone in which he tells you about a given treatment. You can correct erectile disorders with placebos, to use an extreme example. Anything involving pain management is hugely affected by placebos. You can give people placebos after certain kinds of treatments instead of real painkillers and they will report not feeling as much if any pain.
I’ve known a lot of people like you VE and its just like the natural products industry. You have a huge marketing machine pushing forward products to treat all kinds of mysterious ailments that come and go. The nature of these ailments, like fatigue, back aches, moods, these are all very variable ailments and it becomes difficult to objectively ascertain whether or not the effect that you saw was because you took the drug and it specifically had an effect, particularly in the context of why people take these medicines to begin with due to the strength of placebo effects. With kids, this is an EVEN BIGGER mess because a lot of psychiatrists like to play around with all kinds of different products making the whole picture of what might have worked and not worked even blurrier. This is even more screwed up by the fact that the majority of the psychiatrists have no scientific backing for prescribing a lot of the treatments they give kids because there are no guidelines and studies to fall upon. They go on a hunch to try things, often under the pressure of parents who think that they can fix a psychological problem by giving a pill like you give a sick child an antibiotic for his strep.
Your problems with suicidal tendencies and everything else you might have are complex and if anything the drugs made the problem worse as you’ve been thinking you’ve been treating it with drugs. Whether or not the drugs even had an effect is irrelevant because this method is palliative , not curative: you’re treating the symptom and not the problem. If you keep having those other problems recur it means the original problem hasn’t been addressed and that is one of the big reason I have a deep hatred for psychiatry.
I’m actually currently seeing a psychiatrist for depressing, and it’s making me feel a lot worse about myself. According to her I have ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and wants to medicate me for all three.
I don’t think so.
I think the problem is not that I have to pop some fucking pills. The problem is that the only friend I have in the area is my ex-girlfriend, my father got laid off (I don’t live with them, but I’m worried about them), I have a fucking college degree and yet work at a call center, and my life consists of reading books and writing things that will never get published. My “ADHD” is creativity. My “anxiety” and “depression” are because my life is totally fucked up, and I was actually MORE motivated before I “found out” that I had anxiety and depression. Now I’ve caught myself saying I can’t do something BECAUSE I’m depressed. Honestly, I don’t think that it’s my mental condition that makes me wish I was dead, it’s the condition of my life at this stage. I have a shitty life. THAT’S why I have problems.
Of course, my psychiatrist says it’s the other way around, so maybe I’m just delusional, or whatever. I don’t trust her.
I’m a little upset that my company provides free counseling by real psychologists, but it’s medical insurance is nearly fifty dollars per paycheck… and that’s for one with a thousand dollar deductable over the course of a year. This country’s priorities are completely fucked up.
I was on Ritalin for a few months. Didn’t do too much.
I DO think Ritalin did a lot for me - I was the poster child for ADHD. The family horror stories are always fun to listen to around thanksgiving time. I went from being an unstoppable bundle of energy to… mostly focused, I guess. And keep in mind, this was way back when I was too young to believe in meds, you know. So it must have worked.
<font size=1>Sorry I had to <.<;</font>
GAP: to use everyone’s favorite analogy, your shrink is the poster child of a fucking moron and represents exactly what I’ve been talking about.
VE: its not because you felt better after taking it that you felt better because the molecule itself worked. Anyway, this thread isn’t even about ritalin but about prozac and other antidepressants.
Ritalin just made me hyper. I was misdiagnosed =(
Sorry to talk about Ritalin some more, Sin, but jsut want to ask: I could have sworn that there was somethign iN Ritalin that doesn’t work on normal people, only those with ADD or ADHD. Making it pointless to give it to people without them, right?
Who wasn’t misdiagnosed for ADD/ADHD back then?
Personally speaking, I’ve lost a lot of friends (or more accurately made many more enemies than I already had) all thanks to Ritalin. It was also one of the reasons why I’ve never spent more than two consecutive years in a single school until college (though it did lead to the single best year I’ve ever had in the public school system).
[SARCASM]It also killed my father and raped my mother! ;_;[/SARCASM]