I heard about that. I don’t know the answer. There wouldn’t be a worldwide contraversy on the subject if that were the case because it would inherently imply that there is a genetic basis for it and that would make for very different kinds of research the likes of which we haven’t heard.
I knew a bunch of people in high school that would take Ritalin as a recreational drug, so I’m guessing it does something for normal people.
I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was younger, and was put on Ritalin. I was taken off it after less than a year because of how badly it was screwing me up. I went from a “troublesome” straight “A” student to a miserable C-D student. It made me pretty much quit caring about everything. It also completely altered my metabolism, and caused me to gain 40 pounds in 6 months, which is a hell of a lot in third grade. Even after going off it my metabolism never completely recovered.
I’m not sure if I was misdiagnosed, or overdosed, or just had a strange reaction, but I have no doubt that my life would have gone a lot better without it.
As a side note, it is perfectly normal, and healthy for children to want to have fun and play, rather than sit behind a desk for hours on end. I think the problem is we’re diagnosing “childhood” as ADHD, and trying to medicate for it. Which in my opinion, is totally fucked up.
As far as depression goes. In most cases depression is a perfectly normal part of life. When things are going badly, people get depressed. Depression can be a motivating factor to fix these problems. Often times, there is nothing wrong with a person who is “depressed,” and by treating the depression, instead of actually fixing your life, it hurts more than it helps. In these cases, counseling is a good idea, medicating is not.
Now, there are cases where depression is a chemical imbalance, such as in cases of bi-polar disorder. In these cases, drug therapy is a good idea.
Sin has a line of quotage in his signature that is very applicable to our modern approach to medicine, particularly in this country. Especially as we’re talking about in this thread:
“If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails.”
Some people are nails. But many people are not, and yet they are given the hammer (pills) anyway, because of a series of financial incentives and financial coersion that the pill making industry puts the doctors through. I’m not going to go into great detail about it because I don’t know the finer details to well but I, like all of you, already know the general big picture; the prescription drug trade is big business, and we the people are the trapped target consumers, with the doctors used to herd us in (and the doctors themselves being herded) to the cycle of consumption.
In reality there are way more tools in the box than just the hammer. But the people who make hammers don’t want those other tools cutting into their profit margin, either by providing another option entirely, or by putting the hammer manufacturers under the classic capitalistic pressure to invest in making a more effective hammer.
Remember kids, all anecdotal evidence is true. Your situation applies to everyone.
I’ve never been on Prozac, but I have been on other anti-depressants for many, many years. I can honestly say that without the anti-depressants my life would be unbearable, and I would have certainly self-destructed a long time ago.
Having said that, the anti-depressants are only ONE part of a treatment regime. The other part is an excellent therapist. Without therapy, the drugs are like sticking a band-aid over a gangrenous wound: eventually, the gangrene will spread and your leg will fall off.
A good therapist will teach you skills to cope with the depression and whatever else you have going on.
By the way, by therapist I mean psychologist, not psychiatrist. I’m not a big fan of the psychiatric profession, for a lot of reasons. I had to see many psychiatrists before I actually found one that I could relate to on a human level. Personally, I think many of them may have as many problems as their patients.
New e-bread site.
Experienced e-bakers
Free Whole Wheat
Earthen Oven
All kinds of e-baking
visit us today
God damnit Cless! Why’d you have to edit that? Now I don’t know where to find my free whole weat made by real e-bakers 
I have to agree with Hades on this one. Now I won’t know if they e-bake e-cookies in their e-earthen e-ovens on the e-web. ;_;
So they are all Fraser Kranes?
I’ve long been under the impression that psychiatrists are so caught up in recognizing Symptoms Of Abnormalities that they wouldn’t know actual normalcy if it ran by doing the can-can, crossdressing and wearing a V for Vendetta mask while juggling orangutans.
Heck, I’d have a hard time recognizing normalcy if it ran by like that…
Seriously, though, psychiatrists (in my book) are good for two things: diagnosing where you lie along the spectrum of mental illness, and prescribing pills.
If you get a good psychiatrist, they will insist that you also get therapy, from someone else.
The thing that interested me most about the article was that they didn’t discount drugs for the most severely depressed patients, and recommended therapy over drugs for all other patients. This is how I’ve felt for many years. Many doctors are too willing to hand over prescriptions WITHOUT insisting that the patient attend therapy. From my own experience, it’s the therapy that provides the skills that allow a person to cope with depression in the long term.
As I suspected. The only real thing it does to me is turn me into a zombie. That, as you can imagine, is not so good. Hard to find good quality brains in today’s society.
the paper was not published in a “hardcore” scientific publication however, in fact it’s only been around for 4 years. My admittedly limited understanding of scientific research suggests that the kind of journal and attendant peer review strongly implicates your research’s reliability, especially in the areas of psychiatry/psychology.
I agree that serious therapy should be attempted before prescribing any drugs and that it isn’t a cure-all, but for some people they need more help than mere willpower and self-confidence. Sometimes you guys sound like a bunch of Scientologists 
The paper is actually a review and since reviews usually aren’t hardcore new data, they don’t get published in hardcore shiny journals. The impact factor of the journal it was published in is about 5 and while that’s not Nature, its not that bad.
And the reality of the placebo effect is unrelated to scientology :P.
I think Scientologists need therapy.
Therapy doesn’t teach you “will power and self confidence”, unless you have a really crappy therapist.
Therapy teaches you survival mechanisms. How to recognize the triggers for your depression. How to change self-destructive behaviour.
Besides, I never said drugs were bad. I just said the drugs were more effective in conjunction with therapy. I’ve been on anti-depressants for years now, and I have no intention of stopping due to this study or any other.
Over the weekend I went to see “YingTong”, a play about the Goon Show. The play actually focussed mostly on Spike Milligan and his first hospitalization for bipolar depression in the 1960’s. Before the advent of Prozac and the like. In those days it was just “suffer and die, or suffer and live.”
I’m very thankful for anti-depressants, believe me.
The only thing that has ever worked consistently in psychology is cognitive behavioral therapy: you change how you think, you change how you act and magically, your psychological problem is cured!
As I explained earlier: the combination of various treatments together creates confounds when you want to analyze things objectively.
Originally Posted by seras victoria
I think Scientologists need therapy.
I think Scientologists need a better tax dodge. Also spokesmen! >.>
Wait wait wait. If prozac/ritalin are supposed to be anti-depressants, why prescribe them to hyperactives? Or is a healthy, interested attitude towards everything in this living world a passé these days?
Or is this another trick of speech where certain substances (alcohol, for instance) is a depressant (declining…) and anti-depressants are something completely different from the context?
(This is coming from a person who was, for over a year, expected to pop a pill or two every now and then due to spontaneous manner. And then they found out it was just me.)
You need to get your facts checked Mabat because you’re getting your things mixed up quite a bit :P.
This thread isn’t about people with ADHD, the paper was about how people for the past 20 years have been getting prescribed Paxil and Prozac when it didn’t have a solid scientific basis for that.
If you want to really discuss Ritalin and ADHD I can point to a body of conflicted research and the fact that like depression and many other psychological disorders, they were popularized by marketing campaigns by pharmaceutical companies that had a drug looking for a disease. The thing I mentioned earlier is also that ADHD / ADD haven’t only been treated by other drugs than Ritalin and and the individual experimentation that is being done by psychiatrists using drugs used to treat adult schizophrenic patients (for example) haven’t been supported by scientific evidence and the side effects of which are so extreme that it makes it highly unethical to do these things when the very nature of the disease lacks a consensus.
Basically, “eat our shit, we’ll come up with a condition that can be cured with our shit?”
Guess I’ll stick with Vitamin C.