Originally Posted By jonvn Gee, they stop giving out anti-depressants to people, and suicide jump up. Who would have thought. And why did they do this? Because it was thought that these drugs were causing people to kill themselves? Hello? Could it have been the underlying illness that may have triggered these suicides, and not the medicine? Can't anyone put two and two together in this country anymore? <a href="http://www.latimes.com/la-sci-suicide6sep06" target="_blank">http://www.latimes.com/la-sci- suicide6sep06</a>,0,7339696.story?coll=la-home-center
Originally Posted By vbdad55 <Can't anyone put two and two together in this country anymore? < they put 2 and 2 together but rarely come up with 4 - that's the issue
Originally Posted By Sport Goofy << Can't anyone put two and two together in this country anymore? >> From a statistical perspective, you can't link the data on anti-depressants and suicide rate. These are two independently derived variables. Linking these events now is only a hypothesis that would require further research and statistical analysis to prove. I would be interested to know what other hypotheses exist to explain this outcome before I jumped to a conclusion.
Originally Posted By jonvn I think by putting the black box label on these drugs, they've shown a rather marked increase in suicides. That's pretty clear.
Originally Posted By imadisneygal Actually, it's not just a hypothesis. Suicide rates do go up among severely depressed teens who begin taking anti-depressants. The idea behind the correlational data is that severely depressed people do not have the motivation to move or eat, let alone carry out a plan for suicide. But once anti-depressants begin to bring someone who is severely depressed into a moderately depressed state then they have the motivation to carry out a plan. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to include therapy and monitoring along with any medication treatment for depression. This happens in adults, too, but the teens have been making news with it. I think that the rates of suicide that caused the warnings on anti-depressants are both true and misleading. It's not the medicine that causes the suicidality, but the medicine that returns the person to a state where they can actually function and without therapy they can actually get out of bed and carry out a plan. Anti-depressants work well when the right one is used, the right dose is used, and they're monitored closely and correctly.
Originally Posted By Sport Goofy ^^ The researchers hypothesis was based on anti-depressants not being used -- leading to more suicides. I'd be interested to know what other causes were explored, and then discarded, in this research.
Originally Posted By imadisneygal Yes, it seems that the labeling has led to decreased prescriptions that were helping people and while there was an increase in suicides among severely depressed teens who took them, you have to wonder about those who were not quite debilitated yet (moderately depressed) but also didn't take medications. They were in the prime range for suicides. These data are definitely correlational and not causal, but still pretty significant. From what I read it did not indicate the level of depression or the level of suicidal ideation prior to getting or not getting the drugs. I think that would be a big factor. If you're already thinking about it but then don't get help (more people are moderately depressed than severely, debilitatingly depressed) then we might be seeing the true value of the SSRI's - decreased suicides in moderately depressed individuals. Maybe patients steered themselves away from the drugs, or maybe doctors aren't prescribing them as often. I think the bottom line is that with less anti-depressants being used there are more people in the moderate to severely depressed range, which leads to more suicides. I misunderstood SportGoofy when he said that the linkage was a hypothesis. I thought he meant the data between USE of anti-depressants and suicides. Correlational data is all that can be used with suicides, though, because you can't have a control group for suicide which rules out the experimental design. And it's not ethical to have a group of people who are depressed and not to treat them at all. This is why true experiments in this area are difficult. Correlational data are often the best way to see what's going on.
