The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), a non-departmental public body of England’s Department of Health, provides evidence-based guidance on the treatment of medical conditions. Every so often, they update their guidelines, and new depression guidelines are expected to be released in May 2022. This post will take a look at the draft …
The UK’s New NICE Depression Guidelines in Development Read More »
Some people write off antidepressants as being useless because the serotonin hypothesis was wrong, while others insist they need antidepressants because they don’t have enough serotonin. There’s a lot of confusion about what the serotonin hypothesis was and what it meant, so this post will try to clear up some of that. A bit of …
Clearing Up the Serotonin Hypothesis/Depression Confusion Read More »
A fellow blogger asked this question recently, and it’s taken me a while to pull this post together because there just isn’t a simple answer as to why psych medications stop working out of the blue sometimes. There are various possibilities, but there’s also a hefty dose of science just doesn’t know yet. How the …
Why Do Psych Medications Stop Working Sometimes? Read More »
Have you ever wondered why antidepressant side effects seem to be worse at the beginning, or why it takes so long for them to actually start doing what you expect of them? There is actually some rhyme and reason for it, so let’s talk about it. Let’s talk serotonin People with depression don’t have enough …
Antidepressant Side Effects & Delayed Therapeutic Effect Read More »
Do antidepressants increase the risk of suicide? There are certainly people out there who are very vocal in insisting that they do. However, as is so often the case, the loudmouths don’t tend to be especially well informed. The FDA black box warning Since 2004, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required a …
Antidepressants, Suicide Risk, and the FDA Black Box Warning Read More »
I recently watched the documentary Letters From Generation Rx, which looked at instances of people experiencing significant side effects while on psychiatric medication, including people who took the lives of either themselves or others while on psychiatric meds. One man featured in the film was a Canadian Member of Parliament (MP) whose teenage daughter had …
Letters from Generation Rx—Weighing Medication Risks & Benefits Read More »
While this may seem like a bit of an odd topic, it’s something I’ve vaguely wondered about for a while. If orgasms get the feel-good chemicals flowing, might that have any sort of benefit for depression? And especially for single folks like myself – could masturbation have any positive effect when it comes to depression? …
Master of My Domain? A Look at Depression and Masturbation Read More »
Wouldn’t it be nice if the treatment of depression was simple? Unfortunately, there’s nothing simple about depression treatment in the real world. Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) refers to depression that hasn’t responded to trials of adequate duration and dosage of at least two antidepressants. When determining whether the illness is treatment-resistant, it’s important to consider whether …
Options for Managing Treatment-Resistant Depression Read More »
Ketamine is a relatively new option for managing treatment-resistant depression that has a different mechanism of action from other antidepressant medications. Ketamine itself isn’t new, though; it’s a dissociative anaesthetic that’s also known by its club drug name Special K. Over the last 10-15 years, multiple research trials have shown that it has an antidepressant …
Do antidepressants work? There’s a lot of stigma around psychiatric medications, and plenty of people would argue that no, antidepressants don’t work. There are also people, that argue that medication is life-saving. Those are personal experiences, but what does the research have to say? A recent paper published in the Lancet, and reported on in …
