| I see patients still take it seriously because of the heavy marketing of Zoloft in particular. The drugs are literally have serotonin in the name. I still hear people regularly refer to mental health problems being due to a "Chemical imbalance", often as a way to defend their use of pharmaceuticals and dismiss the efficacy of any other intervention. It's that they see people justify a non-falsifiable in the efficacy of the current course of treatment. It's that it's hard enough to convince people who have been on SSRI's for decades and are doing badly to take a month to ween off them, a month to see how things go, and a month to get back on them. If they believe their brains are fundamentally broken without evidence it's just about impossible. It's that when a sixth of American women have taken anti-d's in the past month, and the most popular explanation as to why is they have broken brains that need to be treated with medicine, as if their problems must all be due to some genetic issue or whatever, I find it abhorrent. I don't know, it pisses me off that these drugs are popular largely due to a mythology and how difficult they are to stop more than they're efficacious is all (not that they are not efficacious). It's not that psychiatrists don't know this theory isn't true, I'm well aware the theory has been well known to lack support for a long time in medical circles, it's that they don't effectively inform their patients. Medicine should stop calling them "SSRIs" if the SSRI part is a tangential side-effect, better educate patients on the fact that medicine doesn't really know why the drugs work, or even if a given patient will respond to them better than placebo. Governments should ban pharmaceutical advertisements because they make people sick and misinformed. |
What should SSRIs be called if the SSRI part is how they work indirectly? What would you call them now? And SNRIs? And MAOIs?