Egad. This asshole apparently forgets the origin of the office, doesn’t he?

the problem isn’t the drugs; they’re just additional parts of the materia with no inherent value one way or another. the problem is the control system in which they’re utilized.

are they overprescribed by evil pharmaceautical companies who only care about the bottom line? well, yeah. but that doesn’t mean that ALL such drugs are EVIL and can NEVER help ANYONE.

Re: SSRI’s and what they do. The “Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitor” is a class of drugs that includes Prozac, Paxil, Celexa, Lexapro, etc. (but not Wellbutrin). The body has a natural mechanism whereby excess seratonin (which is one of the naturally occuring brain chemicals associated with feelings of well-being) is reabsorbed. SSRIs function by blocking this mechanism, thereby increasing the abundance of seratonin.

I’ve been on Luvox for about 7 or 8 years now to treat OCD. All I can say is, at this point, missing a dose for a 24 hour period leads to an extreme onslaught of ordinary sensational signals that all is not right. Your vision somehow becomes “slower” than your conscious “gyroscope” and it makes you feel out of place by a few seconds and sorta overcomes you with wonderment at whether you’ll survive not being on it.

Luckily it is easy to get off them. As slomo says, you must do it gradually or slowly, as I have begun to do.

There is also another interesting aspect to SSRIs that you don’t hear about until some kid goes off the deep end and kills his schoolmates. And that is akathisia or “psychomotor restlessness”. I’ve felt this myself from time to time, which is the main reason I’m weaning myself off of it.

I used to describe to my doctors that I sometimes got this hurryuphurryuphurryuphurryup feeling that I couldn’t ever really explain. They said it was my anxiety. I said it “felt” different than normal anxiety. It was more like the loss of all control over my mind. It was psychically “noisy”. The only way to stem it is to quickly engage yourself in someone elses thought stream. Whatever mindless blather that is on the TV works usually and slamming a beer real fast helps too. But it wasn’t until those shootings in Minnesota and the mention of the term akathisia that I eventually put two and two together.

I easily saw how a kid with no other intuitive traits but what his limited experience told him to do would lose full control over this “side effect” of SSRIs. I’ve gone from 150mg to 50mg in the last few months. I suppose tomorrow I’ll begin with a 25mg dose to get the end of this started.

The key I suppose is the gradualness of these drugs’ effectiveness and also the ineffectiveness of being without them. It’s like an addiction that can infect the higher or more pure forms of human virtue. It cancels them from you and then the physical state takes over from there.

Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation’s drinking water, it has been revealed. An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3545684.stm

There’s been a similar report in Swedish press, just a few months ago.

A related topic, which touches on what I do professionally, is that the FDA is not really set up to evaluate safety for prolonged drug use. There is a history here and also an element of pragmatism. For cancer and HIV drugs, emphasizing efficacy over safety makes sense (when the alternative to not taking the drug is certain death). But for psychopharms, the issues are far less clear, since presumably most people could live without SSRIs. The pragmatic issue is, how do you evaluate the safety of long-term use for new drugs, unless you monitor post-market? But, I digress….

My personal position is that drugs are great for fixing life-threatening or short-term problems, but not advisable for long-term, non-terminal problems.

RE: getting off SSRI’s. Did it myself, with very few problems (other than a few minor meltdowns at work). The key is tapering off slowly. That said, I agree with Yasha, psychopharmaceuticals can be useful and helpful if taken voluntarily for a limited period of time.

slomo, i think you make a great point. conspiracists from our side of the fence tend to trash christian fundamentalists as much as we trash the NWO-style perpetrators. it might be extremely worthwhile to quit bickering and band together. i’d like to write about this some more as well.

This might not be the right place, but I’ve been wanting to address your blanket condemnation of psychiatric meds.

I would admit that:

- Psychiatry is extremely primitive, diagnoses can be very dubious, and there are some scary people practicing it.
- Most doctors don’t know how to prescribe these drugs. Insurance companies don’t support the use of these drugs in the way they would optimally work.
- These drugs can be full of side effects, sometimes worse than what they are supposed to relieve.

But I don’t see any problem with voluntary, informed use of such medications, especially by adults. You’ve talked as if bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, etc. are just labels for phases of life (and sure, many people are given these labels who shouldn’t be), but from my experience they are extreme states of consciousness that can seem entirely inescapable, which can make you very unhappy and which make it hard to do the things you want to do. (And which can sometimes just come out of nowhere and hit you like a truck on a highway.)

Some people find that a light comes on when they start taking Prozac or whatever. They are suddenly able to do more than just basic survival tasks. They’re no longer compulsively repeating “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die” under their breath. If people feel like they’re themselves again, that they can go back to being creative and are no longer miserable — even though it means taking a drug every day — I don’t think that’s so bad.

And even though I’m not very fond of the pharmaceutical companies, they’ve been coming out with less toxic and more effective psychiatric meds in recent years.

(In my own life, the results of such has been more ambiguous, but I think I’m in the category of people who believe that Western medicine works for those who believe in it, but personally does not have enough faith for it to work reliably. I’ve never truly believed that antibiotics can help me either.)

I generally avoid any metaphysical statement that can’t be backed up by a well-grounded and/or pragmatic interpretation. But now it’s crystal clear to me how one loses his soul by accepting the “mark”. Basically, any device that provides external access to your neurochemistry exposes you to control of your spiritual progress (at least in the present incarnation). Accept the device in the 21st century age of psychopharmaceuticals and psychotronics and you doom yourself to total government control.

If this can be articulated in these terms to Christians who will listen, it might be possible to build a broad resistance. I’m a scientist, not a political organizer, so I have no idea how to go about it. But I put the idea out there.

All of these stories roaming around of old German folk whom are moving away noting that they have all seen this before is not a joke…

Take the main story today in alt-news in which Bush wants to strike the 22nd ammendment (two term presidency) Couple with the DC metro poster, Gitmo…

You start to understand these former Germans and why they are fleeing.

Been there, done that. The boots are stomping louder and louder…

There is total blackout on this subject akin to “deep intergration” between the Americas or another similar story which was just as controversial named TIA (total information awareness) by John Pointdexter.

TIA is now under a new banner and getting the blackout treatment this time around they won’t make the same mistake twice…

Deep intergration can only be found if you follow geo-political meetings such as CFR, but will never be part of the MSM until too late… (the only strong growing movment against it is from the far-left in Canada)

As for you question about the Mental act… Congress has passed it easily and it is slowly being implimented in schools across he country. It is veiled under guidelines in the school bureacracy so that it doesn’t appear as one huge policy but more of a state of mind towards student behavior.

Prior to this Act, kids in both the US and Canada were strongly suggested within any behaviour problem to get into Prozac and Ritalin, this act simply makes this solution more part of “the books”.

So to make a long story short and excuse the pun, but the Act is being “Institutionalized” within the school system as a whole and not as a drug campaign or No Child Left Behind programs as we have seen in the past.

Hope I helped a little…