Do You Need To Take Medication For Your Depression?

Today’s guest post is by Dr. Eve Wood, a psychiatrist who treats patients struggling with depression, anxiety, burnout or extreme stress.

Do you find yourself wondering if you need to be on medications for depression, or hoping you can stop them? If so, you are not alone!

In 1980, Americans filled 30 million prescriptions for antidepressants, and in 2010, 30 years later, the number of prescriptions for antidepressants filled had risen to 264 million in a year!

What are we to make of this? Twenty eight percent of attorneys nationwide are struggling with depression! Why? And, what is to be done about it? In this short blog, I intend to highlight the relationship between stress, burnout, and “depression”, and the role of diagnosis, medical treatments, and other strategies. I encourage you to think broadly about what you can do to make your life better.

What is Depression?               

To be totally clear: We do not really know what depression is! We have a lot of theories, and can identify biological correlates, with some depressive symptoms. And, we do know that a small percentage of people suffer with an incapacitating illness that won’t quit. However, much of what is being called Depression today, is probably Burnout, or a normal response to abnormal stress!

While I am simplifying the diagnostic process a bit, I think you will appreciate the point. We diagnose Depression by establishing that you have a requisite number and type of symptoms, to meet the diagnostic criteria, as laid out in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Over the course of the last 35 years, there have been 6 iterations of the DSM. As the book has gotten longer, and the number of diagnoses has progressively increased, the “illness” criteria has gotten too loose to be useful.

Before the printing of DSM III, the incidence of depression was quite low, prevalence rate of 1.2% in 1996. After the DSM III was released in 1980, a NIMH study found the prevalence of Depression had risen to 5%. After DSM III-R the prevalence rate had risen to 10 % of the adult population in the United States. And, the rate continues to rise.

In my 35 years in medicine, I have not seen the numbers of people with serious depression, true debilitating symptoms that no one could deny were life-threatening, change much. I have, however, seen a significant escalation in the numbers of people told they “have depression” and consequently get treated with medications.

Today, when you might be dealing burnout, exhaustion, disillusionment, or extreme worry, you are given a clinical diagnosis or two, and prescriptions. This strategy stops you from looking at the precipitants to your distress, and proactively identifying solutions. It also exposes you to “side-effects” or unnecessary risks.

But, Isn’t my Depression due to a Chemical Imbalance in my Brain?

Chances are pretty good you’ve been told that your depression is due to a chemical imbalance in your brain, and medications correct that abnormality. The problem is, all attempts to prove that theory have totally failed.

The fallacy is reinforced by the names given to psychiatric medications. For instance, the term SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) was chosen to imply that the medication inhibits the uptake of a neurotransmitter and thus creates benefit. It originated when the pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham, was trying to distinguish its medication Paxil, from its competitor Prozac.

“SSRI” came out of their marketing department and was used to market a new “class” of drug, even though all antidepressants (new and old) have some impact on serotonin. And, we have no idea how significant that impact is! The term SSRI gives rise to cool pictures of neurons and chemicals which can be used to sell drugs.

Do Antidepressants Work?

Clinical trials of antidepressants show that only 1/3 of patients get better in 8 weeks. The other 2/3 respond in part or not at all! And, within 3 years, 75% of the responders have quit treatment, likely due to side effects, cost or diminishing efficacy.

In many studies of antidepressant effectiveness, drugs perform no better than placebo. And, several studies have found that the biggest predictor of response is you believe meds will help, and vice versa!

So, do pills work? At times, yes, and they even save lives. But, they don’t help most people consistently. And, other interventions might be just as good, or better tolerated. Examples with clear anti-depressant efficacy include improved work-life balance, therapy, specific breathing practices, yoga, mindfulness, light exposure, meditation, nutritional interventions, cognitive restructuring techniques, spiritual practice, time in nature and exercise.

What Should You About Medication?

You are probably wondering whether you should be on medicine. The answer is unique to you and your history. That said, here is what I have seen in 35 years of work with attorneys. Many of you are experiencing normal responses to extreme stress. While you have tremendous power to self-heal, rebound, and thrive when episodically stressed, you become depleted, and burned out when the pressures on you are continuous.

The symptoms of burnout; emotional exhaustion, interpersonal disengagement, and a low sense of meaningfulness and accomplishment are very similar to those of depression. And, interventions for burnout, often transform depression symptoms. Most of my clients stop, or massively reduce their medication need, as they tackle burnout, build resilience, decrease stress, and improve their lives.

In choosing your next steps, consider when you last felt well, and your attendant life circumstances. What was working, or gave you joy? Have medicines saved your life, or are you taking pills because you can’t seem to make your life work? Do you need training on techniques and tools to promote well-being, and minimize your need for medications?

If your life is not as you wish, you can change it! You are a gifted, capable person, as evidenced by how far you have come. You can learn evidence-based solutions, to transform what doesn’t work!

Dr. Eve A. Wood helps lawyers and judges dealing with depression, anxiety, burnout and extreme stress learn to transform their lives for well-being, joy and professional fulfillment. She offers practical, science-based programs and coaching that promote whole person healing, decrease stress and depletion, transform anxiety/depression and reduce reliance on medication.

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: ‘Ordinary Well: The Case for Antidepressants

Dr. Abigail Zuger writes in The New York Times, “Dr. Kramer’s bottom line is well summarized by the double meaning of “Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants” — he argues that antidepressants work just about as well as any other pills commonly used for ailing people, and that the drugs keep people who take them reasonably healthy.” Read the News

Depression: Low Mood is Just the Beginning

Psychiatrist, Ian Drever, M.D., blogs, “It’s one of those words that gets thrown around a lot, and we all think we know what it is to be depressed, but do we really? Rather than seeing depression as just a one-dimensional illness of low mood, I think it’s better viewed as a collection of features which affect both mind and body. Everyone’s precise mix will be unique to them, and will often vary from day to day — even from hour to hour.” Read the Blog

“Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” – Oh, What a Relief it is? Our Relationship with Antidepressants

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Most folks with depression have a complicated relationship with their antidepressant medications.

I certainly do.

While these pills saved my life years ago when major depression struck, years later, I often wonder if I still need to take them, or, if they’re still effective.

If I feel tired and flat on a particular afternoon, is it depression, the side effects of my meds or a jumble of both? Or maybe, it’s just my persistently pensive nature?

I think about this a lot these days – and maybe you do as well.

While the one-two punch of Cymbalta and Lamictal have kept me out of the dungeon of major depression for years, its comes with a cost. I have interludes of passivity, numbness, and fatigue. Maybe a low-grade depression at times, as well. If I ditch the drugs, maybe I will feel more “alive,” I think. I fantasize that cutting my ties with meds could lessen the days lost to the deadening grayness of a medically induced sense of normalcy I sometimes go through.

But I also feel anxiety. If I went cold turkey and lived medication-free, would it end, well, in disaster? A return to the swampland of depression? A deadman’s land if ever there was one. Can I take that chance? Should I?

There’s scary research that suggests once you stop antidepressants that work (or sort-of-work) for you and try to go back on the same ones because being off of them caused your depression to return (or you just couldn’t tolerate the horrible side effects that can come with discontinuation), there’s a good chance they won’t be as effective.

So, what’s a depressed person supposed to do? What should I do?

There are two camps that offer some guidance on this issue. Both have persuasive arguments about why those afflicted should or shouldn’t stay on meds.

The Stay on the Meds Camp

If depression is an “illness,” like diabetes or heart disease, I need these meds to balance out my of whacky neurochemistry. Given my risk factors: a family history of depression (genetics), a crazy childhood with a nutty, abusive and alcoholic father, and a high-pressure job with too much stress, I should stay on the pills.

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In his insightful essay in the New York Times, In Defense of Antidepressants, psychiatrist, Peter Kramer, author of the best-selling books, Listening to Prozac and Against Depression, suggest that studies show this: for mild or moderate depression, talk-therapy is as or more effective that medication. But for the Moby Dick sized sucker called Major Depression? Medications are warranted, and, indeed, lifesavers. They help many to function and live productive lives, albeit with a range of mild to more severe side effects.

The Get off the Meds Camp

Some people (including psychiatrists) see meds as the devil’s handiwork: supposed chemical solutions to emotional problems that flat-out don’t work. Many psychiatrists’ (and family doctors who write the overwhelming majority of scripts for these drugs in the U.S.), they maintain, are “pill pushers” who do the bidding of “BigPharma”, a multi-billion dollar industry in this country. Antidepressants aren’t so much a cure as a curse.

Irving Kirsh, Ph.D., author of The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, writes:

“Putting all [the research] together leads to the conclusion that the relatively small difference between drugs and placebos might not be a real drug effect at all. Instead, it might be an enhanced placebo effect, produced by the fact that some patients have broken [the] blind and have come to realize whether they were given drug or placebo. If this is the case, then there is no real antidepressant drug effect at all. Rather than comparing placebo to drug, we have been comparing ‘regular’ placebos to ‘extra-strength’ placebos.”

The remedy from this group? Psychotherapy. They see depression as the result of off-kiltered, negative thinking patterns. The way out of these ruminative, pessimistic thoughts involves working with a therapist who uses, most often, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to challenge and encourage patients to replace such thoughts with more realistic and positive ones.

In his book Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn’t Teach You and Medication Can’t Give You, Richard O’Connor, Ph.D. argues that both therapy and medication are effective, but limited in certain respects.  He advocates an additional factor often overlooked in depression recovery: our own habits. Unwittingly we get good at depression. We learn how to hide it, how to work around it. We may even achieve great things, but with constant struggle rather than satisfaction. Relying on these methods to make it through each day, we deprive ourselves of true recovery, of deep joy and healthy emotion.

The book teaches us how to replace depressive patterns with a new and more effective set of skills. We already know how to “do” depression-and we can learn how to undo it.

Some Recent News on the Meds and Therapy Conundum

The New York Times reports that a large, multicenter study by Dr. Charles Nemeroff, then a professor of psychiatry at Emory and now at the University of Miami, found that for depressed adults without a history of abuse, there was a clear ranking order of treatment efficacy: Combined psychotherapy (using a form of cognitive behavior therapy) and an antidepressant (in this case, Serzone) was superior to either treatment alone. But for those who had a history of childhood trauma, the results were strikingly different: 48 percent of these patients achieved remission with psychotherapy alone, but only 33 percent of these patients responded to an antidepressant alone. The combination of psychotherapy and a drug was not significantly better than psychotherapy alone.

So what’s a depressed person supposed to do?

I don’t know, really.

We’re in a pickle, aren’t we?

Maybe there’ll be a soon-to-be discovered test that can guide us on precisely what to do. But for now, many of us will stay-the-course and, for better or worse, stick to the “plop, plop, fizz, fix”.

I see myself somewhere in the middle of all this. I’ve never been hospitalized or tried to commit suicide. But I have known depression’s scorching winds, gales that have torn the flesh from my body. I will never forget this pain. It’s scarred me. And I never want to return to it.

If you’re thinking of discontinuing your meds, here’s a great article on how to do it safely.

I welcome your comments about your depression journey with or without medicaton.

Copyright, 2017

by Daniel T. Lukasik

12 Signs of Depression in Men

“While the symptoms used to diagnose depression are the same regardless of gender, often the chief complaint can be different among men and women,” says Ian A. Cook, M.D.  Read the Blog

5 Ways to Get Through a Depression Setback

When it comes to depression treatment, setbacks can occur – even if you’re following your treatment plan. These strategies can help you get through them.  Read the Blog

The Dark Side of Antidepressants

As I’ve intimated, drug industry research on the newer antidepressants has been manipulated to maximize positive results and minimize the downside. Here’s one example: the original research that got FDA approval and set off the craze for these drugs had very low standards, which were not revealed to the public.

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They were generally two- or three-month trials, very short over the lifetime course of depression, and the definition of cure was simply no longer meeting all the criteria for major depression. You might still be feeling suicidal and wracked with guilt, but if your sleeping had improved, as far as the FDA was concerned, the drug had demonstrated its effectiveness. Then there was the fact that in all these trials the drugs proved only slightly better than placebo—in most cases, about 40 percent of people got better with a sugar pill, and about 50-60 percent improved with an SSRI. Added to that is the fact that many of these studies stacked the deck by excluding people who were most responsive to placebo.

Subsequent studies, with larger groups over longer periods of time, have shown about the same disappointing results. The STAR*D study, with a large sample of real-world patients, without excluding placebo responders, found that about 50 percent of patients had a significant response to medication, but only about 30 percent met the researchers’ definition of remission. During follow-up, a significant number of patients relapsed. Overall, the recovery rate was only slightly better than chance alone. STAR*D was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health and should be considered relatively free of drug company influence.

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The withdrawal problems with SSRIs have also been minimized. There can be significant withdrawal problems when you stop taking SSRIs—“SSRI Withdrawal Syndrome”—including extreme anxiety, skin crawling, confusion, GI distress, insomnia, and agitation. For some individuals these symptoms are excruciating. I had a patient who went through weeks of pure hell—fever, nausea, chills, extreme depression, and the certainty she was losing her mind—going off a pill I had encouraged her to take. The best advice is to discontinue any of these medications by tapering off slowly and under a physician’s care.

Last but not least, there are worries that antidepressants interfere with emotional vitality. One study of non-depressed volunteers found that taking an SSRI for only a week interfered with their ability to read facial expressions, especially of anger and fear. Another study of normal volunteers found that four weeks of Paxil significantly reduced their ability to feel sad or angry when appropriate. A group of patients who were experiencing sexual side effects also developed significantly less ability to cry or care about others’ feelings. They also lost erotic dreaming, surprise, creativity, anger, and ability to express their feelings.

Therapists who take SSRIs themselves were very disturbed by these findings, wondering if it meant they were losing their ability to be empathic; many of us have stopped medications as a result. I know a musician who tried Lexapro for his social anxiety and asthma. He noticed that he stopped getting chills and goose bumps when he was really moved by music. When he stopped Lexapro, he was able to get goose bumps again. He felt that he had also lost some of his ability to immerse himself in the music. Another male patient, who was prone to picking up girls for one-night stands, reported that with Paxil he stopped feeling guilty. At least he recognized this was a problem.

Listening-to-Prozac

It seems quite possible that SSRIs (and other antidepressants, for all I know) get some of their effect from an overall emotional blunting, especially of negative feelings. Their use may make us temporarily a little shallow or insensitive. As far back as Listening to Prozac (1993), Peter Kramer was advancing the theory that people with depression may be especially sensitive to signs of rejection, and that SSRIs helped them cope better. This is one of the reasons why I’m so against the use of antidepressants by people without severe depression who simply want to feel better. They may worry less, but it can damage their relationships, reduce their enthusiasm, make them more shallow and unrealistically complacent. This may be why, in this age of stress, so many people are using antidepressants—the drugs can help people put up with things they should not put up with.

Bottom line on SSRIs? Depression is a serious illness, and these are serious medications. No one should ever take them lightly. They definitely can do harm, but the harm depression can do can be much worse. If you have a severe depression, you owe it to yourself to give medication a genuine try. But it needs to be part of a balanced plan that includes good psychotherapy and a lot of self-care. One thing medication can do is let you have the energy or hope to follow through.

By Richard O’Connor, Ph.D.

Dr. O’Connor is the author of the best-selling books, Undoing Depression and Undoing Perpectual Stress: The Missing Connection Between Anxiety, Depression and 21st Century illness.

The Depression Machine: Why Too Much Stress Cranks It Up

I listened to a NPR segment this week about the connection between playing football in the NFL and brain trauma.

One retired running back said that each collision he suffered during a game “was like being in a car accident.” What a tremendous cost to pay, I thought.

For many of us, daily life is so demanding and stressful, that, like a football player, it’s like being in a series of car accidents. The word “stress” doesn’t even seem to do justice the corrosive experience of so much stress– “trauma” is more like it.

The trauma isn’t the type inflicted by bone jarring hits during a football game — it’s psychological, though no less real.

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In his book, The Everyday Trauma of Life, psychiatrist Mark Epstein writes in a recent New York Times article,

“Trauma is not just the result of major disasters. It does not happen to only some people. An undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence. I like to say that if we are not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, we are suffering from pre-traumatic stress disorder. There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster. One way or another, death (and its cousins: old age, illness, accidents, separation and loss) hangs over all of us. Nobody is immune. Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advancement, outside our ability to control it.”

Such trauma not only impacts our psychological/emotional and spiritual selves, but our physical brains.

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In a brilliant article in The Wall Street Journal this week entitled, “Stress Starts Up The Machinery of Major Depression”, Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D., points out that there are many factors that increase our risk of major depression including genes, childhood trauma, and endocrine and immunological abnormalities.

But a frequent trigger is stress.

Sapolsky writes, “The stress angle concerns ‘adhedonia,’ psychiatric jargon for ‘the inability to feel pleasure.’ Adhedonia is at the core of the classic definition of major depression as ‘malignant sadness’”.

As a person who has a genetic history of depression in his family and childhood trauma, I was drawn into Sapolsky’s article. What was the connection between stress and the malignant sadness I’ve experienced off and on since being diagnosed with depression twelve years ago?

Who would have thought that rat brain research would help me understand the link?

Sapolsky gives us a little background about our brain structure by letting us know that our abilities to anticipate, pursue and feel pleasure revolve around a neurotransmitter called dopamine in a region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. Then he turns to the rats for further illumination:

“Put a novel object – say, a ball – in a mouse’s cage. When the mouse encounters the ball and explores it, the arousing mystery, puzzle and challenge cause the release of a molecule in the nucleus accumbens called CRF, which boost dopamine release. If an unexpected novel object was a cat, that mouse’s brain would work vey differently. But getting the optimal amount of challenge, what we’d call ‘stimulation,’ feels good.”

We humans need just enough challenge and stress to make life interesting.

“CRF mediates this reaction: Block the molecule’s actions with a drug, and you eliminate the dopamine surge and the exploration,” writes Sapolsky. “But exposing a mouse to major, sustained stress for a few days changes everything. CRF no longer enhances dopamine release, and the mouse avoids the novel object. Moreover, the CRF is now aversive: Spritz it into the nucleus accumbens, and the mouse now avoids the place in the cage where that happened. The researchers showed that this is due to the effects of stress hormones called glucocorticoids. A switch has been flipped; stimuli that would normally evoke motivated exploration and a sense of reward now evoke the opposite. Strikingly, those few days of stress caused that anhedonic state to last in those mice for at least three months.”

Sapolsky concludes:

“But meanwhile, these findings have an important implication. Life throws lousy things at us; at times, we all get depressed, with a small letter “d.” And most people—as the clichés say—get back in the saddle; prove that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. What then to make of people who are incapacitated by major depression in the clinical sense? Unfortunately, for many, an easy explanation is that the illness is a problem of insufficient gumption: ‘Come on, pull yourself together.’ There is a vague moral taint.”

The trauma of everyday stress is an important player in major depression. When combined with genetic history and a difficult childhood, it can tip the applecart and result in what Andrew Solomon calls “The Noonday Demon”.   The takeaway is that the better we get at managing the “trauma of everyday life”, the better chance we have at preventing depression.

My worry is that the society we’ve created and the hectic lives we lead make the management of stress very difficult, indeed.

 

 

 

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