This is a continuation from the post I made last night regarding the panelist’s discussion on the Larry King Show on Depression and how to cope with it.
The discussion got very interesting when they went over medication. Probably a lot of you reading this are currently taking medication or have been on it at some point in time in your life.
KING: Do you take medication?
DANO: I may. I’m not opposed to that. I’m now, as I said, going through this. I’m sort of weighing that as an option.
KING: You are depressed now, then?
DANO: Yes. Yes.
KING: This event-oriented depression, Dr. Swartz, common?
SWARTZ: Often, there’s a trigger, that people will look in their life and be able to say, this seems to have tipped the balance and put me into the depression. And, unfortunately, sometimes that can be a major loss, such as a death of a loved one, but, alone, too, being such a large stress.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder can go as far back as childhood.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is a psychiatric disorder that can occur following the experience or witnessing of life-threatening events such as military combat, natural disasters, terrorist incidents, serious accidents, or violent personal assaults like rape. People who suffer from PTSD often relive the experience through nightmares and flashbacks, have difficulty sleeping, and feel detached or estranged, and these symptoms can be severe enough and last long enough to significantly impair the person’s daily life.
YOU may forget, but your body never does.
PTSD goes further. The event only has to be perceived as traumatic by the victim. In reality the incident might not pose a serious threat to life, but if the incident is genuinely considered to be life-threatening, then the victim has experienced an event outside the range of normal human experience. More recent evidence has shown that PTSD can result from sexual abuse, and from bullying. I believe that the drastic increase in PTSD is very much the product of modern living. PTSD case numbers rise in ratio to advances in technology. The more advanced today’s world becomes, the greater the scope for the existence of severe life stresses and traumatic situations. The more advanced our communications networks become, the more our minds are filled with plausible traumatic imagery. I suspect the incidence of PTSD cases will continue to rise.
So as you can see here the timing of a trauma is irrelevant. It just simply has to happen. I reckon that it’s safe to assume that the majority of us have PTSD to some degree or another. Depending on our backgrounds, individuals vary on how they cope with it.
Back to the Larry King Show…
KING: Now, Chad, you don’t take any medication? Does it work for you?
ALLEN: No, I don’t take medication right now. My sister does, although none of it’s ever really been all that effective, and I think, to talk about treating the illness of depression, and leave out both the emotional and spiritual component is a recipe for disaster. I think that recovery from…
KING: But if medication would work, you’d take it, wouldn’t you?
ALLEN: But I don’t think it can only just be medication. To simply, just think that this magic can come in a pill is not even half the battle, and to go through this and not be able to talk about what’s going on in the emotional front, it’s not going to happen.
Sometimes the pill alone can do wonders, but sometimes we have to take the pill and utilize other coping mechanisms to get by. Common sense, right?
KING: Is it doubly depressing, Dr. Swartz, when a person in depression gets bad news?
SWARTZ: It can be. It’s interesting, because sometimes when people are in treatment — I have had patients on medication that get very serious news, such as a cancer diagnosis, and sometimes it will trigger another depressive episode, and sometimes they do well through it. And so each time, you have to be vigilant, to pay attention to see if the symptoms are going to come back.
KING: Is it true that over 20 million people have it?SWARTZ: It is. It’s about 5 to 10 percent of men and 10 to 20 percent of women that some time in their life, will have a depressive episode, the kind of depression that’s an illness.
This is interesting. Twenty million people have Depression. Can you imagine if we were to add those that don’t even know they have depression? Whoa!
What’s also interesting here is the different ratio between men and women! This doesn’t mean that men don’t walk around with as much baggage as women. What it means is that women are much closer or aware of their feelings compared to their male counterparts. Remember how I mentioned in my last entry on Depression on how Society teaches us not to feel? Surprise! Boys and Men have feelings too. The only difference is – is that society is much tougher on boys, sadly. Men can choose to feel if they want to, but most don’t because they remember their daddies beatings to “make them men”. And when the boys cried during their beatings, they remember being told the number one cliche line: “SHUT THE HELL UP OR I’LL G-I-V-E YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT!”
Did anybody watch Jay Leno the other night when Laura Bush was on?
If anybody watched that, you heard her saying (in reference to the No Child Left Behind Act) that boys suffer greater than girls do growing up and how they need the same type of nurturing that girls get.
Perhaps Trelease has a revealing insight into the problems boys seem to have when it comes to academic achievement. Boys are more likely than girls to repeat a grade or drop out of school. They suffer more from learning disabilities, are three times more likely to be enrolled in special education classes, are more likely to be involved in criminal and delinquent behavior, are less likely to be enrolled in college preparatory classes, have lower educational expectations and do less homework (Riordan, Sommers, 2000, 1996).
Laura Bush continued that the percentage of women attending college these days is drastically higher than than men.
Plain and simple. Women and men are raised differently. A man can still be raised as a man, sure. But they should be allowed to express themselves. Too many people think they’ll grow up as fags if they cry when they’re 2 months old. No, I’m serious here.
More on Medication from Dr.Swartz from the Larry King Show:
(If anyone you readers have made it THIS far, please read the below. It’s very important!)
SWARTZ: There’s a small group of people for whom that’s probably the treatment of choice. But for most patients with depression, they’re so severely affected that they’re not able to really engage in that kind of intensive psychotherapy. The other issue is that for some people that are taking medication, it’s often a problem if they don’t get an adequate dose of the medicine for long enough for it to really get a chance to work. Often, people have side effects, or they give up on the medication before they’ve had a chance to see if it’s really going to be successful.
This is so common. People try medication for a few days, get undesirable side affects, and never try medication again!
Why does this happen? I have my own theories:
- People think they are contaminating their bodies with poisons.
- If you’re used to feeling bad all the time and know no other feelings than “bad”, to feel good would actually make the depressed feel even worse because of the contrast. Feeling good simply means you are feeling, and for those whom have never felt good before literally freak out.
- People are afraid to admit to themselves that they have a problem. They feel taking medication means that they are “bad” or “wrong” or “crazy” and finally “undesirable”.
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When agree to take a medication, you are also agreeing to give up the wheel into the hands of the medication and re-live what “powerlessness” is. This is something that control freaks cannot do.
- And last but not least, people are afraid of the unknown.
This stubborn behavior will keep them in their stupor. People have a choice, though. And that is the choice that makes them happy, so you really can’t blame them.
On Becoming Immune to Medications from the Larry King Show:
CALLER: And it’s really for the doctor, my question is really for the doctor. There is absolutely no way that I cannot be on medication. When I go off, it cycles down. I’m high. I’m great, and then it’s a spinning cycle down. Can you become immuned to like — I was on Paxil for a long time and it just wasn’t working anymore, and I really had to fight my doctor to change that medication, and I think other people should know out there, if that’s a fact.
KING: Doctor, do you switch medication often?
SWARTZ: Well, you make sure you’ve given the medication a good chance, in the sense of getting to a full dose and staying on that, usually for four to eight weeks. But, if something has stopped working, it’s as important that you try something else. You don’t want to just keep with something that’s not helping you, and there are so many good options now that it’s important to move on to something — to try something else. And it can happen that a medication that’s been helping for, even a few years, can lose its effectiveness.
Last but not least, one more important thing about medication:
KIDDER: I did. I wanted to say a couple of things to the woman who talked about going off her Paxil. There is a withdrawal from anti-depressants. It’s well-documented, and it’s documented also by the companies who make them, although they don’t like to publicize it. They don’t call it drug withdrawal. They call it discontinuation syndrome, but you will get depressed, unless you withdraw really, really slowly from any psychiatric drug, in particular, antidepressants.
And it’s really important to know that, because it’s quite dangerous, so, what I want to say is, I don’t want anyone out there getting the idea that, oh, Margot got better without her medication, so I’ll just throw mine out. If you throw your medication out and try and just – like an alcoholic — you will end up in the bin.
So, to all you people that are suffering with anxiety/depression and don’t like living that way, there is hope.
If any of you want to get more information on anti-depressants or just medication in general, so far, I’ve found this site to be the most comprehensive.
Happy Health to All!
