Posted by yxibow on April 6, 2006, at 2:02:35
In reply to Re: there are other methods of depression treatment » kingdavid20, posted by FredPotter on April 5, 2006, at 23:19:14
> The trouble with herbs is you never know what's in them. Plants mostly don't want to be eaten. Some have become prickly or covered in thorns, while others have become poisonous.
Totally agreed...
> While on the subject of curing depression without drugs, I think the break up of the extended family since the second world war is a lot to do with it. Apparently depression has increased 10 fold in the West since then. I could give a reference for that
I'd be interested in a reference on that... I think its more that since that era, psychiatry began to change from a little-can-we-do-about-it syndrome to one that started to see the discovery of new and real medications that helped depression. As soon as we got past the injecting insulin and housing people in "madhouses" and throwing opium at people, antipsychotics were discovered, tricyclic antidepressants quickly followed about the same time in the late 1950s, followed very soon afterwards by the first benzodiazepines. SSRIs are actually an older discovery than people think but the first one caused fatal problems and was soon off the shelves. Prozac followed. Then we had tetracyclic antidepressants like mianserin and Remeron. Finally SNRIs and SSNRIs came about. Who knows what tomorrow holds.
My point is, though there is a great stigma, psychiatry has "come out of the closet" in the past 50 years. I think that has much more to do with any perceived increases in depression, besides periodic things that we can't control well like 9/11 and poverty and other socio-political forces.Our brains were just as full of the soup of neurochemicals in Roman times through the middle ages, and you can rattle off a list of people who were probably "mentally ill" though little was known at the time and snake oil was sold or people were cast out and gawked at.
Its the same endless arguments you see on CNN these days about blogs and the terrible attraction to teenagers by predators. Its just a new era -- kids used to vanish by someone posing as a caretaker taking them home from school.
Hopefully in this brave new world, this wont be the case any more. Attracting a significant other, maybe wont be a chore, besides getting beyond the first date state, and finally revealing that, yeah, I have _____ condition, but I'm taking medication for it or I seek psychotherapy. Oh -- I'm sorry to hear that, I'm glad you're getting help for your problems. A 21st century scenario? Hopefully.
We cannot despair of humanity, since we are ourselves human beings. -- Einstein.
poster:yxibow
thread:629458
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060403/msgs/629521.html