Anti-Depressants May Be Doing More Harm Than Good (ya think?)

From Medical News Today, this post is for anyone reading this blog who has yet to be convinced that psychiatric drugs are neurotoxic and cause harm especially when used long-term. There is a video with the study’s author at the bottom of this post.

I wonder if the fact that some significant minority of people become completely disabled for various lengths of time when withdrawing from these drugs will ever hit the media? They really only cover some of the vast array of possibly very serious adverse events with antidepressant in general as well in this article.

Commonly prescribed anti-depressants appear to be doing patients more harm than good, say researchers who have published a paper examining the impact of the medications on the entire body.

“We need to be much more cautious about the widespread use of these drugs,” says Paul Andrews, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University and lead author of the article, published in the online journal Frontiers in Psychology.

“It’s important because millions of people are prescribed anti-depressants each year, and the conventional wisdom about these drugs is that they’re safe and effective.”

Andrews and his colleagues examined previous patient studies into the effects of anti-depressants and determined that the benefits of most anti-depressants, even taken at their best, compare poorly to the risks, which include premature death in elderly patients. read the rest here

As he says in the video there are many ways to support the body and mind to heal naturally from depression. This blog often looks at many of these methods. Diet and nutrition, exercise, yoga, meditation, mindfulness and various kinds of psychotherapy are just a few.

UPDATE: The author’s abstract of the study here: Primum non nocere: an evolutionary analysis of whether antidepressants do more harm than good (PDF of complete study available there too)