Letters to the Editor
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What This Nation Needs Is a Good Old Fashioned Dose of Meloncholia, Right Jerome?
I'm having a bit of trouble discerning what the author's specific complaint is regarding this class of drugs.
He does not question their efficacity, but merely cites the small percentage of patients who experience paradoxical effects such as an increase in depression and suicidal thoughts. Such reactions--a very small percentage of users--are common in virtually all meds. Some poor soul rubs the prescribed anti-redness cream on her pinkish forehead at night and wakes up in the morning to find the Crimson Tide has suddenly taken the field. But it's a rare reaction.
Psychotherapy, though brilliantly conceived and practiced by some of the most caring and thoughtful people in the health care arena, doesn't work. My hunch--and that's all it is--is that the rate of success of psychotherapy is roughly equal to the rate of paradoxical responses of those under drug therapy. Mere loquaciousness is overmatched when its opponent is real depression.
Which brings up the one issue that the author somewhat glosses over. Are physicians, with advertising support from Big Pharma, prescribing these drugs to people who do not need them? I live in San Diego, where the sun shines 300+ days a year. On cloudy days, most people I talk with feel "depressed," they say. If physicians are doling out Paxil to them, it is more a commentary on their (the physicians) unethical or ignorant behaviour than it is on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and the drug companies that created them.