Therapy More Effective Than Prozac

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Antidepressants of the Prozac type are no better than a placebo, a leading psychologist has claimed. According to Irving Kirsch, the evidence is overwhelming that there is no link between depression and serotonin, the brain chemical that such drugs are supposed to affect.

Practising psychiatrists, however, say that it would be disastrous to use stricter criteria for the prescription of antidepressants on the basis of Professor Kirsch’s research findings. “Be very careful what you advise, because we in the surgeries will be left to pick up the pieces,” said Amjad Uppal, a consultant psychiatrist for the Gloucestershire NHS Trust.

Last year in England the NHS issued 39 million prescriptions to treat depression, more than half being for “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor” (SSRI) drugs. Three million people took antidepressants daily. Antidepressants including Prozac and the newer generation of SSRIs, such as Seroxat, are taken to increase the level of serotonin in the brain.

Professor Kirsch argued that they worked through the placebo effect — patients expect to be made to feel better — and said that “talking treatments” such as cognitive behavioural therapy were more effective in the long term.

“Although the chemical-imbalance theory is often presented as if it were fact, it is actually a controversial hypothesis,” he said. “This is about as close as a theory gets in science to being disproven by the evidence.”

Others maintain that antidepressants do have an active biochemical influence. “We do not fully understand how these drugs work, but there is evidence that they influence the number of neurons and the connections between neurons. You can’t draw conclusions about this because of the nature of the study,” said Hamish McAllister- Williams, a consultant psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist at Newcastle University.

He said that depression was a dangerous illness, noting that sufferers were at as high a risk of a heart attack as those who smoked 20 cigarettes a day.

Dr McAllister-Williams believed that “at least a proportion” of the effect of the drugs was “due to active ingredients, but either way they work and we really need an effective treatment”. Dr Uppal said: “I have a very high threshold for prescribing antidepressants, but there’s no doubt in my mind they work. Research studies are artificial and do not capture the difference between effectiveness and efficacy.”

Professor Kirsch’s research, presented at The Times Cheltenham Science Festival, shows that a new drug, tianeptine, is just as effective as SSRIs in treating depression. Tianeptine, which is a serotonin reuptake enhancer, actually decreases the level of the chemical.

In comparisons of tianeptine with SSRIs and the earlier tricyclic antidepressants, the three produced virtually identical response rates: 63 per cent of patients responded to tianeptine, 62 per cent to SSRIs and 65 per cent to tricyclics. If drugs having three different effects on serotonin brought similar benefits, these could not be due to their specific chemical activity, Professor Kirsch said. “The idea that the neural transmitter serotonin is a causal factor in depression is wrong.

J K Rowling

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We found J K Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Speech extremely inspiring, moving and above all, entertaining. We do hope you enjoy it too!

Stress and anxiety make it harder for wounds to heal ….

Scientists have discovered that stress and anxiety can make it harder for wounds to heal. Researchers inflicted small ‘punch’ wounds on healthy volunteers whose levels of life stress were gauged using a standard questionnaire. The wounds of the least anxious participants were found to heal twice as fast as those of the most stressed, and changes in the levels of the stress hormone cortisol reflected the difference in healing speed. Professor John Weinman, from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, has previously shown that healing can be enhanced by psychological help aimed at easing emotional stress. He says: “These studies focus specifically on how the life stresses people experience can impact on their ability to recover from different types of wound, such as those caused by surgical procedures and by different medical conditions, including venous leg ulcers. “I hope that these findings can now be used to identify psychological interventions to help speed up the recovery and healing process.”

Forgiving

Hi

Someone passed this on to me earlier today:

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future. ”
Lewis B. Smedes

Forgiviness is an interesting concept, isn’t it? We often seem to want to hold on to a bitter memory because the other person involved doesn’t warrant our forgiveness; maybe we feel that they haven’t atoned enough or they don’t yet/won’t ever deserve to be forgiven.

Yet who is injured by our inability to forgive? It may sometimes be the other person, that’s true ….  but often they remain blissfully unaffected by the weight of our resentment, bitterness and anger.

The one person, the only person, truly affected by our inability to forgive is ourself. By choosing not to forgive we believe that we are valuing ourselves. We may feel that we are not yet ready to forgive and so we hold on to all those negative emotions for a little longer and then a little longer still … and over time we become used to having those negative emotions inside of us … they begin to feel comfortable, we have ‘worn them in’. Fast forward a little further still and we have stopped being able to see/feel the way in which these emotions affect us, eat us up, drain us of opportunties to feel contented in the world.

Why do we do this? In doing so we move from being the injured party to the injuring party …  if someone stole from us we wouldn’t then start throwing money away ourself to make them pay for what they had done, would we? The concept of self harming in the interest of making ’someone else pay’ just doesn’t make sense.

So, for our own sakes, maybe we should take the time to look inside. Is there anything we can let go of?

If so, let’s do it now – isn’t it time to look after us?

Isn’t it time to look inside and forgive …  forgiveness is for no one else’s benefit but our own. It enables us to live freely and to find true contentment.