Reuters | Americans prefer drugs to talk therapy for depression,
with nearly 80 percent taking a pill for the condition, Consumer
Reports said on Tuesday. The most popular class of drugs remain the
so-called SSRIs such as Prozac, the group found. People found newer,
pricier antidepressants less desirable because of side-effects.
Patients benefited just as much from therapy — almost any kind of
therapy, the consumer group found in its survey of 1,500 readers.
Those surveyed said they improved just as much after seven or more sessions of talk therapy as if they took drugs, and it did not matter if the therapist was a psychiatrist, psychologist or social worker.
Nearly 80 percent of people who had been diagnosed with depression or anxiety were prescribed antidepressants.
Patients were happiest with the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, a class that includes Eli Lilly and Co’s Prozac, or its generic equivalent fluoxetine. People were also happy with Pfizer’s Zoloft, or sertraline, as well as Celexa (citalopram) and Lexapro (escitalopram) from Forest Laboratories.
The survey found that people complained of more side-effects from serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, or SNRIs, a newer, often more expensive class of antidepressants.
These include venlafaxine, made by Pfizer-owned Wyeth under the Effexor brand name, and Lilly’s duloxetine, sold as Cymbalta.
The survey found a range of side-effects. But the most common one — loss of sexual interest or ability — was less common than in past surveys, the consumer group said.
Pills are more efficient.
Yeah, why actually fix whats wrong in your life? Just take a pill to forget about your problems.
Yeesh. Depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. You can’t “talk” (therapy) someone out of being depressed any more than you can “talk” a diabetic into producing more insulin.
Research shows that therapy alone just doesn’t help much.
Articles like this belong in the 1970’s. Sad journalism, just sad. Let’s do everything we can to maintain the social stigma of mental illness by writing more articles like this one!
Ask the depressed people who go to therapy if the doctor prescribed an anti-depressant. I bet that most will answer, yes.
I have a history of major depression, along with a few other disorders. Maybe some people just take pills to avoid dealing with problems (which is actually the fault of the doctors, not the patient!), but altogether too often, depression is not something that is within one’s own control. It took electroconvulsive therapy to “shock” me out of my depression after many months of both medication and therapy. Needless to say, my illness was among the most severe possible for a depressed individual, but it IS an illness. Sometimes therapy is not enough. All the talking in the world did me a whole lot of no good, because there was something going physically wrong with my brain. Plenty of other people unfortunately suffer through the same thing, and attitudes like Brad’s do nothing except cause more harm.
As to the article itself, this is extremely poor journalism (and yes, I am a journalist myself, so I have no qualms about making such criticism). What kind of depression are we even talking about? Clinically, “depression” could mean any number of disorders, and they don’t necessarily all have the same kind of treatment. In the fifth paragraph, “happiest” was a ridiculous word choice. Was that supposed to be a pun in an article about depression? What does the author mean by that, anyway? I’m assuming the author meant “satisfied,” but not only is that unclear, it’s also irrelevant. SSRIs simply tend to work for most patients, and SNRIs are usually prescribed instead of or addition to the SSRIs if they aren’t working. It’s a matter of efficacy, not how much the patient likes taking it.
This is truly sad. I wish the stigma of mental illness would disappear, but with this sort of nonsense still appearing in major media outlets, it’s not happening anytime soon.
Oh Brad, if it was just that easy….. (sigh) another misinformed individual speaking out of ignorance.
Therapy is the most important part. You’ll never get better with just medication, you need to learn to control your actions and behaviors as well and cope with the unbalanced emotions.
Perhaps this is not the most analogous metaphor, but it’s like a healthy diet and exercise when it comes to weight loss. You need the combination of the two in order to lose the fat and to keep it off. And each individual’s mileage will vary. Some will need more of one thing over the other. Some are morbidly obese, while others just have a more-manageable 15 lbs to lose.
@brad – its no different than having a badly sprained ankle. You need a crutch (pills) to support you while you fix what’s wrong with your life (aka the ankle).
Psychotropic meds are indicated for true clinical conditions.
Zyprexa was pushed by Lilly Drug Reps.
They called it the “Five at Five” (5 mg at 5 pm to keep nursing home patients subdued and sleepy) and “VIVA ZYPREXA” (Zyprexa for everybody) campaigns to off label market Eli Lilly Zyprexa as a fix for unapproved usage
I was prescribed Eli Lilly Zyprexa by my physician *off-label* for PTSD and it was all wrong,cost me a lot of money and the side effects damaged my pancreas and gave me life-long diabetes.
Daniel Haszard Zyprexa whistle-blower http://www.zyprexa-victims.com