boojit

I just found this essay today. It was published in November of 2005, so it's not exactly breaking news, but it's new to me and hopefully to you as well.

The essay comes from the Medicine section of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which bills itself as "a peer-reviewed, open-access journal." Wikipedia's entry for PLoS states, "The PLoS is a nonprofit open access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of scientific journals and other scientific literature under an open content license," and that "(it) began in early 2001 as an online petition initiative by Patrick Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory."

I hadn't even heard of the PLoS before, but it sounds like an exciting concept: all the benefits of a well-controlled, peer-reviewed legitimate scientific journal (eg: Nature, NEJM), but with the accessibility of open-license content on the web, (eg: Wikipedia).

The jist of the essay: Authors Jeffrey R. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo believe that antidepressant manufacturers usually overstate their claims of efficacy in their advertisments, without the evidence to back those claims up. For example, an SSRI advertisement claims, "depression may be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and Zoloft works to correct this imbalance." Lacasse and Leo ask the obvious: Do we know depression can be caused by a chemical imbalance of seretonin? Does Zoloft change the levels of seretonin in the brain? And if so, where is the proof?

Since SSRIs like Zoloft are the most popular antidepressants on the market, and since they are purported to specifically target seretonin in the brain, you'd expect to find mountains of evidence linking seretonin deficiency to depression. Lancasse and Leo show this evidence is skant at best, whereas evidence to the contrary is relatively common. Unconvinced, they write, "Contemporary neuroscience research has failed to confirm any serotonergic lesion in any mental disorder, and has in fact provided significant counterevidence to the explanation of a simple neurotransmitter deficiency. Modern neuroscience has instead shown that the brain is vastly complex and poorly understood." [emphasis mine]

Reading this article was a bit vindicating for me, because in May 2006 I wrote this blog post based on my own experiences with antidepressants. As I say in that post, it's not the drugs or doctors that I have a problem with; rather, it's the tendency of the doctors and drug companies to overstate how much they know about depression, and how effective these drugs are in treating it. It's nice to see there's at least someone in the scientific community who agrees.

Whether this essay reflects a wacky far-out notion largely ignored by mainstream psychiatry, or whether it is indicative of a beginning trend in how mainstream psychiatry represents itself, I can't say. Either way, I highly recommend reading the PLoS essay and then making up your own mind, particularly if you are on antidepressants or are considering them as therapy. 

I will again state that I do not advise anyone quit their antidepressants or stop seeing their physician, and I fully admit that these drugs can and do provide relief for many sufferers of depression. If you are taking these drugs and they are working for you, you win. If you're not taking them but thinking about it, I'd advise you to arm yourself with as much information as possible from as many sources as possible. It's the best defense you have against the negatives of using antidepressants.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.