Korean Job Discussion Forums

[The Floating World]

I'm not against anti depressants. Have used them myself in the past, once with mixed results, once with okay results.

I'm more interested in the change this marks in society more than anything else.

Imo I believe it's due in part to societal pressures to live up to impossible media imagery, unrealsitc fantasies about women and attitudes towards them held by men due to those images and an attitude amongst young people in the past 15 yrs that they should have really glmorous jobs and lives etc.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203503204577040431792673066.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Health%26Wellness

[northway]

Hello, soaring health care costs...

[Ineverlie&I'malwaysri]

If you think that's bad (and it is), just wait until DSM5 comes out, scheduled for 2013. Its more inclusive criteria are certain to lead to diagnostic inflation.

Revisions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual are usually unstoppable juggernauts. However, the proposed DSM5 has kindled quite a bit of opposition, so much so that the largest association of mental health professional in the country, the American Counseling Association, is participating in a petition to stop it in its tracks, and so can you.

For one interesting example, see the commentary by Richard Green, entitled Sexual Preference for 14-Year-Olds as a Mental Disorder: You Can�t Be Serious!!. Green is Founding Editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior, past president of The International Academy of Sex Research, and the man most responsible for the removal of Homosexuality beginning with the DSM-III.

Another: they proposed a new diagnosis of Bereavement Disorder, for those who feel bad after someone close to them dies! How high will the percentage go if that one goes through?

[curlygirl]

Good grief! I would never argue against people's rights to seek medicinal treatment, but Americans are woefully quick to hit the (pill) bottle when they're ill.

I want to relate a small anecdote for you. Back when I was younger (around the time the great pyramids were being built) I worked in a posh London hotel as a room maid. We cleaners could always tell the nationality of each room's current guests if certain signs were present:

1. Room is spotless and looks as though the bed has not been slept in = Japanese

2. Bathroom is so full of fallen hairs it looks as though someone has gone on an depilation frenzy = Italian

3. Bedside cabinet is fully covered in pill bottles = American

[comm]

[SNOTOSEOUL]

this means 79% are still unhappy!

[mmstyle]

A massive shift occurred when the drug companies were able to advertise their drugs on T.V. At that point, they would tell you all your symptoms in various ads, and you go in to the doctor and tell her what medicine you want. Now, the drug companies put a bunch of symptoms together and call it a syndrome. It has also become the norm to take medicines for things that life style changes would fix (or in which life style changes should at least be explored first), then take more medicines for side effects from the first medicine, and on and on. Add to this the fact that Americans pay more for medicines than any other country I have visited, and drugs in America are a major cash cow for Big Pharma. That's why they spend so much money lobbying American politicians to keep it this way.
Floating World, I also agree with your point....Americans suffer from massive social anxieties based on the lifestyles that they are told are normal by the media. One of the things I have enjoyed about being in Korea is near complete avoidance of these expectations sold by the media.

[Ineverlie&I'malwaysri]

This article requires a subscription, so I quote it here:

Antidepressants: Lifesavers�or Active Placebos?

By Arline Kaplan | October 5, 2011

Are antidepressants active placebos or lifesavers? Are they overprescribed? Are clinical trials of these drugs insufficient?
These were among the issues vigorously debated in recent commentaries appearing in The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. Marcia Angell, MD, Senior Lecturer on Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, and Peter Kramer, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and Against Depression, represented the conflicting viewpoints.

Angell presented her views in a 2-part essay in The New York Review of Books,1,2 in a response to psychiatric leaders� criticisms of her essays,3 and in a subsequent letter in The New York Times.4 She contended that clinical trials have failed to find antidepressants effective at all in mild to moderate depression; that many psychiatric drugs have devastating adverse effects, especially in children and when used long-term; and that despite the risks and uncertain benefits, use of psychiatric drugs is soaring and the heavy reliance on drugs diverts resources better spent on improving treatment.
Antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, Angell charged, �are greatly overused, mainly because of the pharmaceutical industry�s influence on the psychiatric profession.� She also criticized the quality of clinical research in psychiatry as �especially poor� and the DSM as lacking validity, ever widening the scope of mental disorders and justifying �the use of psychoactive drugs.�
Angell supported her stance by citing study findings and opinions from 3 recent books: psychologist Irving Kirsch�s The Emperor�s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth; journalist Robert Whitaker�s Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America; and psychiatrist Daniel Carlat�s Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry�A Doctor�s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis.
Dr Kramer counters
In the July 9 issue of The New York Times, Kramer5 offered a spirited defense of antidepressants in his op-ed rebuttal to Angell and others.
�It is dangerous for the press to hammer away at the theme that antidepressants are placebos. They�re not. To give the impression that they are is to cause needless suffering,� said Kramer.
Both Kramer and Angell cited work by Kirsch,6 who used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FDA reviews of all placebo-controlled clinical trials, whether positive or negative, submitted for the initial approval of 6 antidepressant drugs. The 42 trials revealed that placebos are 82% as effective as the drugs, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D). The average difference between drug and placebo was 1.8 points on the HAM-D�a statistically significant difference. Kirsch concluded that antidepressants are probably no more effective than placebos...


You get the idea, but if there is a demand, I'll post the rest.