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<div id="comment_body_53509109">The single biggest influence on the state of psychiatry today is moral conservativism and other assorted panderings to popular culture and the law. Their desire to stay profitable and respectable in mainstream society long ago destroyed any real credibility they had as a serious hard science.

Pretty much every highly effective anti-depressant ever made (including but certainly not limited to opioids and dopaminergics) is a scheduled substance and almost never prescribed for depression, because apparently every single human being alive is just a helpless addict just waiting for the chance to swallow twenty pills at a time chasing a high. SSRIs have abysmal efficacies, but that didn't stop them from pushing the placebo revolutionary drug Prozac to being one of the most prescribed drugs in the country. A lot of people are still under this weird impression that antidepressants work by re-establishing some natural balance of neurotransmitters present in "normal" people, when there's every indication that this is not the case. (FDA is partially at fault here allowed pharma companies to put out some ads that strongly implied this was how SSRIs worked.)

And it's not as if modern antidepressants aren't addictive; like many psychotropic drugs, SSRIs and SNRIs induce physical dependency with <a title="wikipedia.org" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin_washout">potentially severe withdrawal symptoms</a> [wikipedia.org] if abruptly terminated.

<b>No, the actual difference between modern antidepressants and "addictive" drugs that actually make you feel good is... the latter actually work. Consistently and compellingly. And it's for that very reason that they are deemed dangerous.</b> Drugs that are highly effective in enabling human happiness work better at higher dosages (which is how dosage increase works among most drugs that are actually effective, if you think about)... which of course leads to massive problems among the subpopulations of people who have poor impulse control or are overly euphoria-craving.

And all of this plays directly into the hands of religious and social conservatives who have for millenia made careers out of claiming that anything that people like too much must be bad. You'd think that more people would be suspicious of a profession claiming to be a science that was, just a couple generations ago, trying to chemically castrate people against their will to cure them of their homosexuality... ah well.</div>
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<i>"...one of the very very few posts that deserves to end up with a "Score:5, Troll" distinction."</i> -wvmarle</div>
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via <a href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/12/18/0543214/are-psychiatric-medications-hurting-more-patients-than-they-help#comments">Are Psychiatric Medications Hurting More Patients Than They Help? - Slashdot</a>.