Newsweek again

I don't like to go over the same material lots of time -- although isn't that what most of life is anyway? But my wife still gets Newsweek -- she's been getting it since high school, and that was a while ago. And while she may be one of the two dozen people who actually subscribe to what at one time was a magazine that measured the pulse of the nation, it still has enough power to bother me.

The cover story is by Sharon Begely, the woman who trashed on psychotherapy a couple of months ago and got so many of us therapists all riled up. Well now she has taken her sensationalist approach to journalism and focused on anti-depressant medication. Again, as is her usual style, she reads a couple of articles and takes the most extreme view and turns it into the truth. This time she feels she has discovered The Placebo Effect, which is something that has been around for about forty years. She highlights the fact that most anti-depressant medications are slightly, if any, more effective than a placebo. This is stuff I think that even I, a derivative thinker, have written about on this very blog about two years ago. (if it wasn't so late I'd dig up the post).

The following article in the same magazine was written by a psychiatrist who took the opposite position and extolled the effectiveness and life-saving value of anti-depressants.

This kind of shit is exactly what our President Obama was talking about the other day. He said that discussion and debate are vanishing in this country and it is all point-counter point, with extreme positions and conflict.

The truth about anti-depressants is very complex. Their effectiveness varies greatly depending upon who is taking them, for what, for how long, and how sensitive their body is to chemicals and side-effects.

In many ways the reason these drugs are so wide-spread has more to do with drug company marketing and profits that their actual effectiveness as mind changing agents. It is also true that they can be addicting, and that they usually cause weight gain.
But, these drugs also have been very helpful to millions of people, for reasons that involve a complex interaction of factors.

Hardly anyone, not drug companies, the FDA, clinical researchers who want to get more funding, or the doctors who give out the pills has the time, the skills, the resources, or the money to really do an objective study to tease out all of the factors. We end up with Yes/No divisiveness and half truths.

It has always been this way; back to the time of when we blamed witches and demons.