Posted by Willful on May 18, 2013, at 12:16:06
From my reading recently, our belief about the baneful effects of ADs on adolescents are based on claims that have unfortunately become standard positions-- but which are not well supported. Mostly this may well be because of media reaction to partial research and an FDA process that was poorly conducted and thought through-- and which for some time has been directly questioned on the NIMH sites and by quite a few studies that I 've seen.
This questioning of the data that led to the black box warning hasn't been noted by the media---- and therefore it seems as if a possibly ill-advised conclusion about the effects of ADs on adolescents was promoted without any nuance or follow-up.
So I wish there were more focus on the research that shows that adolescents suicide has at least arguably dropped as a result of using ADs-- statistics that aren't totally stable over time anyway-- so that it's hard to arrive at hard and fast conclusions. (See http://nchspressroom.wordpress.com/2007/09/06/teen-suicide-and-antidepressants/). The claim is that there was an over-reliance on the statistics for one year-- 2004 -- in arriving at the conclusion that these suicides had increased. And if you look at the data for the years since 1990 or so, teenage suicide -- like the statistics for crime etc-- increase and decrease over time. Since there have been many sociological studies accounting for the increase and decrease of urban violent crime (especially by younger people), it's even more reckless to attribute it to ADs in one area-- psychiatry-- - without any apparent recognition of the reseach in other disciplines.
At the very least, the numbers seem conflicting, so it's quite possible that the claim that ADs lead to suicide etc are outright misreadings of data, or at least are far from proven.
Emsam.
Abilify
Provigil
Rilutek
poster:Willful
thread:1043860
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20130109/msgs/1043860.html