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Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

(www.theguardian.com)
206 points pseudolus | 2 comments | 21 Nov 25 00:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.58s | source
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BjoernKW ◴[21 Nov 25 23:04 UTC] No.46010122[source]▶
Drugs of the SSRI category (which Prozac belongs to) are by no means safe or well-tolerated. They have all sorts of severe, life-altering, mostly permanent side effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_i...

Additionally, there's very little - if any - evidence they actually work the way they're purported to.

There are countless heartbreaking stories of people who were prescribed these drugs not knowing what they were subscribing to. In many cases, the effects of those drugs are worse than the symptoms they are supposed to alleviate. With "I Don't Wanna Be Me" there's even a song by Type O Negative (from Peter Steele's own experience with Prozac) about the devastating effects SSRIs can have on a person's life.

These drugs are handed out like candy while the physicians prescribing them often point-blank deny any side effects or even attribute those to the illness they are meant to treat.

I'd go as far as to say that prescribing these drugs for any but the most severe or otherwise untreatable cases violates the "First, do no harm." ethical principle of medicine.

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konmok ◴[21 Nov 25 23:36 UTC] No.46010396[source]▶
Every medication can have severe and permanent side effects, the question is how often that occurs for a particular drug, and how that stacks up against the quality-of-life improvement from taking that drug.
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1. BjoernKW ◴[21 Nov 25 23:46 UTC] No.46010487[source]▶
> Every medication can have severe and permanent side effects

SSRIs are by an order of a magnitude worse than any other common medication in that respect.

Moreover, like I said there's little evidence these drugs actually achieve any quality-of-life improvement beyond a placebo effect.

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2. ckw ◴[22 Nov 25 00:22 UTC] No.46010752[source]▶
SSRIs are very bad, but antipsychotics are worse. There are many other reasons, but a demonstrative one is that there is a cumulative annual risk as high as 7% of developing a permanent movement disorder when on them.