Summary
A Stanford University psychiatrists says his profession is moving away from the dogma of Freud, and treating depression as a biological, rather than conditioned or mentally induced, disease. He says that's one reason why prescriptions for antidepressants are on the rise. But he also says more people these days are recognizing themselves as having depression and seeking help for it.
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http://www.sfexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/18/news/20050218_ne00_schatzberg.txt
Details
Use of antidepressants in the United States has doubled and even tripled, according to studies conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1988-19994 and 1999-2000.
Dr. Alan Schatzberg, chair of -Stanford University's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has extensively studied depressive disorders, with a recent emphasis on chronic cases.
As we do more and more epidemiological surveys, we find that the rates of depression are relatively high in this society.
You tend to in fact have people who recognize themselves as being more depressed as well, because there's a treatment for it.
What's happened with the selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors, the so-called SSRIs, is that they've been relatively easy to tolerate for many patients, particularly Prozac or Paxil, and so a lot of people who have milder forms of depression have taken them, often with quite a bit of success.
Q: Have discoveries by the neuroscientists of how the brain works physically and chemically meant that psychologists and psychiatrists have moved away from Freudian notions entirely?
For more severe forms of depression, even Freud in his very famous paper, "Mourning and Melancholia," pointed out that some forms of depression were clearly biological in nature and not really due to a variety of unconscious conflicts.
So, for the more severe forms, the field has moved towards medication on one hand or specialized forms of psychotherapy, what we call frequently cognitive behavior therapy, which are based on attacking certain individual's cognitions, distorted cognitions or beliefs.
Some of the recommendations to not prescribe may actually be harmful, because there are people who won't obtain treatment, and who will get scared off, and there are practitioners who won't prescribe, which could be to the detriment of individual patients who may in fact benefit greatly from these
treatments.
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Monday, March 07, 2005
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