After about 18 years of non-stop, mostly ineffective antidepressant treatment, I’ve brought this long experiment to an end. I had been wearing Emsam patches for the past six years, but I’ve been fairly sure for some time that they had stopped working. It seems I was right. Getting off the drug has made no difference […]
antidepressant
Taking Emsam: A Different Kind of Antidepressant
Since I’ve written several posts on my growing worries about antidepressants, I thought I’d tell you about the one I’m taking now. Emsam has worked for me longer than any other, and the dietary restrictions it requires have been a small price to pay. Among antidepressants, the MAOI class has been relegated to 3rd or […]
A Brief History of My Meds
Over at Health Central, I’ve put up a post called My 20 Meds. It’s about the trial and error process I went through to find a medication for depression that gave me more help than harm. The interesting thing is that none of the newer antidepressants worked for very long. The most effective have belonged […]
Misunderstood Epidemic: Depression
Video made available by Ironzeal This video is a short preview of one of the best films on depression I’ve seen. Broadcast originally on PBS last fall, The Misunderstood Epidemic is being shown again on a varying schedule around the country. If you miss it, you can get a copy of the DVD at a […]
Prozac for Crowd Control?
Some Rights Reserved by Image Zen at Flickr I’ve heard of a number of off-label uses for antidepressants, but turning them into non-lethal weapons for crowd control is a new one for me. The Soft-Kill Solution in the March Harper’s describes research on the use of “calmatives” or central nervous system depressants for just this […]
Feeling Fine on Prozac
Medication is a hot subject on the internet, so I need to say up front that I’m not opposed to the use of medications to treat long-term depression. I have a live-and-let-live attitude about treatment. Finding anything that works for each person is the key, with or without drugs or any of the many other […]
