Depersonalization Support Forum banner

ALKS 5461 development has been delayed another few years.

983 views 4 replies 3 participants last post by  thanksforbeingalive 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
#2 ·
This means that the company will have to conduct further studies which may set it back for a few years. Hence the expected commercial launch of early 2019 has been significantly delayed.
They already started one, where they also assess anhedonia. They are so dumb. Why didn't they think about that before?
 
#4 · (Edited by Moderator)
Reason 1 applies to virtually all mental disorders, thus it cannot explain why it isn't researched for depersonalization disorder. Even though it is one of the reasons why most pharma companies stopped to research drugs for mental disorders.

Reason 2 is also wrong, because many if not most patients seek psychiatric help. Several studies found the prevalence of clinically significant depersonalization in the general population to be around 1% to 2%, so it's likely not to be a rare disorder.

I would say reason 3 is refuted by the experience of people on forums and also by empirical evidence. Psychiatrists don't have much problems to hand out drugs to depersonalized patients, unfortunately often not the correct ones.

The market isn't small at all. Even if depersonalization disorder itself was rare, secondary depersonalization in other mental disorders would be lucrative, due to being an off-label indication.

In my opinion it all boils down to psychiatrists ignoring depersonalization disorder and thus pharma companies do the same.

By the way, I saw you mentioning that you use German forums as well. I am intermediate speaker of German and I would like to improve my knowledge. Could you name the forum you are using?
http://www.dp.yourweb.de/depersonalisationforum/

There are also some german Facebook groups, which are more active than this forum.
 
#5 ·
I find it hard to believe they didn't think about depersonalization as a potential market for their drug. I wonder why every pharma company shuns this disorder. Here's what I believe may be some of the causes:

1. Are sufferers seen as too heterogenous a group, which would make a single treatment unlikely to succeed in a clinical trial setting? As can be seen, what causes DPDR for some, cures it for others. Yet (apparently) no distinction nor prediction can be made as to who will respond in which way based on symptoms. People get DPDR from Iboga, but also cure DPDR while microdosing on it. People develop DPDR from stimulants but also treat it with them. This makes the disorder quite slippery.
2. It is thought that there are few people with this disorder (debatable) or that the majority of those afflicted can't even name their feelings properly, let alone seek treatment.
3. Perhaps it is believed that psychiatrists do not generally have good knowledge of the disorder, thus are reluctant to diagnose it and prescribe drugs for it.

The market it small, there won't be a cure-all drug anyway and the disorder is difficult to diagnose, so I guess we're out of luck for the time being. We're really just relying on treatments developed for entirely different disorders that happen to work for DPDR as well.

By the way, I saw you mentioning that you use German forums as well. I am intermediate speaker of German and I would like to improve my knowledge. Could you name the forum you are using?
assuming 1-2 percents of world population suffering from DP/DR, the possible market is quite attractive for companies. But brain is too complicated......
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top