I was on Zoloft for around 12-13 years. It worked amazing at first when I was a teenager. Over the years I’d have to up my dose cause my symptoms would return. I got to a point months ago where my symptoms returned heavily and I went to the max dose but no change. I tapered off and now I’ve tried Prozac which seemed to make symptoms worse and no I’m trying lexapro and I feel like the same thing is happening, symptoms getting worse. I’d love to hear others experience with medication and what helps.
SSRI’s not working
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Uuh no, definitely not always. Or you mean just in your experiences?
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i will go one step further. ssri and any psychmed do always destroy the brain. long term using causes loss of personality traits and emotional flatlining. and please dont come with studies. i readed enough lectures to know that studies in general just can give ideas. they prove absolutely nothing. but you are such a science obsessed man that you wont understand my point anyway. youre defending meds on this forum so aggressively that i tend to believe that youre employed as marketing manager at pharma industries
edit: your points are always like this: if someone gets psychological ill, it doesnt have anything to do with the past of that person. childhood issues and long term stress doesnt do anything. we get ill out of the blue. every humanbeing on this planet gets ill out of nowhere and then they stay ill for the rest of their lifes and the only thing to live a normal live with it are fucking physically pills that changes (destroys) the natural way of how the brain is working and they seem to be normal because the meds are damping everything what your brain connects with your personality. i know 2 persons in real life one took 10+ years ssri and the other one 30+ years. both of them are such innerly empty and burned out. no excitement in anything no motivation. everything is just boring to them. and the sadest thing is, they dont notice that. they think its their normal or it is because they became older. now you will say „uhh bro just anectodal“. so if you think, that im telling here lies or bullshit, this is only because youre doing the same and expect from others they are doing the same as you. but no. if you just say „its anecdotal“ why should i believe anything you are posting here? are you a doctor? and even if you are a doctor. how did the fucking science world did it not to research a „disorder“ what was written down first time at 1850 by mayer gross? are they so fucking dumb that they misdiagnosed millions of people with psychosis and other bullshit? is this the science you trust in and believe? i will say to you something. the only reason why the pharma industry can produce fucktons of ssri and other antidepressant is because people who take them are actually healthy people who just try to not lose their job, family or marriage. this is why they make billions with antidepressants every year. when it comes to dpdr suddenly there is nothing they can offer because they know exactly that they cannot influence a deep biographical-personal-psychological hurt and micro traumas through a fucking physical pill
90% of the people who takes antidepressants dont need that actually.Assuming that science "cannot prove anything", by what method did you come to the conclusion that "psychmeds" always destroy the brain? And why do you think this "method" is superior to science?i will go one step further. ssri and any psychmed do always destroy the brain. long term using causes loss of personality traits and emotional flatlining. and please dont come with studies. i readed enough lectures to know that studies in general just can give ideas. they prove absolutely nothing. but you are such a science obsessed man that you wont understand my point anyway. youre defending meds on this forum so aggressively that i tend to believe that youre employed as marketing manager at pharma industries
That's probably an overstatement, but antidepressants surely don't work as well for depression as psychiatrists make them up. However much of the overprescribing of antidepressants isn't due to psychiatrists, but due to primary physicians. Just take a look into the german guideline for major depressive disorders and you will see that antidepressants are only regarded as obligatory for severe depression, where they outperform placebo. You also need to consider that antidepressants are not only taken for mental disorders, but for some organic ones as well, for example neuropathic pain.
Are you really sure that you can regard mental illness as "psychological illness"? This term would imply that you could understand mental illness solely on the base of psychology, so you completely restrict yourself on some kind of software layer. Unfortunately things are more complex than that and there is a myriad of evidence for biological factors at play in mental disorders, even when ties to psychosocial factors are particularly strong (e. g. post-traumatic stress disorder).
Apart from that the relationship between mental illness and past experiences might be more complicated than you think and transcend psychological boundaries. For example longterm stress is known to directly destroy neurons in the hippocampus, which is a brain region involved in memory and emotional experience. Indeed people with depression and trauma-based disorders often have a smaller hippocampus than healthy people and treatments like drugs and electroconvulsive therapy have been shown to increase the volume of the hippocampus.
Unfortunately that can happen as well and often does in depersonalization disorder (about 50% of all cases).
In the family of my sister in law most suffer from depression and have been taking antidepressants for many years. To me they appear normal and not emotionally restricted or unmotivated in any way and are able to function normally for the most part. In contrast her father has been depressed probably for decades and never received treatment up to now, but heavily self-medicated with alcohol instead. Apart from liver dysfunction and painful peripheral neuropathy he got esophageal cancer out of it. It's very likely that he will die in less than half a year. Antidepressants might have prevented that.
You see, anecdotal evidence can go either way.
1. Most human beings get ill out of nowhere at some point in their lives with an illness that is incurable or even fatal. Never heard of cancer or other causes of death?
2. Just because something is "natural" that doesn't mean it is good. If we lived "naturally", i. e. as cave men, with high likelihood you would have died as a baby.
3. "Damage" does not need to be bad. In surgery we also "damage" the body in some way in order to make it work better.
However you got a point with your claim that psychiatric drugs are more on the sedating side, which turns me to why depersonalization disorder is ignored.
This is a complex question to which nobody has a definite answer. Some scholars speculated about reasons for this situation, but none of them were really convincing. In my opinion the most likely reason is that each profession and by extension every medical speciality forms some kind subculture. This subculture determines which diseases and symptoms are taken seriously and given priority and which are ignored and minimized.
For example in ophtalmology the visus and the visual field are the most important things. This leads to eye diseases being ignored, which leave both of them intact, but can severely decrease quality of life by compromising other visual functions. The classic examples are floaters, dry eyes and higher order aberrations. Patients with those diseases are routinely ignored and belittled and treatment that could work for them is denied or not easily available, while at the same time refractive surgery (e. g. LASIK) is handed down without any medical indication, although it frequently causes floaters, dry eyes and higher order aberrations. The target of ophtalmology isn't to maximize quality of life, but to maximize visus. Obviously both targets are not orthogonal, but there are many cases, where they are not in accordance.
My idea is that psychiatry is also affected by such a bias towards certain symptoms at the expense of other equally distressing symptoms. In the case of psychiatry this chasm lies between positive and negative symptoms. Positive symptoms include patients with striking and eye-catching symptoms, for example sad depressives, insane psychotics, petrified catatonics, self-injuring borderliners and skeletonized anorectics or whatever you traditionally regard as "being crazy". Consequently many treatments in psychiatry sedate people down or help them to regulate their behavior more effectively, so that at least they look normal from the outside, but often at the price of reducing their capacity for normal emotional experience.
People with negative symptoms have lost mental functions, especially in terms of affectivity, so they include people with emotional numbness and depersonalization. But these symptoms are for the most part subjective and people are already calm and look normal. That's their misfortune, because now they are outside of psychiatry's loot scheme. The idea of "insanity" in psychiatry is of people delivering a show of profound objective behavioral abnormalities, but not of an disruption of their subjective inner world. That's the bitter irony: Many people with depersonalization disorder are afraid of getting crazy, but the fact that they are not "crazy" in the traditional sense is the reason why their disorder is not taken seriously.
It isn't "science" that is at fault here much in the same way a wrench isn't at fault, when you try to repair a toaster, but it breaks apart once you turn it on. Certain cultural values inside psychiatry prevent depersonalization disorder from getting the recognition it deserves. It's human error.
I'm explaining this as cognitive dissonance (you can look this up on Wikipedia):
1. They (unconsciously) consider patients who look normal as not worthy of suffering,
2. but are told by the patients that they are suffering nonetheless.
To resolve this cognitive dissonance they are throwing off what is harder to reconcile with their beliefs. And that is point (1) by diagnosing patients with a disorder that is worthy of suffering. And that is psychosis, because depersonalization can occur as a symptom of psychosis.
Many people with depression loose their jobs, family and marriage well before they ever see a psychiatrist. Psychiatry still has a heavy stigma and usually people see a psychiatrists years after their problems started.
The problem is they never really tried.
And how are they supposed to influence these "deep biographical-personal-psychological hurt and micro traumas"? Should they build a time machine to prevent you from experiencing them?
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it is so fucking obvious that youre tdx
one need just to compare your old posts with this one. its a shame that youre still able to post hereno the brain heals and recovers itself. even scars heals with time (had a very severe burning on my arm and the scar healed naturally after 10 years). they need to look on how the brain reacts to bullying, absence of love from mother, emotional unbearable pain. because all the answers for the most seen cause for dpd are the above mentioned. you can ask in this forum anyone. if depersonalization and derealization are both experienced chronic 1, patient has history of panic and anxiety 2, patient has history of emotional abuse in any form. i know from myself, it fits those two points completely.
anyways, science is just science because of beliefs. dont know if you did read enough philosophy. and i actually didnt say that science does not prove anything. in physics it is possible to experiment and observation. in chemistry as well. thats science. and even there you just have theories. einstein did disprove newton. but newtons theory was right until einstein disproved him. but studies done from random doctors has nothing to do with science at all.
Not all injury to the brain heals, just like not all injury to the body heals. The regenerative abilities of the body (and the brain) have their limits.
This has been done for many decades in both animal and human trials. It won't give all the answers, because after all a risk factor doesn't always lead to the same outcome and other, likely genetic, factors are at play, too.
Generally, observing the brain isn't that easy.
As I said, in many cases depersonalization is idiopathic or caused by drugs, which would be a biological insult. In addition, while several studies implicated psychosocial factors in depersonalization disorder, the relationship is far from clear-cut and consistent, just as the alleged relationship to anxiety.
And what tells you that the psychosocial factors even matter in the end, even when they could be proven to be the trigger in individual cases? For example stress promotes atherosclerosis, which in turn can lead to hypertension, heart disease and stroke. But addressing stress won't cure the disease, because the damage to blood vessels is permanent. You can't turn back the clock. In the same way many mental disorders might have an initial psychosocial trigger, but you can't cast them out psychosocially.
If science was "just about beliefs", then why is science so much more successful in understanding how the world actually works than, let's say, religion, which is in fact all about beliefs?
That would lead to the question where the difference is. Do you think experiments aren't possible with humans?
Moreover Newton's mechanics still works well outside extreme conditions (e. g. high velocities).
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the only thing what i can understand from your points is that i need to kill myself
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seriously so little hope and almost no reason to fight further
You are not alone in this situation and many people on this site and on Facebook share your fate. After all there are countless people with depersonalization disorder who have decades on records. For example in the book "7 Shrinks: 60 Years in an Undiagnosed Altered State" the author has been suffering for more than 60 years and nothing worked for her.
Unfortunately all proposed "solutions" seem to be unsatisfactory. Living normally and ignoring the symtoms is a mirage. It's simply impossible for many people, particularly the ones with affective and cognitive deficits and the majority, who tried this, was not getting any better.
Getting psychiatric treatment has a higher chance to work, because there are some treatments with varying degrees of evidence for their effectiveness. But it's all trial and error and the likelihood of ending up on the same spot where you started is quite high, even after having tried more than 20 drugs and even more after hundreds of hours of psychotherapy. Moreover there is a low, but not negligible chance to get worse from treatment, because all medical treatments have risks.
Something that hasn't been looked much into by sufferers of depersonalization disorder in regards to fighting is the target. Most sufferers appear to regard this as an internal problem. But maybe it would be more productive to target the external factors keeping depersonalization disorder from being recognized. Maybe sufferers should stop to fight themselves, but to fight the people who are undeniably responsible for their situation: The psychiatrists. People with depersonalization disorder might benefit from getting a lot more noisy and annoying to the public and especially to psychiatrists.
As I said above, part of the problem might be that people with depersonalization disorder are not crazy enough. Maybe they must become more crazy.
You make many good points, but I’m skeptical that this proposal is likely to achieve the desired result. Protesting / attacking those in charge doesn’t tend to work well in my view unless we already have significant institutional support. And it tends to be even worse when the people protesting have already been labeled as “mentally ill.”
I’m reminded of the Lyme Disease wars here in the United States especially. In the early years, Lyme patients who felt their issues were not being addressed protested the IDSA for their failures. And what was their response? To construct the diagnosis of PLDTS: Post-Lyme Disease Treatment Syndrome, which was conceptualized as a sort of Lyme-specific combination of hysteria and Munchausen Syndrome. This set back good research into the actual issues these people were suffering from for years.
I fear it will be too easy to dismiss our complaints. And based on some of your earlier posts, my biggest fear would be that those psychiatrists interpret our “getting crazy about things” as positive symptoms of our mental illness, justifying either coercive control, or simply ignoring us as crazy.
In my view, “acting crazy” or hostile mostly tends to just harden people’s current views, making them more extreme and less likely to come to our aid.
Perhaps this is a bit defeatist of me, but I don’t think we will find assistance in organic psychiatry regardless of how much we protest or ask politely, and I think you pointed out the reasons why earlier in this thread: psychiatry’s focus on positive over negative “symptoms.” Part of it is due to the reasons you presented, but I think a lot of has to do with what “positive” and “negative” actually mean in this context. According to psychiatric thinking, “positive symptoms” are behaviors or experiences that a person has that are undesirable, whereas “negative symptoms” represent a person’s complaint about a failure to experience or behave in a desirable way. It’s relatively easy to develop a drug that helps with the former, but much more difficult for the latter. If I have a kid who is just learning to play the saxophone and is just awful, I could develop a drug that effectively stops him from playing the saxophone. But I could not develop a drug that (reliably) makes him play the saxophone well.
I both agree and disagree with you here. I think your first paragraph hits the nail on the head, but in your second paragraph, you claim that it is not “science” that is the problem, but rather, human error.
I think that “science” is a huge part of the problem, and you told us why in the first paragraph. Psychiatry focuses so much on “positive symptoms” precisely because they can more easily define those problems according to objective, scientific criteria than they can with “negative symptoms,” which are more subjective experiences (or a lack thereof). However, even those so-called “objective” symptoms are not exactly viewed by psychiatry objectively. You yourself used the expression “behavioral abnormalities,” to describe these observations. Psychiatry also frequently uses terms like “dysfunctional behavior.” But these expressions prejudge what they ostensibly describe. Because all behavior has a function (that is, there is always a goal in mind), the term “dysfunctional behavior” is a scientific euphemism for “disapproved” or “undesirable.”
But all our behavior is ultimately the product of our inner (subjective) experiences too. This a problem I have with how psychiatrists, in their desire to be more scientific in their approach to their subject matter, have failed to offer a valid understanding of it. Consider the phenomenon called “akathesia.” Akathesia becomes objectively observable to the scientist when a person starts engaging in constantly moving his limbs. But these are not reflex movements or “dysfunctional behaviors.” These are actions that a person is performing in a (usually futile) attempt to relieve his subjective experience of inner restlessness. A similar analysis can be made with the facial movements characteristic of tardive dyskinesia. If we conceptualize the actions a person is doing as a disease (or as symptoms of a disease), then whatever effectively stops those movements will be seen, from the scientist’s perspective, as a treatment. And often, that treatment works by further hindering the body’s optimal functioning. I do think that leminaseri is making a valid point, though he often struggles to express himself well.
I take issue with the authoritarian way that we look at science in modern society, and nowhere is it more pernicious than in psychiatry, whose patients are often involuntarily treated or are otherwise people who are in extreme distress by appealing to the scientist’s supposed expertise about his patient’s innermost experiences of himself.
It has always been fairly clear to me that the key to understanding the phenomena we label as “mental illnesses” is predominantly semantic and teleological. Biology and other materialist aspects of a person’s environment certainly play a role, and for some people more so than others (after all, our “minds” are contingent on our structures). And I’m also not opposed to people using psych drugs if they find they help with their own self-defined problems. But I’m concerned that we readily accept the authority of science on such matters, and are expected to accept the proposition that positive science is always the best pathway to truth, thereby failing to even consider any other possible way to interpret and deal with these problems.
I dont know what you are talking about. Of course a lot of people's problems come from their past. Just because I think you are wrong about one point doesn't mean I think the exact opposite of you about absolutely everything. I am a victim of psychiatry and useless treatments myself and not being listen to and taken seriously. And sometimes it is even possible to agree with someone about the conclusion and still argue with them that their argument is wrong. That's what happens when you care about finding out what the truth is and not just defend an opinion. Maybe you are used to doing that, but I don't. So if I think that one of your arguments is incorrect that doesn't mean I am slyly trying to prove that pharmaceutical companies are philanthropists. The world is not divided between pro pharma and against pharma, it's not i am with you or against you.i will go one step further. ssri and any psychmed do always destroy the brain. long term using causes loss of personality traits and emotional flatlining. and please dont come with studies. i readed enough lectures to know that studies in general just can give ideas. they prove absolutely nothing. but you are such a science obsessed man that you wont understand my point anyway. youre defending meds on this forum so aggressively that i tend to believe that youre employed as marketing manager at pharma industries
edit: your points are always like this: if someone gets psychological ill, it doesnt have anything to do with the past of that person. childhood issues and long term stress doesnt do anything. we get ill out of the blue. every humanbeing on this planet gets ill out of nowhere and then they stay ill for the rest of their lifes and the only thing to live a normal live with it are fucking physically pills that changes (destroys) the natural way of how the brain is working and they seem to be normal because the meds are damping everything what your brain connects with your personality. i know 2 persons in real life one took 10+ years ssri and the other one 30+ years. both of them are such innerly empty and burned out. no excitement in anything no motivation. everything is just boring to them. and the sadest thing is, they dont notice that. they think its their normal or it is because they became older. now you will say „uhh bro just anectodal“. so if you think, that im telling here lies or bullshit, this is only because youre doing the same and expect from others they are doing the same as you. but no. if you just say „its anecdotal“ why should i believe anything you are posting here? are you a doctor? and even if you are a doctor. how did the fucking science world did it not to research a „disorder“ what was written down first time at 1850 by mayer gross? are they so fucking dumb that they misdiagnosed millions of people with psychosis and other bullshit? is this the science you trust in and believe? i will say to you something. the only reason why the pharma industry can produce fucktons of ssri and other antidepressant is because people who take them are actually healthy people who just try to not lose their job, family or marriage. this is why they make billions with antidepressants every year. when it comes to dpdr suddenly there is nothing they can offer because they know exactly that they cannot influence a deep biographical-personal-psychological hurt and micro traumas through a fucking physical pill
Here i am just saying that no, symptoms don't always get worse during the first days or weeks of treatment. I think that sometimes yes, and sometimes no. And to defend this opinion I need observations of people who get worse and observations of people who don't. And I do have them. I did get worse with some SSRI and not with some others. I can probably assume i have your account of getting worse, i have the testimony of a good friend who had zero side effects, my sister's testimony who had zero problem when she started. So so far my observations confirm that. Maybe there are scientific papers about that too, but let's talk only about personal experiences so that we are on the same level.
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im saying taking psych drugs is the same like cutting your leg with a saw because it is stuck under a car. it destroys certain parts of the brain so the symptoms can seem less to the patient.
So a bit like painkillers. Or you mean that SSRI's cause permanent damages to the brain. But this is a different topic, what we were talking about was if whether or not symptoms always get worse during the first weeks.
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okay master youre always right
My idea might have risks, I agree with that. On the other hand I don't see how the situation could be worse. There is virtually no research on depersonalization disorder and it is ignored by almost every psychiatrist. And there is no indication that this could change in the near future. In the last years a few patient organizations emerged, i. e. Unreal and IDS, but they are basically failures from the start. Unreal heavily pushes the "defence mechanism doctrine" of Elaine Hunter and IDS is merely a cash grab without a clear vision, founded by a former sufferer who lost every sense about what sufferers really need.
The situation you are describing about post-Lyme snydrome is even attempted to be established in Germany by Matthias Michal. He created a guideline for depersonalization disorder, where he made psychodynamic psychotherapy the treatment of choice for depersonalization disorder and effectively banned biological treatments. Even worse, he made mindfulness meditation a routine treatment, although there is ample evidence that it can cause depersonalization disorder. So patients acting up isn't required for a psychosomatic holocaust to happen. On the other hand massive patient opposition appears to help against psychosomatics, as can be seen in chronic fatigue syndrome.
I agree, this is a risk. However even the act of getting attention, even if it was negative attention, would likely prompt some psychiatrists to take things seriously, even if the majority did not. At the very least they could not claim not to know about depersonalization disorder anymore. It could still be a win, especially when one is starting from nothing and things are already turning into the wrong direction. Even if it wasn't optimal, it would still be better than nothing and the cargo cult of recovery by living normally and ignoring symptoms.
I do not agree with your characterization of negative symptoms being about high level functions. My impression is that negative symptoms are fairly low level, e. g. you can't feel. It's as simple as that. Most positive symptoms are much more difficult to define, like for example hallucinations or delusions.
My hypothesis is that positive symptom are not necessarily more amenable to the scientific method and that's why there were given more attention. I suppose that it's because they evoke strong emotional reactions on behalf of psychiatrists, leading to being nothing left of it for patients with mental disorders who do not offer a "show". That wouldn't be a failure of the scientific method, just like ophtalmologists minimizing floaters isn't due to science.
Moreover we already have drugs that sometimes work for depersonalization, like lamotrigine, naltrexone, clonazepam and clomipramine, which shows that depersonalization and possibly emotional numbness in general might not be so hard to treat after all. At least we would need the lack of interest to be removed and see how it goes prior to making definite judgements whether negative symptoms are really harder.
Actually I do not a priori exclude other approaches. But before considering them I would like to hear why they should be superior to science. So far I haven't seen any convincing arguments why they should be prefered for mental illness in general, depersonalization disorder in particular or much of anything else, especially since science apparently outperformed them all. The step from the middle ages to our modern life was achieved by science. Of course this sets the bar for alternative approaches very high.
Do you think you are wrong sometimes? Because it doesn't show.
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