Many People Taking Antidepressants Discover They Cannot Quit

Antidepressants and Withdrawal: Readers Tell Their Stories - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/health/antidepressants-withdrawal-readers.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/04/17/science/17SCI-ANTIDEPRESSANTS/17SCI-ANTIDEPRESSANTS-facebookJumbo.jpg

Their reasons for wanting to stop taking them were rooted in part in the understanding that antidepressants were supposed to be a short-term solution, a bridge over troubled waters. But by the mid-1990s, drug makers had convinced government regulators that when taken long-term, the medications sharply reduced the risk of relapse in people with chronic, recurrent depression.

Thus began the era of indefinite or open-ended prescribing, and not just for the most severe cases of depression. The change in practice roughly coincided with the promotion of the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression: Marketers and some researchers implied that antidepressants corrected deficits in brain levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter.

In truth, the theory has scant basis. No one knows the underlying biology of depression or any mood disorder. But that shift — along with a change in federal regulations, in 1997, allowing drug makers to advertise directly to consumers — helped undermine the stigma associated with depression and mood disorders generally.

#science_fictive