Mood-altering drugs (a la depression meds, etc.) – yay or nay? If nay then what?

Mood-altering drugs (a la depression meds, etc.) – yay or nay? If nay then what? –@cseidholz

Several issues: One is that clinical depression is a real physical disease and does require drugs. However, there is a severe problem.

“Depression” is a very loose, umbrella term. Does it mean “anxiety”? Or “eating disorder”? Or “post-traumatic stress syndrome?” Or ADD, ADHD, traditional clinical depression, etc.

And for each one of these things (and a dozen more) a different drug works and the rest of the drugs don’t work and can, in fact, make you worse. For instance, some anti-depressants can make you feel suicidal if you are not technically depressed.

On average it takes eight years for a depressed patient to discover which drug works for them. There have been various tests that have shown this.

I’m biased on this topic because  I’m invested in a company that solves this problem (so have learned a lot of the problems in the industry), CNS Response. They have 10,000 EEGs in a database. Each of the 10,000 is of a patient who was successfully diagnosed and treated.

Then, with a new patient, they match the new patient’s EEG with the database to determine the right treatment. It’s remarkably effective according to statistical tests done.