A 10 year study published in 2022 found use of any “antidepressant” increased all cause mortality by 86%(1).
This study replicates a meta-analysis which found that when adjusting for pre-medicated levels of depression the drugs increased all cause mortality by 49% for SSRI, 75% for other, and 26% for TCA’s.(1). This meta-analysis contained corporate funded studies and was of shorter duration.
The 2022 study contained over 220,000 people.
It contained several pro-drug biases/flaws such as:
1- excluded participants on “antidepressant” polytherapy
2- In figure 1 they show they excluded people who took “antipsychotics” after being exposed to “antidepressants.” Same with anyone who used “antimanic” drugs.
3- The baseline the 10 year study used occurred after 5 years of antidepressant use (table 1).
The study results were adjusted for these confounders:
“depression, age; gender; body mass index (BMI); waist/hip ratio; smoking and alcohol intake status; physical activity; parental history of outcome; biochemical and haematological biomarkers (apolipoproteins A and B, vitamin D, triglycerides, haemoglobin A1c); socioeconomic status (accommodation status, number of vehicles per household, employment status, benefits status, urban/rural status, education, household income) and self-reported long-term illness, disability or infirmity”
Results:
“evidence of a dose–response effect (Table 4) for all-cause mortality, with higher doses associated with an increased risk”
Table 3 results:
Use of any “antidepressant” increased mortality by 86% when using the 5 year baseline adjustments
Use of any antidepressant increased mortality by 223% when just the age and gender are adjusted for.
For comparison smoking tobacco increases all cause mortality by around 79%(3), and smokers generally have 10+ year shorter lifespans.
Another study that occurred in those 65 years and older replicated this new study(3).
These Oakchair pseudo-medical posts are tiresome. This one jumps from “association” to causation without explanation or justification. From the abstract of study 1: “Further research is needed to assess whether the observed associations are causal, and elucidate the underlying mechanisms.” In other words, this study does not, and indeed cannot, show causation.
Correlation is frequently the first step in cause discovery. The correlation between smoking and lung cancer (very strong) lead to further work which, proved, yes smoking causes lung cancer.
Effects as strong as this should lead to further investigations to prove that the correlation is spurious (Umbrellas cause rain). This is a warning sign.
Funny that the drug Cos don’t do that investigation. It’s like they know what they’d find.
Which Bradford Hill criteria for antidepressants causing increased mortality do people believe isn’t met?
It would be great if instead of posting ad hominems people simply engaged in the topic.
The increased suicide rates caused by antidepressants is if anything understated because “Only 56.8% of Serious Adverse events experienced by drug-treated partipcants were reported.”
Table 3 shows only 38% of deaths and half of suicide events were accurately reported. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/7/e005535.long
Likewise the harms of psych drugs are severally understated in the clinical trials because the “placebo” group is actually a group put into cold turkey or rapid drug withdrawal.
Imagine If Budweiser did a study that took people addicted to alcohol and put one group into cold turkey withdrawal, kept the other on beer and claimed alcohol addiction saves lives. We’d all laugh. Yet for some reason when pharma does it people act like pointing it out is “tiresome” “pseudo-science” https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/04/withdrawal-symptoms-routinely-confound-findings-psychiatric-drug-studies/
You can use sci-hub to get past most paywalls on scientific studies. https://sci-hub.se/
Last week I commented on the Naked Capitalism site cutting comments because of rancor and general churlishness among other things.
Ms Smith turned the spigot back on under the condition that people play nice, which I guess they’re doing, although I pretty much lost interest in the goings on over there.
I have no idea how long I’ve been plugged into Ian’s blog world, but it’s been a while. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that there’s more intolerance in comments these days.
I always thought that many here consider me a flippant bore and just skip over my prattle. That’s what I’d do with any thing that doesn’t resonate. All right, I might make a jab here and there, but with some degree of respect I hope.
Lately though it seems there’s a dwindling number of commenters who are willing to let things slide.
I dunno. It’s like having a persistent runny nose and scratchy throat. You can’t shake it and feel compelled to pass it around.
Just one person’s opinion.
Thank you. Thank you. And for my next act . . .
If you have a one-in-a-million risk of something and then you add something else which raises you to a 1.49-in-a-million risk of that something, you could say your risk of that something went up by 49%. But your overall risk is still close to one-in-a-million, which is to say, not materially different. And if you benefit from that other something, then you take that tiny increase in overall risk.
I have been ” in depression” withOUT anti-depressant meds and I have been “in depression” WITH anti-depressant meds. And I have found that life WITH sertraline in particular is better enough than life without it that I will accept the risks that come from using it to avoid the certainties of living without it.
I would invite all those who suggest that life in depression withOUT sertaline is better than life in depression WITH sertraline to figure out how to get themselves a genuine case of genuine depression and then live the rest of their life in that depression withOUT sertraline and withOUT any OTHer anti-depressant med as well.
We can then observe them at leisure over the course of their lives to see ” how that’s working out for them” ( in the deathless words of Doctor Phil).
Thinking about this development that Canada and Mexico now understand the US is not their friend, I wonder if we could hope for an end to NAFTA from this?
Catching up Judge Napolitano’s show. All of the episodes this week are sharp.
Saw where Buttigieg is contemplating a run for president. Is he delusional? Do these people learn nothing? If he loses it will be because the deplorables are homophobic of course.
Earth to Pete – this country is being convulsed by cruel and ominous things happening everywhere at disorienting speed, so your show pony, do-nothing posing is offensively clueless. We watched you be useless as head of DOT. We watched you get no support in the primary where you betrayed Bernie. Then we saw you get openly paid off for you shabby perfidy with a plum job at DOT.
Now you tell us you want to run for president. Back here on earth we just look at each other and wonder what you’re smoking.
mago – I read the post that Smith put up about why they suspended comments and what you are saying sort of lines up with what she was saying. Since Trump took office the mods over there are dealing with a significant spike in the number of coarse and intolerant comments they get . Welcome to our new normal these days I guess. Anyone not feeling edgy must not be paying attention.
diff clue – I have been lucky that any depression I’ve had hasn’t lingered. Because I fear it I pay attention to the things I do when I’m not depressed- even corn and rain dances if it helps. If the day came when the corn and rain dances didn’t work, I would do whatever it took to get out of that state. I know what it feels like and I live in fear of it . If you have something that keeps it at bay for you, congratulations.
I’ve been wondering, maybe all this five-one state thing is really only about big energy projects “must build more pipelines!!”, “mine more shit to appease the yanks”, and trippling our military expenditures.
Same oligark-puppetters whispering in t-rump and t-rew’s ears.
In which case, it’s going swimmingly. The little maple leaves on the grocery shelves (on imported white rice?!) is a nice touch.
–
@Mago You’re onto a little something, I think.
My take on it is that it’s a result of both the cumulative larger disruptions of society over the last while, and specifically the cognitive dissonace around the increasingly blatent bullshit messaging, contradicted by reality leaching out via social media.
Put the placebo group into rapid withdrawal, unblinded the participants, cherry pick the participants, use unblinded corporate employees to do the rating, miscode adverse events and still antidepressant manufacturers are unable to produce a study showing their drugs have a CLINICAL benefit.
Depressed people taking the drugs have been followed long term and compared with depressed people who don’t keep taking the drugs. The results are those taking the drugs end up with around 50% more depression and twice the disability rate.
I wonder what else could be done with the hundreds of billions spent yearly on those drugs?
“The Royal Armoured Corps has not been able to deploy a realistic Challenger 2 regiment of 59 tanks for many years. Lack of available Challenger 2s has meant that the army’s ambition for MBTs has been at the 20-25 level, at the very best.
When Denmark and Sweden have more credible tank forces than the United Kingdom, you know there’s an issue. And, as the Ukraine War has shown, tanks do have a major role, especially if a peacekeeping force were to be a credible deterrent.”
One of my good friend was a shrink. I asked him about anti-depressants maybe 10 years ago. He said they work short term, and he uses them to give people relief when they are in crisis, but his goal is to get them off them in 3 to 6 months at the outside.
He didn’t believe in long term use. Guy had very good academic credentials, kept up with the research and had worked in a research hospital most of his career.
He also pointed out, even back then, that supply lines are unreliable and that for many commonly used psychiatric drugs (not just anti-depressants) uncontrolled withdrawal is very nasty.
I’ve seen benzo withdrawal and that is horrible. The titration has to be done very slowly and can take as long as a year.
different clue, I was afflicted for years with I thought was severe depression. No drugs used as I tend to avoid medical intervention unless absolutely needed. Then, late in life, alas, I learned about CPTSD, and everything became clear. I suggest you might want to ask yourself, did you grow up in a family which was wildly dysfunctional, violence, alcoholism, general disorder, etc. or, like me, one in which one or both parents simply did not like you. The condition, I think of it as a mental disability, something one has to learn to live with, was discovered and named fairly recently, this century I think, because therapists began noticing that their patients were reporting variations on my parent(s) simply did not like me.
Mary Bennet – CPTSD – me too! Hated and gaslit by mother from day I was born. Only learned about CPTSD recently and what a relief. Finally have an analysis and a name for a lifetime of social dysfunction. Friends told me that when mom died I would feel like an orphan. Instead, after she passed, I felt safe for the first time in my life.
The most damaging problem with CPTSD as I see it, is that it badly injures the sense of self and a whole slew of problems come out of that, especially if it occurs at an early age.
I would not be surprised if almost all CPTSD is due to early life abuse and the most damaging of it might be emotional/psychological abuse because the sufferer doesn’t see it being done to them, like they would if someone was physically hitting them, and they tend to internalize it and think that it’s them that is the problem. When you get emotionally abused at such an early age, your sense of self develops around it and you don’t recognize that you have been damaged and often don’t believe that there is any help for you.
I’d imagine that a lot of CPTSD is caused by narcissistic parents and/or parents who take amphetamines. The thing about amphetamines is that the users are sometimes highly functioning, it’s hard to detect … especially for a child, and everyday it’s the same show all over again and they never seem to learn anything from their mistakes and mature. Also, they are so amped up that it causes their kids to be anxious and live on edge because of it.
I suspect that there is going to be an epidemic of CPTSD from the offspring of the Millennials and Gen Z with their cellphone addictions and widespread amphetamine use. Mind you, that there was a lot of amphetamine use by parents in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, as well, but back then there weren’t any computers or cellphones and it was more possible for kids to develop bonds with other kids through person to person interactions and develop a healthy sense of self and esteem from that.
I also would not be surprised, partly due to ecological and economic breakdown as well as widespread CPTSD, if there is a great growth in communal living in ten to twenty years with people seeking a sense of community and security outside of the family to salve what they didn’t get from their families growing up.
–
Used to edit some work for a guy who was on anti-depressants. It gave me a big-time headache. From editing his work, I could see how his anti-depressants worked: they didn’t allow him to dwell on anything. Every eight words or so, his writing would slightly go off canter from the meaning and drive of the previous 8 or so words and I would have to drag it back into line to make it cohesive with what he had previously written.
I think probably the reason that the psychological problems that come from CPTSD are, in fact, complex is because the damage is done so early in life to the “self” and your emotional and psychological development gnarls around that damaged sense of self. Essentially, the structural foundation of your “self” is badly damaged and everything develops upon that faulty foundation.
With early age emotional/psychological abuse you also don’t have the serenity and calmness of security growing up so you develop a larger range of emotions because the fear/anxieties you feel at an early age … and the stresses from your inability to deal with the causes of it, which are most often abusive parents who do not care enough about you and way, way too much about themselves … and this acts as an amplifier to your emotions so your emotions are “over-excited”. This often also amplifies the problems that emanate from your damaged sense of self in interpersonal relationships because of how you react to stresses in those relationships. Which is why, I’d imagine, that a lot of folks with CPTSD become loners: it’s less stressful for them to be alone than to deal with people.
You pretty much nailed it Z. I was taught that anything I thought or felt was awful because it was coming from me. It was crippling. Since then I’ve had a lifetime to do the work it took to heal myself, but even now as I sit here in old age, I only feel safe if I am alone.
Nice misdirection, Z. My parents took no drugs except the occasional aspirin, used no tobacco or alcohol, not even coffee. By all means let us not cast aspersions on the iconic intact two-parent family. A psychotherapist I once consulted, very smart man who had a lot of good ideas, was unable to diagnose my condition because his evangelical ideology left him unable to understand that certain kinds of families can literally damage their offspring. Maybe you should look up narcistic families before you hold forth on matters you clearly do not understand.
My my, a little sensitive, are we? What would be my motivation to misdirect? Am I trying to sell my services here?
Anyway, I feel qualified to share my theories on anything.
First of all, read this, which came from what I wrote:
I’d imagine that a lot of CPTSD is caused by narcissistic parents and/or parents who take amphetamines.
And I don’t know how much clearer I have to be that these are merely my opinions when I pepper these qualifiers throughout what I wrote: “as I see it”, “I would not be surprised if”, “I’d imagine that”, “I suspect that”, “I also would not be surprised”, “I think probably”.
Whoo hoo hoo
After reading this thread
I feel justified in what i said above although
Nobody’s gonna remember or look at it.
Whistling past the graveyard. . . .
mago – I hadn’t noticed until you made the point but, yeah. Folks are edgy and the good part is that we feel this way because we are paying attention and have a clue, in our respective ways.
Z – I wondered about the amphetamine thing too, because those are train-wreck, junkie, hyper-destructive things. So the idea that a generation of parents were scarfing them up like cocktails makes me want to hear more background.
beyond that, I was offended by your remark to mago
Hi Z. Mockery is unbecoming.
I don’t know what your handle Z signifies, but if your last name begins with zet, it explains something.
The Zepps and Zach’s always got called last in the classroom and usually developed a lasting complex as a result.
Psychologizing is not my thing however since I was married to a psychotherapist for 25 years or so.
I usually enjoy your comments by the way and am only mildly bemused by your jab. Kinda high school of you, but that’s the world in which we live.
Beyond the general societal disruptions of the last while, something that is specifically new is having a sub-class of people being publicaly shit on by people and institutions of importance.
full on officially sanctioned othering.
“Let them die. I honestly don’t care if they die from COVID. Not even a little bit. Unvaccinated patients do not deserve ICU beds. At this point, who cares. Stick the unvaccinated in a tent outside and tend to them when the staff has time.”
I wondered about the amphetamine thing too, because those are train-wreck, junkie, hyper-destructive things.
I do not necessarily believe that amphetamines are always “train-wreck, junkie, hyper-destructive things”, I just know that they can be to some extent because I had a parent who was addicted to them … which I didn’t know at the time because he was very functional … as well as a narcissistic parent (the other member of the demolition duo who I got cursed with as parents and who very well may have been on amphetamines herself – or “diet pills”, as I’m sure she would have told herself since she thought of herself as being far, far above drug abuse).
Oakchair
A 10 year study published in 2022 found use of any “antidepressant” increased all cause mortality by 86%(1).
This study replicates a meta-analysis which found that when adjusting for pre-medicated levels of depression the drugs increased all cause mortality by 49% for SSRI, 75% for other, and 26% for TCA’s.(1). This meta-analysis contained corporate funded studies and was of shorter duration.
The 2022 study contained over 220,000 people.
It contained several pro-drug biases/flaws such as:
1- excluded participants on “antidepressant” polytherapy
2- In figure 1 they show they excluded people who took “antipsychotics” after being exposed to “antidepressants.” Same with anyone who used “antimanic” drugs.
3- The baseline the 10 year study used occurred after 5 years of antidepressant use (table 1).
The study results were adjusted for these confounders:
“depression, age; gender; body mass index (BMI); waist/hip ratio; smoking and alcohol intake status; physical activity; parental history of outcome; biochemical and haematological biomarkers (apolipoproteins A and B, vitamin D, triglycerides, haemoglobin A1c); socioeconomic status (accommodation status, number of vehicles per household, employment status, benefits status, urban/rural status, education, household income) and self-reported long-term illness, disability or infirmity”
Results:
“evidence of a dose–response effect (Table 4) for all-cause mortality, with higher doses associated with an increased risk”
Table 3 results:
Use of any “antidepressant” increased mortality by 86% when using the 5 year baseline adjustments
Use of any antidepressant increased mortality by 223% when just the age and gender are adjusted for.
For comparison smoking tobacco increases all cause mortality by around 79%(3), and smokers generally have 10+ year shorter lifespans.
Another study that occurred in those 65 years and older replicated this new study(3).
(1) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article/antidepressant-use-and-risk-of-adverse-outcomes-populationbased-cohort-study/6AAA6943E55F8B08DD9E25155E72931F
(2) https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/10/antidepressants-increase-risk-death-study-finds/
(3) https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d4551
(4) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9150905/
Senator-Elect
These Oakchair pseudo-medical posts are tiresome. This one jumps from “association” to causation without explanation or justification. From the abstract of study 1: “Further research is needed to assess whether the observed associations are causal, and elucidate the underlying mechanisms.” In other words, this study does not, and indeed cannot, show causation.
Scientific papers can throw up all kinds of results, and it takes expertise to read them and tell the gold from the iron pyrite. I enjoyed this Eric Topol interview of Christopher Labos on nutrition studies: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/christopher-labos-debunking-myths?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
marku52
Correlation is frequently the first step in cause discovery. The correlation between smoking and lung cancer (very strong) lead to further work which, proved, yes smoking causes lung cancer.
Effects as strong as this should lead to further investigations to prove that the correlation is spurious (Umbrellas cause rain). This is a warning sign.
Funny that the drug Cos don’t do that investigation. It’s like they know what they’d find.
Oakchair
Which Bradford Hill criteria for antidepressants causing increased mortality do people believe isn’t met?
It would be great if instead of posting ad hominems people simply engaged in the topic.
“The suicide rate was higher in the antidepressant than in the placebo group (OR = 2.83”
That is the corporations own clinical trials
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333987755_Newer-Generation_Antidepressants_and_Suicide_Risk_in_Randomized_Controlled_Trials_A_Re-Analysis_of_the_FDA_Database
The increased suicide rates caused by antidepressants is if anything understated because “Only 56.8% of Serious Adverse events experienced by drug-treated partipcants were reported.”
Table 3 shows only 38% of deaths and half of suicide events were accurately reported.
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/7/e005535.long
Likewise the harms of psych drugs are severally understated in the clinical trials because the “placebo” group is actually a group put into cold turkey or rapid drug withdrawal.
Imagine If Budweiser did a study that took people addicted to alcohol and put one group into cold turkey withdrawal, kept the other on beer and claimed alcohol addiction saves lives. We’d all laugh. Yet for some reason when pharma does it people act like pointing it out is “tiresome” “pseudo-science”
https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/04/withdrawal-symptoms-routinely-confound-findings-psychiatric-drug-studies/
You can use sci-hub to get past most paywalls on scientific studies.
https://sci-hub.se/
mago
Last week I commented on the Naked Capitalism site cutting comments because of rancor and general churlishness among other things.
Ms Smith turned the spigot back on under the condition that people play nice, which I guess they’re doing, although I pretty much lost interest in the goings on over there.
I have no idea how long I’ve been plugged into Ian’s blog world, but it’s been a while. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that there’s more intolerance in comments these days.
I always thought that many here consider me a flippant bore and just skip over my prattle. That’s what I’d do with any thing that doesn’t resonate. All right, I might make a jab here and there, but with some degree of respect I hope.
Lately though it seems there’s a dwindling number of commenters who are willing to let things slide.
I dunno. It’s like having a persistent runny nose and scratchy throat. You can’t shake it and feel compelled to pass it around.
Just one person’s opinion.
Thank you. Thank you. And for my next act . . .
different clue
If you have a one-in-a-million risk of something and then you add something else which raises you to a 1.49-in-a-million risk of that something, you could say your risk of that something went up by 49%. But your overall risk is still close to one-in-a-million, which is to say, not materially different. And if you benefit from that other something, then you take that tiny increase in overall risk.
I have been ” in depression” withOUT anti-depressant meds and I have been “in depression” WITH anti-depressant meds. And I have found that life WITH sertraline in particular is better enough than life without it that I will accept the risks that come from using it to avoid the certainties of living without it.
I would invite all those who suggest that life in depression withOUT sertaline is better than life in depression WITH sertraline to figure out how to get themselves a genuine case of genuine depression and then live the rest of their life in that depression withOUT sertraline and withOUT any OTHer anti-depressant med as well.
We can then observe them at leisure over the course of their lives to see ” how that’s working out for them” ( in the deathless words of Doctor Phil).
someofparts
Thinking about this development that Canada and Mexico now understand the US is not their friend, I wonder if we could hope for an end to NAFTA from this?
Catching up Judge Napolitano’s show. All of the episodes this week are sharp.
someofparts
Saw where Buttigieg is contemplating a run for president. Is he delusional? Do these people learn nothing? If he loses it will be because the deplorables are homophobic of course.
Earth to Pete – this country is being convulsed by cruel and ominous things happening everywhere at disorienting speed, so your show pony, do-nothing posing is offensively clueless. We watched you be useless as head of DOT. We watched you get no support in the primary where you betrayed Bernie. Then we saw you get openly paid off for you shabby perfidy with a plum job at DOT.
Now you tell us you want to run for president. Back here on earth we just look at each other and wonder what you’re smoking.
someofparts
mago – I read the post that Smith put up about why they suspended comments and what you are saying sort of lines up with what she was saying. Since Trump took office the mods over there are dealing with a significant spike in the number of coarse and intolerant comments they get . Welcome to our new normal these days I guess. Anyone not feeling edgy must not be paying attention.
someofparts
diff clue – I have been lucky that any depression I’ve had hasn’t lingered. Because I fear it I pay attention to the things I do when I’m not depressed- even corn and rain dances if it helps. If the day came when the corn and rain dances didn’t work, I would do whatever it took to get out of that state. I know what it feels like and I live in fear of it . If you have something that keeps it at bay for you, congratulations.
capelin
I’ve been wondering, maybe all this five-one state thing is really only about big energy projects “must build more pipelines!!”, “mine more shit to appease the yanks”, and trippling our military expenditures.
Same oligark-puppetters whispering in t-rump and t-rew’s ears.
In which case, it’s going swimmingly. The little maple leaves on the grocery shelves (on imported white rice?!) is a nice touch.
–
@Mago You’re onto a little something, I think.
My take on it is that it’s a result of both the cumulative larger disruptions of society over the last while, and specifically the cognitive dissonace around the increasingly blatent bullshit messaging, contradicted by reality leaching out via social media.
Oakchair
Put the placebo group into rapid withdrawal, unblinded the participants, cherry pick the participants, use unblinded corporate employees to do the rating, miscode adverse events and still antidepressant manufacturers are unable to produce a study showing their drugs have a CLINICAL benefit.
Depressed people taking the drugs have been followed long term and compared with depressed people who don’t keep taking the drugs. The results are those taking the drugs end up with around 50% more depression and twice the disability rate.
I wonder what else could be done with the hundreds of billions spent yearly on those drugs?
https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/03/do-antidepressants-work-a-peoples-review-of-the-evidence/
Poul
State of the British Army: Five Argentinians in a row boat can take the Falklands.
https://archive.vn/qsHKn
“The Royal Armoured Corps has not been able to deploy a realistic Challenger 2 regiment of 59 tanks for many years. Lack of available Challenger 2s has meant that the army’s ambition for MBTs has been at the 20-25 level, at the very best.
When Denmark and Sweden have more credible tank forces than the United Kingdom, you know there’s an issue. And, as the Ukraine War has shown, tanks do have a major role, especially if a peacekeeping force were to be a credible deterrent.”
GrimJim
How deep does the military purge go?
Are they purging anyone associated with DEI, down to the lowest recruits?
What’s happening to all the immigrants who joined up to work toward citizenship?
More importantly, how many officers are getting their papers?
The new CJC is a Christofasciststrsight out if the AFA. The kind of guy we were all warned about years ago.
How long till the new crop of MAGAt stormtroopers get through Boot and AIT?
The final countdown begins then…
Ian Welsh
One of my good friend was a shrink. I asked him about anti-depressants maybe 10 years ago. He said they work short term, and he uses them to give people relief when they are in crisis, but his goal is to get them off them in 3 to 6 months at the outside.
He didn’t believe in long term use. Guy had very good academic credentials, kept up with the research and had worked in a research hospital most of his career.
He also pointed out, even back then, that supply lines are unreliable and that for many commonly used psychiatric drugs (not just anti-depressants) uncontrolled withdrawal is very nasty.
I’ve seen benzo withdrawal and that is horrible. The titration has to be done very slowly and can take as long as a year.
Mary Bennet
different clue, I was afflicted for years with I thought was severe depression. No drugs used as I tend to avoid medical intervention unless absolutely needed. Then, late in life, alas, I learned about CPTSD, and everything became clear. I suggest you might want to ask yourself, did you grow up in a family which was wildly dysfunctional, violence, alcoholism, general disorder, etc. or, like me, one in which one or both parents simply did not like you. The condition, I think of it as a mental disability, something one has to learn to live with, was discovered and named fairly recently, this century I think, because therapists began noticing that their patients were reporting variations on my parent(s) simply did not like me.
someofparts
Mary Bennet – CPTSD – me too! Hated and gaslit by mother from day I was born. Only learned about CPTSD recently and what a relief. Finally have an analysis and a name for a lifetime of social dysfunction. Friends told me that when mom died I would feel like an orphan. Instead, after she passed, I felt safe for the first time in my life.
someofparts
https://www.commondreams.org/news/bernie-sanders-donald-trump
Check out the crowds and the enthusiasm.
Z
The most damaging problem with CPTSD as I see it, is that it badly injures the sense of self and a whole slew of problems come out of that, especially if it occurs at an early age.
I would not be surprised if almost all CPTSD is due to early life abuse and the most damaging of it might be emotional/psychological abuse because the sufferer doesn’t see it being done to them, like they would if someone was physically hitting them, and they tend to internalize it and think that it’s them that is the problem. When you get emotionally abused at such an early age, your sense of self develops around it and you don’t recognize that you have been damaged and often don’t believe that there is any help for you.
I’d imagine that a lot of CPTSD is caused by narcissistic parents and/or parents who take amphetamines. The thing about amphetamines is that the users are sometimes highly functioning, it’s hard to detect … especially for a child, and everyday it’s the same show all over again and they never seem to learn anything from their mistakes and mature. Also, they are so amped up that it causes their kids to be anxious and live on edge because of it.
I suspect that there is going to be an epidemic of CPTSD from the offspring of the Millennials and Gen Z with their cellphone addictions and widespread amphetamine use. Mind you, that there was a lot of amphetamine use by parents in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, as well, but back then there weren’t any computers or cellphones and it was more possible for kids to develop bonds with other kids through person to person interactions and develop a healthy sense of self and esteem from that.
I also would not be surprised, partly due to ecological and economic breakdown as well as widespread CPTSD, if there is a great growth in communal living in ten to twenty years with people seeking a sense of community and security outside of the family to salve what they didn’t get from their families growing up.
–
Used to edit some work for a guy who was on anti-depressants. It gave me a big-time headache. From editing his work, I could see how his anti-depressants worked: they didn’t allow him to dwell on anything. Every eight words or so, his writing would slightly go off canter from the meaning and drive of the previous 8 or so words and I would have to drag it back into line to make it cohesive with what he had previously written.
Z
Z
I think probably the reason that the psychological problems that come from CPTSD are, in fact, complex is because the damage is done so early in life to the “self” and your emotional and psychological development gnarls around that damaged sense of self. Essentially, the structural foundation of your “self” is badly damaged and everything develops upon that faulty foundation.
With early age emotional/psychological abuse you also don’t have the serenity and calmness of security growing up so you develop a larger range of emotions because the fear/anxieties you feel at an early age … and the stresses from your inability to deal with the causes of it, which are most often abusive parents who do not care enough about you and way, way too much about themselves … and this acts as an amplifier to your emotions so your emotions are “over-excited”. This often also amplifies the problems that emanate from your damaged sense of self in interpersonal relationships because of how you react to stresses in those relationships. Which is why, I’d imagine, that a lot of folks with CPTSD become loners: it’s less stressful for them to be alone than to deal with people.
Z
someofparts
You pretty much nailed it Z. I was taught that anything I thought or felt was awful because it was coming from me. It was crippling. Since then I’ve had a lifetime to do the work it took to heal myself, but even now as I sit here in old age, I only feel safe if I am alone.
Mary Bennet
Nice misdirection, Z. My parents took no drugs except the occasional aspirin, used no tobacco or alcohol, not even coffee. By all means let us not cast aspersions on the iconic intact two-parent family. A psychotherapist I once consulted, very smart man who had a lot of good ideas, was unable to diagnose my condition because his evangelical ideology left him unable to understand that certain kinds of families can literally damage their offspring. Maybe you should look up narcistic families before you hold forth on matters you clearly do not understand.
bruce wilder
President Krasnov.
It never gets old, does it?
Z
Mary,
My my, a little sensitive, are we? What would be my motivation to misdirect? Am I trying to sell my services here?
Anyway, I feel qualified to share my theories on anything.
First of all, read this, which came from what I wrote:
And I don’t know how much clearer I have to be that these are merely my opinions when I pepper these qualifiers throughout what I wrote: “as I see it”, “I would not be surprised if”, “I’d imagine that”, “I suspect that”, “I also would not be surprised”, “I think probably”.
Z
mago
Whoo hoo hoo
After reading this thread
I feel justified in what i said above although
Nobody’s gonna remember or look at it.
Whistling past the graveyard. . . .
Z
mago,
Oh boy! Oh wow! Woo woo wooo!
You’re a prophet! There’s an argument on the internet!
Everyone’s whistling past the graveyard! Tee hee hee …
Z
someofparts
mago – I hadn’t noticed until you made the point but, yeah. Folks are edgy and the good part is that we feel this way because we are paying attention and have a clue, in our respective ways.
Z – I wondered about the amphetamine thing too, because those are train-wreck, junkie, hyper-destructive things. So the idea that a generation of parents were scarfing them up like cocktails makes me want to hear more background.
beyond that, I was offended by your remark to mago
mago
Hi Z. Mockery is unbecoming.
I don’t know what your handle Z signifies, but if your last name begins with zet, it explains something.
The Zepps and Zach’s always got called last in the classroom and usually developed a lasting complex as a result.
Psychologizing is not my thing however since I was married to a psychotherapist for 25 years or so.
I usually enjoy your comments by the way and am only mildly bemused by your jab. Kinda high school of you, but that’s the world in which we live.
capelin
Beyond the general societal disruptions of the last while, something that is specifically new is having a sub-class of people being publicaly shit on by people and institutions of importance.
full on officially sanctioned othering.
“Let them die. I honestly don’t care if they die from COVID. Not even a little bit. Unvaccinated patients do not deserve ICU beds. At this point, who cares. Stick the unvaccinated in a tent outside and tend to them when the staff has time.”
https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/TorontoStar.jpeg
Also echoed by our illustrious leader, “… how long do we tolerate these people.”
There were others that are othered, of course, but this is an unusual licence, and it bleeds to the larger discourse.
Makes the shit-on group to crankier, too.
Z
someofparts,
I do not necessarily believe that amphetamines are always “train-wreck, junkie, hyper-destructive things”, I just know that they can be to some extent because I had a parent who was addicted to them … which I didn’t know at the time because he was very functional … as well as a narcissistic parent (the other member of the demolition duo who I got cursed with as parents and who very well may have been on amphetamines herself – or “diet pills”, as I’m sure she would have told herself since she thought of herself as being far, far above drug abuse).
Z
Curt Kastens
Any deal that Russia makes with the west, or the US, is a bad deal for Russia.