Mania and Depression

It surprises me that the official psychiatry makes a philosophical distinction between the states of mania and depression, while it is quite obvious to me that the two are one and the same. That is to say, the similarity between them is wide and profound, while the apparent difference is only a superficial nuance.

Let us consider a traffic light as an example. When it is red, it is very different from when it is green. But think about all the forces in background that are responsible for the traffic light operation. The power plant that provides electricity, the cables that conduct it, the engineering of the light bulb, the physics of light and the physiology of vision, as well as the philosophy of the city traffic and its regulation - all are absolutely the same in both states, and what is different is only the position of a small relay on the very surface of the process.

In exactly the same way, both mania and depression stem from one common background force, and the difference is only in the way a person reacts to it. When a big black cloud starts to cover the sky and nothing seems to matter anymore, some people succumb to it and halt all activity; others choose to run away from it in denial, putting on a tremendous buffoonery of omnipotence and invulnerability. Sooner or later they are exhausted and the cloud gets them.

That is why there is depression without mania, but there is never mania without depression. That is why the symptomatic treatment of both is bound to be inefficient. What we have to deal with is the black cloud. And to deal with our patients’, we first have to come to terms with our own…

Prozac As Good As Placebo

In a PLoS Medicine article, a British professor Irving Kirsch and his colleagues have reported that the antidepressant drugs like Prozac are not more efficient then placebo in the treatment of depression.

The authors have gained access to, and analyzed the data from the unpublished trials of these medications.

Even before that, according to the most optimistic data from the published studies, the drug and placebo response rates were around 50% and 40% respectively. Now when the unpublished studies are taken into account, it turns out (perhaps not surprisingly) that the drug-placebo difference is almost non-existent.

A Guardian article comments on this more extensively, and describes some drug producers's reaction to these findings.

Depression Meds

There was a guy at a party the other day, who worked for a pharmaceutical company. He said: "Imagine that! They try to sue our company claiming that one of its medications for depression causes suicides. I mean, how stupid is that? They are already depressive, we try to help them, and then they sue us!"

A very nice interpretation, I thought. He had a PhD, and he didn't have a clue. I wonder, do at least the CEOs of the pharmaceutical companies know what they are doing?