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Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Que Bicho Somos???
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
AGRADEÇO A VOCÊ POR EXISTIR EM MINHA VIDA!
FICO MUITO FELIZ, QUANDO ABRO O MEU BLOG E ENCONTRO,
TANTOS COMENTÁRIOS LINDOS E MARAVILHOSOS.
ESSA REALMENTE É UMA CORRENTE DE AMIGOS.
VEJO O CARINHO, QUE AS PESSOAS DEIXAM AQUI.
ELAS PASSAM A FAZER PARTE DE NOSSAS VIDAS, NUM PASSO DE MÁGICA.
AGRADE ESTE MOMENTO LINDO E BELO QUE ESTOU VIVENDO.
TER MAIS 100 SEGUIDORES E TER QUASE MIL VEZES MAIS DE COMENTÁRIOS,
É TER A CERTEZA QUE UM BOM TRABALHO SE FAZ.
QUE A CONQUISTA DE UM NOVO AMIGO, REALMENTE,
UMA NOVA CONQUISTA.
CADA UM DE VOCÊS QUE ESTÃO AQUI E AGORA, SÃO MINHAS PÉROLAS.
MEUS TESOUROS, ESCONDIDOS DENTRO DE CADA COMENTÁRIO AQUI DEIXADO.
DENTRO DE CADA FRASE AQUI POSTADA.
MUITO OBRIGADA PELO SEU CARINHO E PELA SUA TERNURA.
QUE DEUS PERMITA SEMPRE CONTINUAR NESTA CORRENTE DE AMIZADE.
OBRIGADA AMIGO POR VOCÊ EXISTIR EM MINHA VIDA.
ESTE SELO É ESPECIAL PARA VOCÊ.
UM CORAÇÃO FEITO COM MUITO AMOR PARA VOCÊ!
MUITA PAZ E AMOR.
AGRADEÇO A SUA AMIZADE.
COM TODO O MEU CARINHO.
TANTOS COMENTÁRIOS LINDOS E MARAVILHOSOS.
ESSA REALMENTE É UMA CORRENTE DE AMIGOS.
VEJO O CARINHO, QUE AS PESSOAS DEIXAM AQUI.
ELAS PASSAM A FAZER PARTE DE NOSSAS VIDAS, NUM PASSO DE MÁGICA.
AGRADE ESTE MOMENTO LINDO E BELO QUE ESTOU VIVENDO.
TER MAIS 100 SEGUIDORES E TER QUASE MIL VEZES MAIS DE COMENTÁRIOS,
É TER A CERTEZA QUE UM BOM TRABALHO SE FAZ.
QUE A CONQUISTA DE UM NOVO AMIGO, REALMENTE,
UMA NOVA CONQUISTA.
CADA UM DE VOCÊS QUE ESTÃO AQUI E AGORA, SÃO MINHAS PÉROLAS.
MEUS TESOUROS, ESCONDIDOS DENTRO DE CADA COMENTÁRIO AQUI DEIXADO.
DENTRO DE CADA FRASE AQUI POSTADA.
MUITO OBRIGADA PELO SEU CARINHO E PELA SUA TERNURA.
QUE DEUS PERMITA SEMPRE CONTINUAR NESTA CORRENTE DE AMIZADE.
OBRIGADA AMIGO POR VOCÊ EXISTIR EM MINHA VIDA.
ESTE SELO É ESPECIAL PARA VOCÊ.
UM CORAÇÃO FEITO COM MUITO AMOR PARA VOCÊ!
MUITA PAZ E AMOR.
AGRADEÇO A SUA AMIZADE.
COM TODO O MEU CARINHO.
Monday, July 13, 2009
UM MOMENTO ESPECIAL.
ESTE MOMENTO MERECE SER COMEMORADO COM UMA BELA E GOSTOSA FATIA DE BOLO.
POIS CONSEGUIR CHEGAR AOS 100 SEGUIDORES É UMA HONRA. MERECE MUITA DEDICAÇÃO E CONQUISTAS.
SEI QUE, ME DEDIQUEI MUITO PARA CHEGAR ATÉ AQUI.
MAS COM A AJUDA DE ALGUMAS PESSOAS MARAVILHOSA, ESTE BLOG FICOU MUITO CHIQUE E MERECEDOR DESSE SELO. É PARA CADA UM DE VOCÊS, QUE DEDICO ESTE SELO E ESTA FATIA DE BOLO.
SINTAM-SE EM CASA E VAMOS COMEMORAR.
AGRADEÇO IMENSAMENTE A MARCIA DE MEUS PENSAMENTOS, POR TER FICADO SEMPRE DO MEU LADO, NOS MOMENTOS DE CONSTRUÇÃO DESSE BLOG.
A PRIMEIRA FATIA DESSE BOLO AMIGA... VAI PARA VOCÊ.
O SEGUNDO PEDAÇO VAI PARA VOCÊ ANA DO BLOG, PELOS CAMINHOS VIDA.
TODO ESTE CARINHO VAI PARA VOCÊ, QUE CAMINHA TODOS OS DIAS COMIGO!!!!
FICO MUITO FELIZ COM A SUA PRESENÇA.
ESTE SONHO SÓ FOI POSSÍVEL COM A AJUDA DE CADA UM QUE TRILHA ESTE CAMINHO.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
SELO 100
CURIOSA HOJE ESTA EM FESTA.
GANHOU A SUA 100 SEGUIDORA.
GANHOU A SUA 100 SEGUIDORA.
O BLOG DA CURIOSA PRESENTEIA A CIRCE DE ARAUJO
DO BLOG. TEORIA DA COMUNICAÇÃO, PELOS OS SEUS 100 SEGUIDORES.
PARABÉNS AMIGA.
FOSSE A GRANDE SORTUDA DO SELO.
ESTOU MUITO FELIZ!!! ESTE PREMIO É SEU TAMBÉM, MEUS QUERIDOS SEGUIDORES:
DO BLOG. TEORIA DA COMUNICAÇÃO, PELOS OS SEUS 100 SEGUIDORES.
PARABÉNS AMIGA.
FOSSE A GRANDE SORTUDA DO SELO.
ESTOU MUITO FELIZ!!! ESTE PREMIO É SEU TAMBÉM, MEUS QUERIDOS SEGUIDORES:
Saturday, July 11, 2009
O INVRIVEL E INESPERADO...
Pois é, após mais dois dias sem o meu computador, voltei quem sabe agora sem nenhum problema mais espero.
Por este motivo aindei afatadas dos comentários e das visitas de vocês.
Estava sempre usando o da minha visinha.
Mas o que realmente eu quero dizer é o seguinte:
Passando pelo Blog da Gi. eu li uma linda postagem que falava sobre família.
E foi impulsionada nisso, que resolvi, então falar, do que aconteceu hoje.
Nunca esperamos que pode acontecer conosco. Mas acontece...
Por mais cuidado que temos, o inusitado sempre acontece.
Meu irmão me convidou para irmos visitar nosso pai e mãe que moram na cidade de Otacílio Costa-SC, próximo a Lages.
Embora chovendo, saímos somente hoje de manhã com muita tranquilidade.
Quando de repente ao descer a Serra de Pomerode, quase no finalzinho, o carro se desgoverna.
Rodopiamos várias vezes. E ao perceber que íamos cair numa ribanceira, rapidamente
indaguei o nome de Deus, pedindo Proteção.
Foi ai que o carro rodopiou mais uma vez, voltou de re e com a direção travado voltou de re e deu num paredão de pedra.
O carro virou, e ficamos presos numa valeta.
Meu lado principalmente. Pois o lado em que meu irmão estava, ficou de rodas virada para o paredão de pedras.
Ele se apoiou e saiu por cima da janela. Subiu sobre minhas pernas e conseguiu sair. Muitas pessoas pararam e ajudaram abrir a janela para que ele pudesse sair.
Depois de um tempo consegui tirar o cinto de segurança e também pular por cima da janela.
Meu filho que estava junto, com 15 anos, também conseguiu sair.
Minha cunhada não foi e nem marido. Íamos somente nós para visitar nossos pais que não estavam muito bem de saúde.
E quase que sofremos uma tragédia.
Os vidros se esmigalharam tudo sobre mim. Incrível. Nunca pensei que um dia pudesse passar por isso.
Mas graças a Deus tudo terminou bem .
A carro foi guinchado, um casal que vinha de Pomerode com destino a Joinville, me trouxe de volta para casa, e agora estamos bem. O susto foi muito grande.
Claro que a pista estava molhada, pois está chovendo muito por aqui. E com resíduo de óleo no caminho, tudo contribuiu para que ocasionasse o acidente.
Infelizmente não tenho a foto para mostrar. Mas não preciso. sei que vai ficar por muito e muito tempo guardado na memória o dia de hoje.
E sempre que passarmos por lá iremos lembrar desse momento.
AGRADEÇO A DEUS TODO PODEROSO POR ESTARMOS AQUI NOVAMENTE. COM VIDA E JUNTO DE NOSSA FAMÍLIA.
NÃO ESQUEÇAM DE VOTAR EM MEU BLOG-UMA INTERAÇÃO DE AMIGOS.
CONTO COM O SEU VOTO.
MUITO OBRIGADO AMIGOS.
Blog Coletivo-Uma Interação de Amigos
Do The Drugs Work? It's Complicated
Over at Comment is Free a week ago, Ed Halliwell proclaimed that "The Drugs Don't Work". The drugs being antidepressants. On this blog I've often written about antidepressants and the evidence that they work, or don't, so I was interested to see what he had to say.
Halliwell begins by noting that antidepressant prescriptions are rising. This, he declares, is a bad thing because antidepressants just don't work very well - "....A recent review found the SSRIs barely more effective than a placebo pill. Still, the NHS bill for prescribing them runs into hundreds of millions of pounds a year. It's a crazy situation, and the tide may be turning..."
This invokes the famous Kirsch et al 2008 PLoS review of antidepressants. This analysis concluded that 6 weeks treatment with antidepressants was only slightly better than placebos for depression. But slightly is better than nothing. Kirsch et al is evidence that the drugs do, in fact work.
This despite the fact that the analysis included "suppressed" unpublished drug company data unfavorable to antidepressants. So almost uniquely in medicine, there can be none of the publication bias which plagues all clinical trials. In other words, an exceptionally high standard of evidence shows that the drugs do work. A bit. And in fact they probably work better than that, because Kirsch et al's paper was biased against antidepressants as a series of classic posts by P J Leonard and Robert Waldmann pointed out.
Halliwell then says that instead of popping pills to ease our troubled minds, we should turn to "...simple, socially based steps everyone can take to improve their wellbeing. These include building good relationships, lifelong learning, being kind to others and exercise – not rocket science, but somehow we seem to have forgotten them."
Now I don't know what drugs you would need to take to think that "building good relationships" is "simple" - Ecstasy washed down with alcopops might do it. But once you sobered up and read a novel, or watched a play, or just remembered your last breakup, you would realize that relationships can actually be quite complicated. Not to mention being kind to others and lifelong learning, which are so simple that everyone is has a PhD in Being Nice.
But such nonsense aside, the actual hard evidence that these kinds of things can treat clinical depression as opposed to just "improving wellbeing" is weak. There is some evidence that exercise can treat depression, for example, but it's often of poor quality, with no placebo, and publication bias could be rampant.
Indeed as luck would have it, today, two Cochrane Reviews were published. One was about antidepressants for the treatment of depression in primary care. The other was about exercise for depression.
Respectively, they concluded that - "Both tricyclic antidepressants and SSRIs are effective for depression treated in primary care" (not massively effective I hasten to add, but it's something) while the exercise one concluded that "Exercise seems to improve depressive symptoms in people with a diagnosis of depression, but when only methodologically robust trials are included, the effect sizes are only moderate and not statistically significant..."
I'm not endorsing these conclusions. Neuroskeptic readers know that I've long been critical of antidepressant trials and sometimes even Cochrane Reviews. I study antidepressants for a living, and I honestly don't know if they work for the millions of people who take them. (I'm fairly sure that they work in severe depression, but this isn't a very common disease.) But I do know that it's a really complicated issue. And I know that simplistic pro- or anti- medication rhetoric helps no-one and insults the intelligence of all.
But there's more here. Ed Halliwell has a history. He was the lead author of "In The Face of Fear", a deeply flawed Mental Health Foundation report from a couple of months back. The main message of the report was that anxiety is currently on the rise in Britain. We're getting more scared and anxious. There is an epidemic of fear - right now.
This claim was supported by two things - a completely unscientific opinion poll (which didn't really show much of an increase at all), and a reference to government mental health survey data from 1993 and 2007. These indeed show an increase in reported prevalence of anxiety disorders.
Now whether surveys such as these give meaningful data is questionable, but quite apart from that, the MHF report was guilty of a much more glaring error. As I said at the time, it simply failed to mention that we also have data from 2000. And in 2000, rates of anxiety disorders were almost exactly the same as in 2007, higher in some cases.
Now, the 1993, 2000 and 2007 figures are right next to each other in the government report (page 41 of this publicly accessible pdf): unless Halliwell has some kind of visual defect rendering him unable to see the middle of three columns of numbers, he must have seen this. The best available scientific data is that rates of anxiety have been stable for the last 10 years.
Stable, but very high. And the irony - and the tragedy - is that these massive reported rates of depressive and anxiety disorders in the British population (17.6%, at any one time and this is only for some disorders), are why antidepressants are so widely prescribed. Not these figures alone, but rather the more general belief that mental illness is very common - a belief promoted, inter alia, by organisations such as the MHF.
This belief - the "one in four" myth - is music to the ears of the very drug companies that Halliwell and others lambasts for pushing pills. When tens of millions of people are told that they are ill and need treatment, can you blame them for turning first to pills instead of a wholescale reconstriction of human life and society?
Halliwell begins by noting that antidepressant prescriptions are rising. This, he declares, is a bad thing because antidepressants just don't work very well - "....A recent review found the SSRIs barely more effective than a placebo pill. Still, the NHS bill for prescribing them runs into hundreds of millions of pounds a year. It's a crazy situation, and the tide may be turning..."
This invokes the famous Kirsch et al 2008 PLoS review of antidepressants. This analysis concluded that 6 weeks treatment with antidepressants was only slightly better than placebos for depression. But slightly is better than nothing. Kirsch et al is evidence that the drugs do, in fact work.
This despite the fact that the analysis included "suppressed" unpublished drug company data unfavorable to antidepressants. So almost uniquely in medicine, there can be none of the publication bias which plagues all clinical trials. In other words, an exceptionally high standard of evidence shows that the drugs do work. A bit. And in fact they probably work better than that, because Kirsch et al's paper was biased against antidepressants as a series of classic posts by P J Leonard and Robert Waldmann pointed out.
Halliwell then says that instead of popping pills to ease our troubled minds, we should turn to "...simple, socially based steps everyone can take to improve their wellbeing. These include building good relationships, lifelong learning, being kind to others and exercise – not rocket science, but somehow we seem to have forgotten them."
Now I don't know what drugs you would need to take to think that "building good relationships" is "simple" - Ecstasy washed down with alcopops might do it. But once you sobered up and read a novel, or watched a play, or just remembered your last breakup, you would realize that relationships can actually be quite complicated. Not to mention being kind to others and lifelong learning, which are so simple that everyone is has a PhD in Being Nice.
But such nonsense aside, the actual hard evidence that these kinds of things can treat clinical depression as opposed to just "improving wellbeing" is weak. There is some evidence that exercise can treat depression, for example, but it's often of poor quality, with no placebo, and publication bias could be rampant.
Indeed as luck would have it, today, two Cochrane Reviews were published. One was about antidepressants for the treatment of depression in primary care. The other was about exercise for depression.
Respectively, they concluded that - "Both tricyclic antidepressants and SSRIs are effective for depression treated in primary care" (not massively effective I hasten to add, but it's something) while the exercise one concluded that "Exercise seems to improve depressive symptoms in people with a diagnosis of depression, but when only methodologically robust trials are included, the effect sizes are only moderate and not statistically significant..."
I'm not endorsing these conclusions. Neuroskeptic readers know that I've long been critical of antidepressant trials and sometimes even Cochrane Reviews. I study antidepressants for a living, and I honestly don't know if they work for the millions of people who take them. (I'm fairly sure that they work in severe depression, but this isn't a very common disease.) But I do know that it's a really complicated issue. And I know that simplistic pro- or anti- medication rhetoric helps no-one and insults the intelligence of all.
But there's more here. Ed Halliwell has a history. He was the lead author of "In The Face of Fear", a deeply flawed Mental Health Foundation report from a couple of months back. The main message of the report was that anxiety is currently on the rise in Britain. We're getting more scared and anxious. There is an epidemic of fear - right now.
This claim was supported by two things - a completely unscientific opinion poll (which didn't really show much of an increase at all), and a reference to government mental health survey data from 1993 and 2007. These indeed show an increase in reported prevalence of anxiety disorders.
Now whether surveys such as these give meaningful data is questionable, but quite apart from that, the MHF report was guilty of a much more glaring error. As I said at the time, it simply failed to mention that we also have data from 2000. And in 2000, rates of anxiety disorders were almost exactly the same as in 2007, higher in some cases.
Now, the 1993, 2000 and 2007 figures are right next to each other in the government report (page 41 of this publicly accessible pdf): unless Halliwell has some kind of visual defect rendering him unable to see the middle of three columns of numbers, he must have seen this. The best available scientific data is that rates of anxiety have been stable for the last 10 years.
Stable, but very high. And the irony - and the tragedy - is that these massive reported rates of depressive and anxiety disorders in the British population (17.6%, at any one time and this is only for some disorders), are why antidepressants are so widely prescribed. Not these figures alone, but rather the more general belief that mental illness is very common - a belief promoted, inter alia, by organisations such as the MHF.This belief - the "one in four" myth - is music to the ears of the very drug companies that Halliwell and others lambasts for pushing pills. When tens of millions of people are told that they are ill and need treatment, can you blame them for turning first to pills instead of a wholescale reconstriction of human life and society?
Do The Drugs Work? It's Complicated
Over at Comment is Free a week ago, Ed Halliwell proclaimed that "The Drugs Don't Work". The drugs being antidepressants. On this blog I've often written about antidepressants and the evidence that they work, or don't, so I was interested to see what he had to say.
Halliwell begins by noting that antidepressant prescriptions are rising. This, he declares, is a bad thing because antidepressants just don't work very well - "....A recent review found the SSRIs barely more effective than a placebo pill. Still, the NHS bill for prescribing them runs into hundreds of millions of pounds a year. It's a crazy situation, and the tide may be turning..."
This invokes the famous Kirsch et al 2008 PLoS review of antidepressants. This analysis concluded that 6 weeks treatment with antidepressants was only slightly better than placebos for depression. But slightly is better than nothing. Kirsch et al is evidence that the drugs do, in fact work.
This despite the fact that the analysis included "suppressed" unpublished drug company data unfavorable to antidepressants. So almost uniquely in medicine, there can be none of the publication bias which plagues all clinical trials. In other words, an exceptionally high standard of evidence shows that the drugs do work. A bit. And in fact they probably work better than that, because Kirsch et al's paper was biased against antidepressants as a series of classic posts by P J Leonard and Robert Waldmann pointed out.
Halliwell then says that instead of popping pills to ease our troubled minds, we should turn to "...simple, socially based steps everyone can take to improve their wellbeing. These include building good relationships, lifelong learning, being kind to others and exercise – not rocket science, but somehow we seem to have forgotten them."
Now I don't know what drugs you would need to take to think that "building good relationships" is "simple" - Ecstasy washed down with alcopops might do it. But once you sobered up and read a novel, or watched a play, or just remembered your last breakup, you would realize that relationships can actually be quite complicated. Not to mention being kind to others and lifelong learning, which are so simple that everyone is has a PhD in Being Nice.
But such nonsense aside, the actual hard evidence that these kinds of things can treat clinical depression as opposed to just "improving wellbeing" is weak. There is some evidence that exercise can treat depression, for example, but it's often of poor quality, with no placebo, and publication bias could be rampant.
Indeed as luck would have it, today, two Cochrane Reviews were published. One was about antidepressants for the treatment of depression in primary care. The other was about exercise for depression.
Respectively, they concluded that - "Both tricyclic antidepressants and SSRIs are effective for depression treated in primary care" (not massively effective I hasten to add, but it's something) while the exercise one concluded that "Exercise seems to improve depressive symptoms in people with a diagnosis of depression, but when only methodologically robust trials are included, the effect sizes are only moderate and not statistically significant..."
I'm not endorsing these conclusions. Neuroskeptic readers know that I've long been critical of antidepressant trials and sometimes even Cochrane Reviews. I study antidepressants for a living, and I honestly don't know if they work for the millions of people who take them. (I'm fairly sure that they work in severe depression, but this isn't a very common disease.) But I do know that it's a really complicated issue. And I know that simplistic pro- or anti- medication rhetoric helps no-one and insults the intelligence of all.
But there's more here. Ed Halliwell has a history. He was the lead author of "In The Face of Fear", a deeply flawed Mental Health Foundation report from a couple of months back. The main message of the report was that anxiety is currently on the rise in Britain. We're getting more scared and anxious. There is an epidemic of fear - right now.
This claim was supported by two things - a completely unscientific opinion poll (which didn't really show much of an increase at all), and a reference to government mental health survey data from 1993 and 2007. These indeed show an increase in reported prevalence of anxiety disorders.
Now whether surveys such as these give meaningful data is questionable, but quite apart from that, the MHF report was guilty of a much more glaring error. As I said at the time, it simply failed to mention that we also have data from 2000. And in 2000, rates of anxiety disorders were almost exactly the same as in 2007, higher in some cases.
Now, the 1993, 2000 and 2007 figures are right next to each other in the government report (page 41 of this publicly accessible pdf): unless Halliwell has some kind of visual defect rendering him unable to see the middle of three columns of numbers, he must have seen this. The best available scientific data is that rates of anxiety have been stable for the last 10 years.
Stable, but very high. And the irony - and the tragedy - is that these massive reported rates of depressive and anxiety disorders in the British population (17.6%, at any one time and this is only for some disorders), are why antidepressants are so widely prescribed. Not these figures alone, but rather the more general belief that mental illness is very common - a belief promoted, inter alia, by organisations such as the MHF.
This belief - the "one in four" myth - is music to the ears of the very drug companies that Halliwell and others lambasts for pushing pills. When tens of millions of people are told that they are ill and need treatment, can you blame them for turning first to pills instead of a wholescale reconstriction of human life and society?
Halliwell begins by noting that antidepressant prescriptions are rising. This, he declares, is a bad thing because antidepressants just don't work very well - "....A recent review found the SSRIs barely more effective than a placebo pill. Still, the NHS bill for prescribing them runs into hundreds of millions of pounds a year. It's a crazy situation, and the tide may be turning..."
This invokes the famous Kirsch et al 2008 PLoS review of antidepressants. This analysis concluded that 6 weeks treatment with antidepressants was only slightly better than placebos for depression. But slightly is better than nothing. Kirsch et al is evidence that the drugs do, in fact work.
This despite the fact that the analysis included "suppressed" unpublished drug company data unfavorable to antidepressants. So almost uniquely in medicine, there can be none of the publication bias which plagues all clinical trials. In other words, an exceptionally high standard of evidence shows that the drugs do work. A bit. And in fact they probably work better than that, because Kirsch et al's paper was biased against antidepressants as a series of classic posts by P J Leonard and Robert Waldmann pointed out.
Halliwell then says that instead of popping pills to ease our troubled minds, we should turn to "...simple, socially based steps everyone can take to improve their wellbeing. These include building good relationships, lifelong learning, being kind to others and exercise – not rocket science, but somehow we seem to have forgotten them."
Now I don't know what drugs you would need to take to think that "building good relationships" is "simple" - Ecstasy washed down with alcopops might do it. But once you sobered up and read a novel, or watched a play, or just remembered your last breakup, you would realize that relationships can actually be quite complicated. Not to mention being kind to others and lifelong learning, which are so simple that everyone is has a PhD in Being Nice.
But such nonsense aside, the actual hard evidence that these kinds of things can treat clinical depression as opposed to just "improving wellbeing" is weak. There is some evidence that exercise can treat depression, for example, but it's often of poor quality, with no placebo, and publication bias could be rampant.
Indeed as luck would have it, today, two Cochrane Reviews were published. One was about antidepressants for the treatment of depression in primary care. The other was about exercise for depression.
Respectively, they concluded that - "Both tricyclic antidepressants and SSRIs are effective for depression treated in primary care" (not massively effective I hasten to add, but it's something) while the exercise one concluded that "Exercise seems to improve depressive symptoms in people with a diagnosis of depression, but when only methodologically robust trials are included, the effect sizes are only moderate and not statistically significant..."
I'm not endorsing these conclusions. Neuroskeptic readers know that I've long been critical of antidepressant trials and sometimes even Cochrane Reviews. I study antidepressants for a living, and I honestly don't know if they work for the millions of people who take them. (I'm fairly sure that they work in severe depression, but this isn't a very common disease.) But I do know that it's a really complicated issue. And I know that simplistic pro- or anti- medication rhetoric helps no-one and insults the intelligence of all.
But there's more here. Ed Halliwell has a history. He was the lead author of "In The Face of Fear", a deeply flawed Mental Health Foundation report from a couple of months back. The main message of the report was that anxiety is currently on the rise in Britain. We're getting more scared and anxious. There is an epidemic of fear - right now.
This claim was supported by two things - a completely unscientific opinion poll (which didn't really show much of an increase at all), and a reference to government mental health survey data from 1993 and 2007. These indeed show an increase in reported prevalence of anxiety disorders.
Now whether surveys such as these give meaningful data is questionable, but quite apart from that, the MHF report was guilty of a much more glaring error. As I said at the time, it simply failed to mention that we also have data from 2000. And in 2000, rates of anxiety disorders were almost exactly the same as in 2007, higher in some cases.
Now, the 1993, 2000 and 2007 figures are right next to each other in the government report (page 41 of this publicly accessible pdf): unless Halliwell has some kind of visual defect rendering him unable to see the middle of three columns of numbers, he must have seen this. The best available scientific data is that rates of anxiety have been stable for the last 10 years.
Stable, but very high. And the irony - and the tragedy - is that these massive reported rates of depressive and anxiety disorders in the British population (17.6%, at any one time and this is only for some disorders), are why antidepressants are so widely prescribed. Not these figures alone, but rather the more general belief that mental illness is very common - a belief promoted, inter alia, by organisations such as the MHF.This belief - the "one in four" myth - is music to the ears of the very drug companies that Halliwell and others lambasts for pushing pills. When tens of millions of people are told that they are ill and need treatment, can you blame them for turning first to pills instead of a wholescale reconstriction of human life and society?
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