Tag:

Personal Experiences

The Unrelenting Search for the Female Viagra

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 8/3/2024

For as long as Viagra has been on the market for men (1998, if you’re keeping tabs), scientists have been hard at work trying to find a female equivalent. What will make women as horny as men on Viagra?

The answer has been elusive. That’s probably because sexuality isn’t just about blood flow to your sexual organs, but also the blood flow to your primary sexual organ — your brain. Research has suggested that for women, the brain is as important as any other body parts. And for researchers looking for a female sexuality pill, that presents a unique set of challenges.

The New York Times talks about researchers’ latest attempts at crafting such a pill, called Lybrido. It’s an in-depth story that explores women’s personal experiences — and frustrations — with their decreased sexual desire.

8/3/2024 1 comment

Newsweek’s Take on Antidepressants: More Reactions

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 4/3/2023

written by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Since Newsweek published its article on antidepressants last week, we’ve seen a wide range of opinions posted about it online.

Psych Central blogger and journalist Christine Stapleton asks, Am I treating my depression with expensive Tic Tacs? She reacted strongly to the main premise of the article — that antidepressants are nothing more than expensive Tic Tacs. It’s a personal but very real reaction from someone who has battled depression and has found relief in antidepressants — like millions of other Americans. Indeed, it echoes my own arguments. Research can inform us about many things in general, but they can never tell us anything about how a specific individual will benefit (or not).

Christine posted a followup entry today, Antidepressants: JAMA, Newsweek and balanced journalism, where she says, “I am even more convinced that circulation trumped sound journalism in the Newsweek article.” Indeed. If Newsweek was looking for balanced and insightful journalism, this was not the piece to do that.

Therese Borchard added her voice to the “antidepressants work” argument in her blog entry, Newsweek: Do Antidepressants Work? For Many People, YES!. She said it eloquently:

For folks like me, though, who are/were hanging on to life by a very thin and fraying thread, antidepressants can save lives. They have certainly given me back my life.

I think it’s relatively absurd to suggest to people who have been helped by antidepressants that they could have simply taken a sugar pill and experienced the same positive effects. That’s not been their experience. But maybe you don’t buy into the appeals to emotion and personal experiences.

Finally, the editor-in-chief of Psychiatric Times (and occasional Psych Central contributor) Ronald Pies, MD wrote an editorial entitled, Newsweek’s Topsy-Turvy Take on Antidepressants earlier this week. In it, Dr. Pies demonstrates the numerous flaws in the evidence that Newsweek relied upon:

Both the Kirsch and Fournier studies are “meta-analyses” of various individual antidepressant trials. Meta-analyses suffer from all the problems common to such “number-crunching” methods: if the individual studies are flawed, the meta-analysis is flawed. For example, the Kirsch meta-analysis looked only at studies carried out before 1999. The much-publicized Fournier study examined a total of 6 antidepressant trials (n=718) using just 2 antidepressants, paroxetine and imipramine. Two of the imipramine studies used doses that were either subtherapeutic (100 mg/day) or less than optimal (100 to 200 mg/day). Moreover, the design of the Fournier study intentionally excluded individual studies involving a “placebo washout” phase, which attempts to reduce the number of placebo-responders receiving active medication. By excluding such studies, the Fournier meta-analysis may have reduced the difference between placebo and antidepressant response rates.

The challenge of a mainstream publication like Newsweek doing any kind of fair and balanced job with a controversial issue such as this is immense. How do you keep perspective and summarize decades’ worth of research in a consumer-friendly format?

In most cases, it’s a daunting and near-impossible task. I don’t think a publication like Newsweek can do anything but present a one-sided view to such controversies, because of their complexity. That’s what mainstream media does — boil down complex issues into black-and-white “sides.” And while they pretend they don’t take a side, simply counting the amount of words given to one over the other demonstrates clearly that a bias in such articles exists.

I can’t say it any better than Dr. Pies in this closing to his editorial:

Yes, antidepressants are “oversold” in those Big Pharma ads, adorned with chirping birds and fluttering butterflies — in truth, antidepressants don’t work as well or as specifically as we’d like. Given the frequent side effects of many antidepressants, it is usually wise to initiate treatment with psychotherapy, in cases of mild-to-moderate, non-melancholic depression. Alas, psychotherapy is often difficult for patients to obtain or afford. Despite Newsweek’s supposedly “depressing news” about antidepressants, psychiatrists have good reason to keep these medications in their armamentarium — and patients with severe unipolar depression8 have good reason to consider taking them.

It’s worth the read: Newsweek’s Topsy-Turvy Take on Antidepressants

4/3/2023 10 comments

Introducing Therese Borchard’s New Book, Beyond Blue

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 3/16/2023

written by John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you probably noticed that one of our regular contributors here has been Therese Borchard. However, she blogs more often and more regularly on her beliefnet.com blog, Beyond Blue. It was actually her wonderfully witty and touching writing there that led me to invite her to blog more regularly here.

Therese is a rare find, combining a love of prose with a wealth of personal experiences with depression and other concerns to make for always engaging reading. So it’s no wonder she was able to bundle up that wisdom and publish her first book, Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes.

If you’ve enjoyed Therese’s posts either here or on her regular blog at beliefnet.com, then you already are familiar with her writing style and know what to expect in reading the book. The book, however, is not just a regurgitation of her blog posts. Instead it is something much, much more — it puts her blog posts into context. It gives you the full back story to this amazing woman, told in her own colorful words.

As she notes in the introduction, she’s divided the book into two neat parts:

The first half, “Drink, Pray, Cry: My Story” reads like a memoir of a girl whose father must be a shrink, because she’s been diagnosed with practically every illness covered on The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (or DSM-IV). Here you’ll read about the early seeds of my depression, how my mood disorder morphed into a different beast with every new U.S. president, about my futile attempts at taming the beast, and about my miracle in the end.

In the second half, “Beyond Blue: Or at Least Headed That Way,” I give you a tour inside my brain and introduce you to some of the demons that live there rent free. I share some techniques I’ve used to evict the cheap guys, and how I go about erecting all those damn boundaries in my life — with the cable guy, my FedEx delivery man, and with certain friends — so that I can continue down Recovery Lane.

Here’s an excerpt:

“But should I be doing anything more than I am? Addressing a certain issue in therapy? Working on any specific cognitive-behavioral worksheet? Doing some breathing exercises? Going to yoga more?”

She smiked.

And I got it.

Trying too hard was precisely my problem. It was the “mind over spoon” issue again. In my mind, I was failing because I couldn’t think myself to perfect health. I couldn’t do it all myself.

Dr. Smith salvaged the last crumb of my self-esteem with this compassionate statement: “Mindful meditation, yoga, and cognitive-behavioral therapy are extremely helpful for people with mild to moderate depression. But they don’t work for people such as yourself who are suicidal or severely depressed.”

Her advice was grounded in neuroscience.

There’s 17 chapters and I enjoyed every last one of them. So much so that I said:

A natural writer, Therese touches your heart with the very real and very poignant stories that have helped shape her life. It’s both an uplifting tale and full of down-to-earth advice that almost anyone can use and relate to in their own lives. Therese is a rare writer that can have you laughing one moment and crying the next. BEYOND BLUE is a testament to the unwavering resiliency of the human spirit.

I very much mean those words again today, now that the book is available for sale. I sincerely hope you’ll consider picking up a copy and gaining the hope and wisdom that Therese has to offer.

3/16/2023 5 comments