This is a somewhat belated note of thanks, Awais, for your detailed and meticulous debunking of a misleading and extreme thesis from "across the Pond." I also appreciate your call-out to the article Dr. George Dawson and I wrote, knocking down the false claim that antidepressants work by "numbing" emotions:
The effort to discredit and disparage psychiatric medication has a long and ignoble history, and is now seen in the false claims by RFK Jr. as the recently appointed head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I discuss some historical aspects of the movement against psychiatric medication on the Psychiatric Times website.
None of this is to engage in cheer-leading for psychiatric medications--antidepressants in particular--whose risks and limitations are very well-known to those of us who have written about them and prescribed them for nearly our entire professional lives (my experience goes back over 40 years). We should always acknowledge that these agents--while safe and effective when carefully prescribed--are not panaceas, and ought to be used very conservatively as part of a comprehensive, bio-psycho-social approach to the patient.
Whew! Thank you for the effort you've put into this and the clarity you bring to the underlying murk of it all. My work -- advocating for a more rigorous approach to including precise observations of actual subjective experience in studies of effects such as these -- currently sits far outside these contentious debates, but I can see what I might be getting myself into at some point. I'll definitely need some help if/when that day comes.
This is a somewhat belated note of thanks, Awais, for your detailed and meticulous debunking of a misleading and extreme thesis from "across the Pond." I also appreciate your call-out to the article Dr. George Dawson and I wrote, knocking down the false claim that antidepressants work by "numbing" emotions:
See: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/antidepressants-do-not-work-by-numbing-emotions
The effort to discredit and disparage psychiatric medication has a long and ignoble history, and is now seen in the false claims by RFK Jr. as the recently appointed head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I discuss some historical aspects of the movement against psychiatric medication on the Psychiatric Times website.
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/the-ongoing-movement-against-psychiatric-medications
None of this is to engage in cheer-leading for psychiatric medications--antidepressants in particular--whose risks and limitations are very well-known to those of us who have written about them and prescribed them for nearly our entire professional lives (my experience goes back over 40 years). We should always acknowledge that these agents--while safe and effective when carefully prescribed--are not panaceas, and ought to be used very conservatively as part of a comprehensive, bio-psycho-social approach to the patient.
Best regards,
Ron
Ronald W. Pies, MD
Whew! Thank you for the effort you've put into this and the clarity you bring to the underlying murk of it all. My work -- advocating for a more rigorous approach to including precise observations of actual subjective experience in studies of effects such as these -- currently sits far outside these contentious debates, but I can see what I might be getting myself into at some point. I'll definitely need some help if/when that day comes.