What's your guys take on this article I found on the Internet this evening?

[cjemc]

http://davidhealy.org/is-alcohol-safer-and-more-effective-than-ssris/

Please let me know, any of you who have been on SSRI's, would you say they were any good? Is this article credible? Please let me know.

Many thanks guys.

[.Poppy.]

Hm.

So, my psychiatrist, upon prescribing me clonazepam actually told me it was like alcohol in pill form and asked me if I felt better when I was drinking. So this article is interesting.

I do feel better...when I have a bit of a buzz. If I get too far gone it's not much longer before I actually feel WORSE but that's probably the risk with benzos too.

I think it's more difficult to regulate...it's easy to prescribe a certain mg of a pill but it's much harder to say, "go drink some and you'll be just fine".

And of course drinking doesn't have a positive effect on everyone. It's often referred to as a depressant, in fact.

So, that's my jumbled opinion. :blush:

[MyNameIsTerry]

Well I'm wary of someone afraid to take antidepressants who is using alcohol to control a symptom, asking what could be perceived as justification to continue.

Isn't this article about doctors prescribing alcohol? That's a whole world away from you self medicating. Doctors prescribe addictive drugs that you could buy off a dealer but that didn't mean the medical profession advocate it outside of a controlled environment.

Alcohol is very cheap. It's everywhere. There is no way the medical profession could stop the rise in alcoholism that would take place from this. Alcohol is legal.

[NoPoet]

A motorsport analogy.

Between 1996-1998, Peugeot raced their 406 Supertouring across the world. It was dominant in Germany and Australia, but its performance within the UK (in a far more prestigious championship) was pitiful with only brief moments of hope. This is one of the "WTF" questions of motorsport which stumped people for more than a decade.

The actual reason? All the 406s raced across the world used the same aerodynamic settings which were optimised for twisty, turning tracks. However, the tracks in Britain are typically very fast with fewer complex sections, so the 406s raced over here were bringing scalpels to a gunfight. This problem was not addressed until recently and since then, the 406 has performed superbly in British races.

Relying on SSRIs as a kind of cure-all is not just worthless, it can be counter-productive. Medications which affect serotonin balance appear to be the ones which cause the worst side effects. You'd therefore only want to take SSRIs when they are specifically needed. In this case, the SSRIs could be quite effective.

In situations where anxiety and depression are being caused by other health conditions, a totally different class of medication might be required to treat the other conditions. Wrongly prescribing SSRIs can, in very rare cases*, lead to bipolar type III, or can otherwise make a person feel worse.

Tl;dr - it's having the right setup for the right occasion that counts.

* I've never heard of this happening to anyone since I joined NMP seven years ago.

EDIT: Implying alcohol is an effective antidepressant when it is itself a known depressant is simply trolling the reader. It's what people are calling "click-bait".