>In sharp contrast to female adolescents, the monthly antidepressant dispensing rate among male adolescents declined abruptly during March 2020 and did not recover afterward.
This is certainly anecdata, but based on that date in the quote and the different behavior I see in male vs. female friends, I doubt this is a split between rates of depression so much as there is a stronger female norm to seek help from professionals whereas this is like pulling teeth with the guys. That date looks suspiciously like COVID derailed men seeking help and they haven’t bounced back or they’ve found other maladaptive coping mechanisms in higher numbers than women.
At least here in Germany one of the groups getting more help would immediately mean that the other one has less access simply because here you wait like 6 month to get an appointment with many psychotherapists and psychiatrists not taking any new patients. Would it be possible that the increase could explain the decrease as well.
Definitely anecdata but that is what i see all around, I can't even convince my father, that has been in depression for years now, to take treatment seriously. I don't even know what to do anymore.
The older one is the more pointless it is to try. Not because it's impossible but because of all the friction and inertia required to get someone to change their habits and mindset. You quickly reach diminishing returns.
As the article you link shows, it wasn't banned, it just required a warning, and there are questions about whether that did more harm than good. Also, it only applied to SSRIs, not other antidepressants
> Im so done with this idea that getting medication through doctors is somehow superfluous.
Not trying to be a conspiracy theorist here but we don't always get it right. The opioid crisis in the US was started by "getting medication through doctors." Research changes over time and current research does suggest that antidepressants are often over-perscribed.
I think of it as a marketing term to reduce social stigma, which was massive at the time because it used to be thought of as something for hysterics, invoking the imagery of men in white coats taking people off to the looney bin.
What’s disturbing and awful is the field of psychiatry has been so completely taken over by it - psychiatrists tend not to do much other than dispense pills and have patients fill out forms, like they are in a drug trial. They play whack a mole with peoples nervous systems and prescribe very wide acting meds.
Psychiatrists used to be interested in the whole mental health of people rather than stats and what drugs they’re on. They might actually talk about trauma, suggest other therapies.
There’s a big body of evidence that the trauma model has a lot of truth to it, as opposed to the “illness” model which presupposes a chemical cause, treating medication like some sort of split that you rarely ever take off. The trauma model has problems but its much more close to the underlying root causes.
That article is all over the place with it's verbage and intention.
What it is actually saying is that there was a meta study done that found low serotonin itself was not necessarily the cause of depression. However drugs that target serotonin still work as anti-depressants.
It's really a terrible article. Never mind using "chemical imbalance" and "low serotonin" interchangeably throughout the article.
Its an absurd description of a problem. Everything ranging from a thunderstorm to too much mustard on a sandwich can accurately be described as a "chemical imbalance".
Teenage girls as a group probably have more chemical imbalance than any other group alive, Im not sure what is surprising here, we have the medicine why not use it. I bet a bunch of mostly male adult programmers will have a truly deep and nuanced understanding of this issue though
"Chemical imbalance" is the wrong model and asserts culture over nature, but sort of like menopause being a biological control to prevent resource competition between younger and older females in populations, I'd wager that behaviors that create conflict or distance between newly sexually mature offspring and parents/family could serve the role of decreasing the likelihood of incest.
> "Chemical imbalance" is the wrong model and asserts culture over nature
It's the model in use. Calling it "wrong" is at odds with the medical community. I get it, but it's not a compelling statement.
Regardless, coinciding with tighter tracking of populations, especially from schools, the last few decades have shown that young girls are at high risk for depression and suicide. Some calling it an epidemic. I'm sure you can find the TED talks, news articles, etc
Notably, this is backed by CDC data. It is not stated what is causal nor how effective anti-depressants are, as a treatment, but they are an option that many parents and children choose.
Full study: https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/153/3/e20230...