7 ms·

Our 11 year old daughter was seriously depressed recently. N=1, but fluoxetine was life changing (and potentially life saving) for her, at least.

by lemming 11mo ago

thebigspacefuck 11mo ago
Placebo can be life changing
- biff1 11mo ago
  Nocebo can too. Apropos the featured article, I wonder if we should worry about that when we report in the popular media that antidepressants trigger suicides.
- abraxas 11mo ago
  Absolutely. These random namedrops of drugs are irritating. People respond to different psychiatric medications in wilddly different ways. And actually, the majority do not respond at all. Throwing a random name of some random medication helps absolutely nobody. It will just make some desperate people seek "this one drug" that they heard about on the internet.
  - muhis 11mo ago
    That was an anecdote about the medication in question, not a random namedrop. Prozac is fluoxetine.
tcj_phx 11mo ago
[flagged]
- EasyMark 11mo ago
  Puberty in general can be rough. I (a dude) had all kinds of bad thoughts and moods going through puberty and then one year it was just gone, grades improved dramatically, started making friends again, etc
- lemming 11mo ago
  Do you have a plan to get her off, or is she on the maintenance drug for life? It's too early to say. Obviously the idea is to get her off it if possible. SSRIs never help because of boosting serotonin. That's a hell of a claim, which could use some evidence.
  - tcj_phx 11mo ago
    > > SSRIs never help because of boosting serotonin. > That's a hell of a claim, which could use some evidence. My experience with the chatbots is that they start with the conventional marketing tropes, but if you ask pointed questions they'll dig into the actual research. This thread started with a generic question about why ECT seemed to help some patients. It had a really good reasoning about why SSRIs are still the first-line treatment for depression, even though the MAOIs were much better drugs. https://chatgpt.com/share/69207aa3-26a0-8005-8dda-8199da153f6b https://chatgpt.com/share/69207aa3-26a0-8005-8dda-8199da153f... The Big Picture SSRIs flood serotonin globally, which can suppress dopamine/norepinephrine and blunt mood. Anti-serotonin strategies (receptor-specific antagonism, reuptake enhancement, or targeted modulation) often result in cleaner antidepressant effects with fewer side effects. This supports the criticism you mentioned: SSRIs may “work” only because the brain adapts to the serotonin disruption, whereas directly reducing or modulating serotonin is more therapeutic. The whole 'conversation' is pretty good, and would provide plenty of search terms for helping you figure out what science has actually figured out about depression. A simple pregnenolone supplement can sometimes be magical, because of the steroidogenesis cascade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#/media/File:Steroidogenesis.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#/media/File:Steroidoge... There's a supplement seller that said his pregnenolone powder was made with a newer, cleaner process than is used by most of the pregnenolone supplement vendors, but I don't know if he's still using that supplier. The powders are a much better value than the capsules. hth.
    - flatline 11mo ago
      The chatbot is great as a first-line of research for many things, but something like this needs to be backed up by actual research to make a concrete claim. It will absolutely fabricate falsehoods or misrepresent truths based on an unknown number of stochastic factors behind any response. Shame on your for propagating a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that every reader must go verify for themselves if they want to substantiate or refute your claim - in response to a request for substantiation!
potsandpans 11mo ago
Genuine question (which I accept may be too personal to answer): what does depression in someone that young look like? How is it different from the expected hormonal changes that an adolescent is expected to go through?
- 0134340 11mo ago
  Probably something like Boy Interrupted[0]. Sad story and something I can sympathize with having some of the same feelings very early on despite having a rather normal upbringing and siblings not showing signs of it. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Interrupted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Interrupted
- potsandpans 11mo ago
  It's incredible that my last four comments are down voted to -1, for engaging in genuine dialog across topics. @dang it's hard to believe that I'm not being brigaded.
  - amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
    My advice as a long time participant here: pay no attention to upvotes or downvotes. Sometimes they seem to be completely unrelated to whatever you said. Stay curious.
  - tomhow 11mo ago
    And several of your comments before that were upvoted. Are we to regard those as suspicious? Of the recent downvoted comments, one was a complaint about moderation that anyone who has paid attention to dang's track record here over more than a decade knows is baseless. (And if you think the top comment on any thread is a bad one, you can always choose to be a helpful contributor to the community and email us to let us know). Of the other two of your downvoted comments, none were downvoted by the same users. The choice is yours to make an effort to observe the guidelines and be a positive contributor to HN, or alternatively to keep using HN for political/ideological battle and complain to the moderators when things don't go your way, but it's clear what others in the community want to see.

Our 11 year old daughter was seriously depressed recently. N=1, but fluoxetine was life changing (and potentially life saving) for her, at least.

by lemming 11mo ago

Our 11 year old daughter was seriously depressed recently. N=1, but fluoxetine was life changing (and potentially life saving) for her, at least.

thebigspacefuck 11mo ago

Placebo can be life changing

biff1 11mo ago
Nocebo can too. Apropos the featured article, I wonder if we should worry about that when we report in the popular media that antidepressants trigger suicides.
abraxas 11mo ago
Absolutely. These random namedrops of drugs are irritating. People respond to different psychiatric medications in wilddly different ways. And actually, the majority do not respond at all. Throwing a random name of some random medication helps absolutely nobody. It will just make some desperate people seek "this one drug" that they heard about on the internet.
- muhis 11mo ago
  That was an anecdote about the medication in question, not a random namedrop. Prozac is fluoxetine.

tcj_phx 11mo ago

[flagged]

EasyMark 11mo ago
Puberty in general can be rough. I (a dude) had all kinds of bad thoughts and moods going through puberty and then one year it was just gone, grades improved dramatically, started making friends again, etc
lemming 11mo ago
Do you have a plan to get her off, or is she on the maintenance drug for life? It's too early to say. Obviously the idea is to get her off it if possible. SSRIs never help because of boosting serotonin. That's a hell of a claim, which could use some evidence.
- tcj_phx 11mo ago
  > > SSRIs never help because of boosting serotonin. > That's a hell of a claim, which could use some evidence. My experience with the chatbots is that they start with the conventional marketing tropes, but if you ask pointed questions they'll dig into the actual research. This thread started with a generic question about why ECT seemed to help some patients. It had a really good reasoning about why SSRIs are still the first-line treatment for depression, even though the MAOIs were much better drugs. https://chatgpt.com/share/69207aa3-26a0-8005-8dda-8199da153f6b https://chatgpt.com/share/69207aa3-26a0-8005-8dda-8199da153f... The Big Picture SSRIs flood serotonin globally, which can suppress dopamine/norepinephrine and blunt mood. Anti-serotonin strategies (receptor-specific antagonism, reuptake enhancement, or targeted modulation) often result in cleaner antidepressant effects with fewer side effects. This supports the criticism you mentioned: SSRIs may “work” only because the brain adapts to the serotonin disruption, whereas directly reducing or modulating serotonin is more therapeutic. The whole 'conversation' is pretty good, and would provide plenty of search terms for helping you figure out what science has actually figured out about depression. A simple pregnenolone supplement can sometimes be magical, because of the steroidogenesis cascade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#/media/File:Steroidogenesis.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid#/media/File:Steroidoge... There's a supplement seller that said his pregnenolone powder was made with a newer, cleaner process than is used by most of the pregnenolone supplement vendors, but I don't know if he's still using that supplier. The powders are a much better value than the capsules. hth.
  - flatline 11mo ago
    The chatbot is great as a first-line of research for many things, but something like this needs to be backed up by actual research to make a concrete claim. It will absolutely fabricate falsehoods or misrepresent truths based on an unknown number of stochastic factors behind any response. Shame on your for propagating a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that every reader must go verify for themselves if they want to substantiate or refute your claim - in response to a request for substantiation!

potsandpans 11mo ago

Genuine question (which I accept may be too personal to answer): what does depression in someone that young look like? How is it different from the expected hormonal changes that an adolescent is expected to go through?

0134340 11mo ago
Probably something like Boy Interrupted[0]. Sad story and something I can sympathize with having some of the same feelings very early on despite having a rather normal upbringing and siblings not showing signs of it. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Interrupted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Interrupted
potsandpans 11mo ago
It's incredible that my last four comments are down voted to -1, for engaging in genuine dialog across topics. @dang it's hard to believe that I'm not being brigaded.
- amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
  My advice as a long time participant here: pay no attention to upvotes or downvotes. Sometimes they seem to be completely unrelated to whatever you said. Stay curious.
- tomhow 11mo ago
  And several of your comments before that were upvoted. Are we to regard those as suspicious? Of the recent downvoted comments, one was a complaint about moderation that anyone who has paid attention to dang's track record here over more than a decade knows is baseless. (And if you think the top comment on any thread is a bad one, you can always choose to be a helpful contributor to the community and email us to let us know). Of the other two of your downvoted comments, none were downvoted by the same users. The choice is yours to make an effort to observe the guidelines and be a positive contributor to HN, or alternatively to keep using HN for political/ideological battle and complain to the moderators when things don't go your way, but it's clear what others in the community want to see.