Word: psychiatrist
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There's really nothing funny about what happened to Rebekah Beddoe, except maybe for a little black comedy at the end. In 1999, a psychiatrist diagnosed her with postnatal depression, which she probably didn't have, and for the next three years multiple doctors treated her with drugs that she almost certainly didn't need. As episodes of deliberately cutting herself progressed to bouts of mental torment and suicide attempts, Beddoe's carers, concluding that her illness was worsening, kept upping her dosages and trying new medications. Nothing worked. Eventually, Beddoe acted on a different idea. Without telling anyone...
...very large number. Intractable misery is rife, it seems: in Australia last year, 12 million prescriptions for antidepressants were dispensed through the federal government's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (up from 8.2 million in 1998), a figure equating to more than a million users. Do the math, says Sydney forensic psychiatrist Yolande Lucire: if only 1% of users suffer terrible side effects that aren't recognized for what they are, that's more than 10,000 Australians who've recently been disabled by a drug that was supposed to help them. "That would be enough to fill the beds in every...
...biological test for depression instead of the series of questions doctors use now. Don't hold your breath waiting for that, says British academic Moncrieff: "I believe that human emotions will never be located in a simple biochemical formula." The chemical-imbalance theory is nonsense, says Adelaide psychiatrist Jureidini. SSRIs alter a patient's serotonin levels within days, he says, but their antidepressant effect - if there is any - doesn't occur for several weeks. "The idea that there's a serotonin deficiency that explains depression is such a gross oversimplification as to be completely misleading," Jureidini says...
...Beddoe didn't like the idea of going on drugs and decided not to take them. She checked in to the mother-and-baby unit of a private hospital, where staff helped her to settle Jemima. There, after another brief consultation, a psychiatrist diagnosed Beddoe with postnatal depression and suggested she start on Zoloft right away. This time, she relented. A week later, she was in hospital, waiting in good spirits for a group-therapy session, when something happened. She suddenly couldn't breathe and her heart was pounding. The walls seemed to be closing in. She thought...
...rare are cases like Beddoe's? "We see them quite often," says N.S.W. University's Parker, a psychiatrist for 30 years and director of the Black Dog Institute, a not-for-profit research, educational and clinical body specializing in mood disorders. "We see depressed people who've been undertreated and others whose illness is not quintessentially biological," yet their treatment has amounted to "the relentless pursuit of one physical treatment after another." Parker's experience is that, shortly after starting a course of SSRIs, about 7% of patients feel agitation ranging from moderate to profound, while an additional...