Hello,
The following story just kills me. I'm sure I've already ranted about enough stuff here in the past few days, but lately every time I listen to or read the news I find something else that drives me up a wall. This story has to do with taking pills to conquer phobias. Sure, I know that it's the trend these days for doctors to try and tweak with brain chemistry- (Prozac, Zoloft, Welbutrin (sp?) , etc.)- but I don't think these doctors know what the fuck they are doing. In my more cynical moments I think they just keep on prescribing medication to get the kickbacks from the pharmaceutical companies.
I used to take Zoloft that was prescribed by a psychiatrist because I was "depressed" and "anxious." Soon I found that I could get him to prescribe TONS of other drugs as well. I barely ever went to his office, but he billed my health insurance for weekly visits and kept the drugs coming.
That was years ago, and finally I realized that I was just a lazy, self-indulgent person who had not had the gumption to address my own emotional issues. At long last I decided to take some personal responsibility and deal with my problems sober. I'll never take another prescribed mood-levelling drug again. They just made me dependent on my doctor and let me make excuses for why I didn't have the strength to deal with my problems. What a weak loser I was.
The following article is a recent example from what I see from my humble vantage point as a decade-long trend of doctors encouraging their patients to believe that taking a pill is a better method for combatting personal turmoil than learning some self-discipline and willfully changing their behavior.
I have no doubt that the medication described in the story below does alter perception and conduct because I'm far too familiar with the effects of such drugs as, oh, coke, speed, ecstacy, etc. Remember when coke wasn't supposed to be addictive? Remember when doctors prescribed speed to housewives to help them control their weight?
Perhaps as time progresses and younger generations really come to believe that they are not responsible for controlling their own impulses and actions they will just subsist on pills, watch a lot of television, and turn into vegetation.
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Pill May Help People Overcome Fears

By JANET McCONNAUGHEY, Associated Press Writer

NEW ORLEANS - Scientists say a pill may help people overcome their worst phobias. In a small study released Monday, a drug already on the market for tuberculosis helped people who were terrified of heights get over that fear with only two therapy sessions instead of the usual seven or eight.


The study, led by Michael Davis, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Emory University School of Medicine, was described at a session about unlearning fears at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.


Davis based his work on research that had found the transmission of a certain protein to a brain receptor were critical to overcoming fear. He found that the TB drug, D-cycloserine, aids the transmission of the crucial protein.


The drug, sold by Eli Lilly and Co. under the brand name Seromycin, doesn't dissolve fear. But in rats, it helped them unlearn fears faster, Davis said. Since it was already approved for use in people, he and Barbara O. Rothbaum, director of the school's trauma and anxiety recovery program, tested it on 28 acrophobics, people afraid of heights.


Each got a pill just before their two virtual reality therapy sessions, in which computerized goggles are used to simulate going up a glass elevator in a hotel lobby. Nobody knew whether the pill was a dummy or one of two doses of D-cycloserine, the 500 mg used for TB or one-tenth that dose.


One participant dropped out. When checked one week after and three months after the second session, the 10 patients who had gotten placebos did slightly better than they had at the start. But the 17 on drug — the dose didn't seem to matter — did as well as or better than people who had finished the usual course of eight treatments, Davis said.


"That's pretty powerful stuff, and pretty convincing," said Alan Steinberg, associate director of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress at UCLA.


And those who had taken the drug were twice as likely as those on the placebo to be going up in elevators, driving over high bridges and doing other things that fear of panic attacks had kept them from doing before the therapy.


"That's an especially positive aspect of these results," said Mark Bouton, a psychology professor at the University of Vermont. Many times, he noted, fear unlearned in one situation — elevators, for instance — may still show up in other areas, such as high bridges or rooftop restaurants.


However, David Kupfer, a Falls Church, Va., cognitive behavioral therapist with a specialty in phobias and other anxiety disorders, said that even if larger studies confirm the findings, he probably would use it only in a few patients.


Other research has indicated that people who go through therapy unmedicated for such problems do better, in the long run, he said.


"People learn ... that they are the powerful agent of change, not the medication," he said.


However, Kupfer said, it could be useful for people who have trouble with exposure therapy, whether it is virtual reality, imagination or going out to face the fear.