Mental Health News

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While I noted here last week that antidepressants have been deemed safe for use by expecting mothers, they can pose some substantial risks to aging patients. Canadian researchers have noted that individuals over the age of 50 who took commonly prescribed antidepressants like Zoloft and Prozac had double the risk of broken bones.

This news certainly isn’t a reason to stop taking the medications, but it definitely seems like a reason for prescription companies and government researchers to look more closely at this problem. The question that popped into my head is whether or not it is the drugs, or whether it is the depression. Afterall, depression has also been found to cause thinness in bones.

Pfizer, a manufacturer of antidepressant medications, notes that “the risks must be balanced against the benefits gained by treatment.” I agree. I would much prefer to break a bone while enjoying myself and my life, than wallowing in the darkness of depression and still experiencing that same fracture. Ciest la Vie!

Canadian and Korean researchers report in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine that behaviors of 22 children who were prenatally exposed to a selective serotonin uptake inhibitor (SSRI), one of a relatively new class of antidepressant drugs including Prozac and Zoloft, were not noticably different than those of 14 unexposed children.  This is great news for those women in their child bearing age that have been trying to choose between taking care of their own mental health or risking the future health of a child due to exposure in utero.  The children, do however, pick up on the stress level of the mother and adjust behaviors accordingly.  Hopefully this study will not only ease fears of becoming pregnancy for want-to-be mothers, but will encourage them to relax more after the child is born. 

After decades of being told that the drug experimentation of the 60s and 70s was a bad thing, it may just seem that something good has come out of it after all.  Last week the results of a small-scale study done at the University of Arizona was published showing that psilocybin erased the symptoms of OCD sufferers in every case. 

Now, as noted, this was a very small scale study — in fact there were only nine patients included.  And, to be even more clear, the purpose of the study was not to test the effectiveness of psilocybin, but only to test it’s safety for use on human subjects.  However, the complete reversal of compulsive symptoms in 100% of the patients (some extremely severe, some less so) is something worth noting.  Hopefully the researchers will push forward quickly to a larger scale study.  Sure, there are a lot of things to consider before releasing hallucinogenic drugs back to the public (including addiction, tolerance build-up, etc.), but these results appear extremely promising.  Here’s hoping they provide the breakthrough that OCD sufferers have been waiting for.