There has been a phenomenal positive shift in his behavior since he started medication. All that said, another commenter pointed out that the study specifically says that Prozac is no better than placebo for depression, which is similar to but distinct from anxiety, which is what my son is being treated for. My mom and I were both diagnosed with depression, but anxiety may be more accurate -- I'm not sure.
It sounds like you made a wise decision given your personal and family history and your son is benefiting. Kudos.
I wish there were a way to shortcut this process for society so that so many people didn't need to either go through a similar experience personally to have such an epiphany, or worse, never have it at all. (Speaking not only about medication for kids, but other polarizing issues as well.)
I wish this were true, but its not even close. I wonder how your kids will react when they move away, and you're not around to police their emotional expression. If they're like me, they will promptly collapse into paralysis and self-destruction.
I strongly suggest that you frequently give your kids long stretches of time (months) to practice regulating themselves, without your interference.
And if they have anxiety or depression, please let them see a professional. If my parents had noticed the signs earlier, they would have saved me decades of pain.
This sounds horrible. If I weren't depressed or anxious, being told that I wasn't ever permitted to be lazy or say that I was bored would make me so; and, if I were, then being told that I was lazy and hopeless would make it worse.
Seems like a really great way to have your kids feel guilty about the way they feel and then not talk to you about it.
Maybe they act like being hopeful because they are afraid of you. If you were my parent, chances are I would.
Attitude
Others have responded to the depression/laziness part -- I was wondering if you could clarify what you mean by anxiety being caused by hopelessness? To my way of thinking hopelessness and depression have a lot of overlap, but anxiety not so much... It's more like a feeling of dread.
Fear of the dentist is common but understanding that the inconvenience is required for the desired outcome, the reason for the suffering, there is a hope to look to allowing the suffering to have meaning.
Do you really believe this, or do you believe your children aren't depressed? Your comment is not in accordance with science. Depression is a complex topic. I'm having trouble imagining a way to be more wrong. Is this satire?
While pizzafeelsright gets heavily downvoted, I think their may be some (dark) truth behind it: if you weren't lazy, you would sommit suicide instead of living a depressed life. :-(
I also have a feeling that there might be another (dark) truth behind the link between anxiety and hopelessness.
No offense, but teaching your kids this kind of nonsense is borderline abusive. It's so far away from so many people's experiences, and is just plain wrong. I hope you can recognize how damaging this could be for your kids down the road.
It could be easy for a kid to feel depressed when they're either the source or the victim of all the world's problems only being 7 years in
It’s also impossible to to talk about idk Columbus, slavery, Great Britain, or the founding of America (and like ya know, the treatment of native Americans) without ascribing some blame to the people responsible…who were by and large “white”. We also talk about how any judgement based on skin, appearance, gender, ethnicity, or religion, is flat out wrong.
There is however also benefit in updating your priors as new research comes out. I won't say this particular research discounts your experience. But maybe some day your son will prefer a different medication.
You said elsewhere that there were "no known long-term side effects". Aside from that not being universally true for any drug I've ever personally researched, no side effect is more long-term than suicide.
Me and my mom are on identical doses of Prozac to treat very similar symptoms.
We consulted with a child therapist, a pediatrician, and a psychiatrist.
Kudos to you; you're inspiring me to find more grace in my life, but don't feel obligated to respond to these people who are trying only to bring people down.
It’s the Prozac, obviously /s
It really does take a lot to be able to deal with all the comments they’re getting, and I know from my own experience that once you’re living a life of both seeing and experiencing struggles with mental health, it becomes something you adapt to rather quickly.
Have some empathy.
By all means, Google whatever you like, but if you show up to a doctors office waving WebMD sheets in a medical professionals face, you are going to be mocked and you deserve it.
The last few years have been a proof that even the "experts" are following strong political or personal ideology.
Also we don't live in the 18th century anymore. A lot of knowledge (especially around medicine) is open to the world. People can read papers, understand research etc.
Few if any non-medical people can read medical papers and make sense of what they say. There is simply far too much context to evaluate such papers, especially in the cases of complex medical conditions.
Then he should cite the papers, point out the research, etc. Rather than dismissing the entire discipline and all its practitioners with a wave of the "common-sense mental illness isn't real" wand.
It's so common it's a trope. "Antidepressants don't work" says the scientists testing antidepressants on things they're not supposed to work on.
Studies repeated with just major depression all conclude antidepressants are better than a placebo.
Click through the article to the study and you'll find they did not limit their study to must major
There’s an interesting theory lately [0] that the antidepressant effect of SSRIs is actually unrelated to its effect on serotonin. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that this is completely true: serotonin has nothing to do with depression, increasing serotonin levels is useless for treating depression, and everything everyone has ever claimed about chemical imbalances causing depression is flat-out wrong.
If so, pharma companies should probably try to develop different drugs instead of new SSRIs. But it does not follow that a patient with depression ought not to take an SSRI. That would be like saying that taking aspirin for aches has been completely debunked because there is no connection between aches and aspirin’s anticoagulant effect.
[0] See, for example, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/trkb-bdnf-and-depr...
Pretty weird the article we're commenting on about Prozac being no better than placebo for children is just now coming out when it was already approved for use in children, then.
It most certainly has not been debunked and mind altering chemicals most certainly do work.
SSRIs have _questionable_ efficacy but that's not the same as proven to have none, which is an exceptionally high bar.
This is close minded dogma no better a religion.
(I have many first-hand and second-hand experiences.)
I agree with this.
I've learned a lot through life, one thing I've learned is about detrimental long term physical and even social effects of antidepressants, and other medications like adderal. Both I used to take.
At this point in my life, if I realized my parents gave me an antidepressant prescription when I was SEVEN years old because I said something stupid WHEN I WAS SEVEN I'd be very disturbed and disappointed in them, I'd definitely give both of them a solid scolding.
Before you respond to this remember I'm talking about me. Not your kid or your friends kid or your cousins kid.
EDIT: Quick edit to add when I was a kid I was a total outcast, I was weird, anxious, and definitely often depressed. A lot of kids in my religious schooling systems were.
If my parents said this to me the moment I realized what I was on and that I had to deal with coming off of it late in life I would be beside myself.
I'd probably also look up the doctor that encouraged my parents to put their seven year old on SSRIs so I could warn friends.
These huge lists of side effects are haunting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine
If my parents were like "uh well I had virtually no symptoms" I'd lose my mind!
Life sucks, I'm depressed all the time, kids are depressed all the time. There's material everywhere explaining a decline in general mental health. I'm happy and lucky that when my parents (or the one that was paying attention, who was certainly also depressed) noticed I was depressed or sad during a few events, some long lasting, they asked me about it, listened to me, and did their best to give me advice instead of giving up when I was seven and giving me drugs.
Remember when replying, this post has all been about myself, a victim of depression.
This decision was made collectively by me, my wife, our pediatrician, the child therapist, the psychiatrist, and for what it's worth also my son. We did extensive research. You may disagree with our decision, but please don't cast aspersions on how much we care.
Medicine is advancing. We're increasingly able to understand and adjust dysfunctions that cause major, negative quality of life impacts. These dysfunctions have always existed, we're just getting better at finding ways to help people work through it.
I trust a cohort of scientists significantly more than anonymous strangers online, and you should too.
NONE of the current theories being experimented with on patients have a concrete, proven scientific basis with some such as the decades-long SSRI scam have actively harmed patients and created physical dependence/addiction and actively causing harm to patients and their families (eg, SSRI-induced suicides).
I trust science, but I don't trust scientists any more than I trust any other human with their money, career, and reputation on the line. I trust the FDA and pharmaceutical company ethics even less (eg, Bayer knowingly selling HIV-infested drugs to hemophiliacs, saying Oxycotin is non-addictive, or the revolving door that allows non-working SSRIs to be released and marketed as working despite all evidence to the contrary).
50 years ago many people with mental illness would go undiagnosed. They would instead self-medicate through alcohol, illicit drugs, or risky behavior and die far too young after leading miserable lives.
50 years ago was 1975. It wasn’t the dark ages and the worst cases were already being moved to asylums for at least 150 years before that.
Suicide in particular is hard to hide any suicide rates are going up despite treatment. If mental illness rates are the same as 50 years ago and more people are getting effective treatment, we’d expect per capita rates to decrease.
Impoverished third world countries where people have nothing but problems almost universally have higher reported happiness and less suicide.
Severe mental health issues don’t just go away because you drink and if alcohol could suppress the problems, we’d never have made treatments to begin with.
In terms of “self medicating” with drugs, we’re hitting an all-time high (pun intended). Risky and self destructive behavior is also way up as evidence with our prison systems overflowing.
Nothing indicates to me that mental health is improving and everything seems to indicate it getting worse despite all the attempted interventions.
As someone who lived through that, I refuse to let him. All of memories of school are just feeling anxious about everything, just tight and suffocated, always in a panic. I started living when I started taking anxiety pills at 39 years old, and I can see my 2 year old having the exact same anxiety ticks and fits I have.
I don't know at what age I'll medicate him, but I'll do it as soon as I notice he isn't coping and happy anymore.
Horrifying is forcing him to experience that because you can't comprehend us.
Do you think that there is a way to treat the underlying cause and not the symptoms?
I was on medication during that period and it complemented my practice, provided a stable base to apply meditation and other recovery protocols.
We can say certain behaviors, experiences, illnesses and some genetic identifiers can trigger the conditions, but not the underlying cause. We can say things like some therapy and medication can help with the illness, but not the cause.
Not to trivialize therapy, but for many illnesses, not just mental, a portion of it can be described as ways of learning to live with the illness, not necessarily treating the underlying cause.
Yeah, I feel like it's fair to describe the cognitive behavioral model. We're not necessarily looking for the cause of these thoughts and beliefs, tho they may come up, we're simply going to challenge them at face value and reinterpret the situation.
Often, people react to the concept of a thing rather than the ground reality of life and its complexities of lived experience. Most people also extrapolate (in either direction) others' lived experiences based on their learnings, understandings, pasts and future ambitions. In this case especially, there's also added stigma around mental health, antidepressants and the locus of personal responsibility when it comes to mental health issues.
The _concept_ of a child on antidepressants suspends trust in parents, that's often assumed and unquestioned depending, depending on the child's age. Maybe close to 18yo? Supportive parents. 7yo? Horrible parents. I'd argue it also tends to suspend critical thinking and introduces an unshakeable bias, that a child of 7yo _never [ever]_ needs antidepressants. Why? What makes you say that? What's your evidence and reasoning?
If you feel so horrified by that, can you consider for a moment that the parents recognize the weight and gravity of this decision too? That they had to really think this through, pursue more thorough medical advice than usual, make a judgement call, and have to live through this decision throughout all their lives?
OP's response to multiple comments indicates that they did not make this decision lightly and without making sure that this was the better thing to do overall. I commend OP's openness and honesty in talking about it. It's certainly inspiring to see a parent care for their child's mental health, and not dismissing that to be "oh, the kid's just young and moody, they'll feel better tomorrow."
PS. We (as a society) are always learning more and newer things about mental health and treatments. It might look like we know a lot. Perhaps. But we also don't know so much!
Common side effects of long-term SSRI use in adults include weight gain, emotional numbing, loss of libido, and sexual dysfunction. It seems to me that anyone taking SSRIs when their brain is still developing would be more likely to have these side effects, and to have them persist after ceasing use.
It's anecdotal, but I know some people who were prescribed SSRIs during puberty. It's not possible to know how they would have turned out if they hadn't taken these drugs, but as adults I pity them. Their lack of sex drive causes relationship problems, which is especially sad since they do want children. They're starting to get older, so I doubt it'll ever happen.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_serotonin_reuptake_i...
The clinicians I've interacted with have always warned me of the possible side-effects of psychotropic medications, and said they should be notify immediately if the side-effects appear. I believe this is at least standard procedure, if not legally required?
I do have a low libido. Can't say whether or not that's due to Prozac, but regardless it hasn't negatively affected my life, probably because it was low before I met my wife. If someone enters a relationship while their libido is at one level and then during the relationship it changes considerably then I can certainly see how that could be a major challenge. That's an important thing to weigh when evaluating medication.
You are asking for evidence that does not exist because nobody has done good studies on it. That's too high of a bar. There are many drugs and life interventions that we don't have studies on regarding children, but that doesn't mean those things are safe for children. To use an example so ridiculous that we can both agree on it: There are no studies showing long term effects of fentanyl on children. Yet if some parent managed to get a fentanyl prescription for their kid, I think we would both be concerned.
Obviously I'm not implying that giving a child Prozac is as harmful as fentanyl. I'm saying that your line of reasoning proves too much. If someone did get their kid on a dangerous drug, and defended their decision by pointing out that there are no studies on children showing its long term harm, there is nothing you can say to that parent that others in this thread haven't already said to you. That should give you pause.
‘Warning: Suicidality and Antidepressant Drugs
Increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults taking antidepressants for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and other psychiatric disorders’
Read the package insert: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2011/01...
The fact that you were not informed about this should serve as proof that you cannot blindly trust what doctors tell you. They will absolutely kill you out of ignorance or incompetence, and never even realize their responsibility.
> This is one of the most shocking things I have ever read.
Good grief. I hope you're exaggerating for effect.
The subject was specifically about long term brain chemistry changes.
People committing suicide after taking it, while incredibly sad, is completely unrelated.
‘Highlights
• Antidepressant withdrawal can be severe and protracted.
• It produces characteristic physical and emotional symptoms.
• All symptoms were more severe after stopping than before starting antidepressants.
• We identified the 15 most discriminatory withdrawal symptoms in our sample.
• Withdrawal did not differ between people with physical or mental health diagnoses.’
If this guy has a non chemical cure, I'm all for it. In fact I'm actively researching children psychologists to stave off the meds as much as we can, the problem is that 99% of psychologists are quacks, so choosing them is tough.
This is horrifying.