Citalopram Quotes

There are little wisps of jelly in a living brain. Deagle knows this well: neurons, transmitting signals - and the soul, so to speak, is somewhere in those flashes. He heard once on a science program that the spindle cell - present in humans, whales, some apes, elephants - may be at the heart of what we call our "selves." What we recognize in the mirror - that thread we follow through time that we call "me"? It's just a diatom, a paramecium, a bit of ganglia that branches and shudders assertively. A brief brain orgasm, like lightning. In short, it's all chemicals. You can regiment it easily enough: fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine, escitalopram, citalopram - the brain can be washed clean, and you can reset yourself, Ctrl+Alt+Del. You don't have to be a prisoner of your memories and emotions.

Consider, for example, the landmark 2004 study that followed several hundred patients treated with one of three popular antidepressants: Zoloft, Paxil, or Prozac. Among those who took the drugs as prescribed, only 23% were depression-free after six months of treatment. (As you might expect, patients who failed to take their meds did even worse.) And all three medications yielded roughly the same dismal results. A fluke result, perhaps? It’s actually pretty typical. The recovery rate with antidepressants in similar studies usually falls somewhere between 20% and 35%. Clinical researchers at forty-one treatment sites across the country have just completed the largest real-world study of antidepressants ever conducted, and the results fit the same overall pattern. This multimillion dollar project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Mental Health, followed about three thousand depressed patients who initially took the drug citalopram (marketed under the trade name Celexa) for about twelve weeks. By the end of that short-term treatment period, only 28% of study patients had fully recovered. The study’s 28% response rate might even be an overestimate of the medication’s true effectiveness, because patients received higher drug doses and had more frequent doctor’s visits than people do in everyday clinical practice. (In real life, insurance companies sharply restrict the frequency of “med check” follow-up appointments). Remarkably, the study’s authors—a veritable All-Star team of clinical researchers—noted that the observed 28% recovery rate was about what they had expected to see based on comparable studies. That’s right: They weren’t surprised to find that the majority of study patients failed to recover on an antidepressant. In the study’s published write-up, the researchers also raised a provocative question: What percentage of their patients might have recovered if they had received a sugar pill—a placebo—instead of the medication? Could it possibly have been as high as 28%?