Manic-depressive illness

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nicotine is a mood stabilizer in people with depression and bipolar disorder Citations, please? I have the best regarded textbook on bipolar disorder http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... at hand as I type this, and there is no recommendation of nicotine for any patient there. I'm quite sure that "mood stabilizer" is an incorrect characterization of the drug effect of nicotine. Nicotine has very harmful effects on the personalities of long-term users. I've seen too many examples in the previous generation to recommend it to anyone in my generation. One study on harm of smoking: Socioeconomic Status, Smoking, and Health: A Test of Competing Theories of Cumulative Advantage # Fred C. Pampel and Richard G. Rogers # Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 306-321 One study on personali…

lithium guarantees irreversible organ damage Kay Redfield Jamison has been on lithium for a long time and credits it with saving her life. Lithium does have some nasty side effects and not all patients who start with it stay on it. Lithium does need to be used with medical supervision, as its "therapeutic range" is narrow. It is incorrect that patients using mood stabilizing medications lack normal emotional affect. What they are often able to achieve, with differing patients benefitting more or less from differing medications, is freedom from ENDOGENEOUS mood variation unconnected to life events, and a return to the normal functioning of the human mood system as a response to what is objectively happening to the patient. Investigation of long-term treatment effects of lithium on the human brain reported in the primary sources cited in th…

…hat it takes nearly a billion dollars to bring a drug to market, so if the public discovers a new use of equivalent efficacy for a natural treatment or a drug already in the public domain for less than a billion dollars it is a benefit. That's a very good point. Economic issues matter. What I would like to know more about is whether there has ever been, or ever will be, an "alternative" therapy of comparable safety and effectiveness that will come to market at less research expenditure than a "big pharma/mainstream medicine" therapy for the same condition. Human subject safety and effectiveness studies are inherently expensive, and until they are done, it is not clear that two therapies from two different paradigms of treatment are comparable at all. Thanks for the other link about antidepressant drugs. The best considered view of the aut…

I have seen a different summary of (less recent) research in the second edition of the Goodwin and Jamison textbook, http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... confirming that sleep deprivation itself (without medication) can alleviate depression--but also precipitate mania in bipolar patients. Studies of brain wave patterns during sleep and circadian rhythms of mood disorder patients are numerous and are still suggesting treatment strategies, including choice of particular pharmacologic measures for particular patients, an issue that needs much more investigation.

How do you know this? I don't know how the participant to whom you are replying knows what his post reported, but concern about suicide is definitely one of the motivations for urging more treatment for depression. An organization for suicide prevention http://www.save.org/ puts up billboards in my town to remind family members to have their depressed relatives treated for depression, saying that untreated depression is the main risk factor for suicide. That factual statement is correct, as I can verify from having read many books by psychologists or medical doctors about mood disorders. I got into this reading back in the 1990s as part of studying suicide risk in different cultures, http://learninfreedom.org/suicide.html and research on this issue continues to be replicated across many studies with different investigators in different pl…

…has been studied at book length. The most authoritative of the several books on that issue is by psychologist (and mood disorder patient) Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic... and co-author of the definitive text on manic-depressive illness http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... who has thought out loud in her writings over the years about whether treatments for depression that help suffering people may also deprive society of creative output. Her current thinking on the issue--and she takes lithium herself every day--is that the best-evidenced mood-stabilizing treatments for mood disorders are helpful to patients and increase rather than decrease their ability to contribute useful wo…

As noted in the previous HN thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788259 that submitted this article, Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic... and co-author of the definitive text on manic-depressive illness http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... has thought out loud in her writings over the years about whether treatments for depression that help suffering people may also deprive society of creative output. Her current thinking on the issue--and she takes lithium herself every day--is that the best-evidenced mood-stabilizing treatments for mood disorders are helpful to patients and increase rather than decrease their ability to contribute useful work product to society. Her co-autho…

Yes, Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic... and co-author of the definitive text on manic-depressive illness http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... has thought out loud in her writings over the years about whether treatments for depression that help suffering people may also deprive society of creative output. Her current thinking on the issue--and she takes lithium herself every day--is that the best-evidenced mood-stabilizing treatments for mood disorders are helpful to patients and increase rather than decrease their ability to contribute useful work product to society. Her co-author, Frederick K. Goodwin, M.D., is still deeply skeptical of some antidepressant medications (e.g., the…

But we know how to build antidepressants which work on everyone. It took me a while in my offline personal life for the very evident counterexample to come to mind. In fact, it is well known that human mood can go wrong in two ways: by being too low (depression) but also by being too high (mania). To date, there isn't any medication that reliably raises the mood of individuals in normal mood states without subjecting some of those individuals to severe risk of psychotic mania. Anyone proposing policy reform as to this issue should be aware of this fact. Here are some reading references for HN participants who would like to know more about the medical research on mood disorders: Depression: Causes and Treatment, 2nd Edition http://www.amazon.com/Depression-Treatment-Aaron-T-Beck/dp/0... (a very recent book, by the inventor of cognitive the…