Change Your Brain Every Day - Taking Antidepressants: The Pros & Cons

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

For some people, the choice to take antidepressants leads to a happier, healthier quality of life. For others, it only makes things worse. Therefore it’s crucial to understand the benefits and drawbacks of choosing this route of treatment. In the first episode of a series on antidepressants, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen arm you with the information you need to decide if antidepressants are the right choice for you or your loved one.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back.

This is going to be depression week and things you can do and maybe some things you shouldn't do. Depression is the number one illness. So not just mental illness, it is the number one most expensive illness worldwide and seems to be increasing despite the fact that the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed. It's quadrupled since 1987 when Prozac was first released. So there seems to be a bit of a disconnection between the medications can just solve everything. But you have a review.

We haven't read a review in a while. This says, I really appreciate this podcast on brain health. Years ago, I was misdiagnosed as bipolar, and it seems like ever since then I'm trying hard through a healthy lifestyle to live optimally. This is a great short but thorough podcast, and you always walk away with at least one tip for the day to be mentally or physically healthy.

I wish insurance covered brain scans because it would be awfully useful for everybody to see why we are the way we are. From Ocean Bliss 770. Doesn't insurance cover more now? Well, we actually did a study of the patients who came to Amen Clinics and of the people that submitted it to insurance, 60% of them got some reimbursement. Right, so it's more than people think. That imaging is just so important. But thank you for the review. And if you leave a review at brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, we'll actually enter you into a raffle to win a signed copy of one of Tana's cookbooks. We also want you, you know, what's the one thing

you're going to learn from this podcast? Post it on any of your social media sites and hashtag Brain Warriors Way podcast. Yep. So yeah, let's talk about depression. I'm really curious, as someone who suffered from depression, and we see people every day, thousands of them a month that are suffering. There's so many questions and over the next week, let's through out this week, let's talk about depression, the causes, what you can do, but also what's the connection between depression and anxiety? How do antidepressants change your personality? And is it a good idea or a bad idea? So let's, let's talk about it. Well, I had a girl last night I was seeing

who was struggling with depression. And she said the school counselor told her about antidepressants. And I said, well, I said, let's talk about it. And head to head, omega-3 fatty acids versus Prozac in a study from New Zealand, omega-3 fatty acids were actually more effective. Prozac was effective 51% of the time. The omega-3 fatty acid EPA was effective 57% of the time. And then when they were used together, they were actually, it had a higher level. So also head-to-head against exercise, walking like you're late

four times a week, head-to-head against Zoloft, another good antidepressant. They were equally effective at 12 weeks. And at 10 months, exercise beat the socks off Zoloft. Head-to-head against cognitive behavior therapy against antidepressants found to be equally effective. So we always talk about not believing every stupid thing you think. And so, and then I told the girl and she's 15, I'm like, antidepressants, they don't tell you once you start them, they're sort of hard to stop because they change your brain to need them. And yes, they can help with depression, but they tend to block all emotion.

Right. And so you are less depressed, but you're also less happy. You're also less joyful. And- No one tells you that part. The serotonin antidepressants, Prozac,il lexapro ptsd um luvox all interfere with sexual function so they make it harder to have an orgasm which um it's a little weird talking about it with with a teenager but if she's sexually, it's very important to know. And I do it because I'm not opposed to antidepressants. And I use them when appropriate.

But I always want to do the natural things first, or at least give my patients the options of doing the natural things first. And one of the things nobody ever tells you when they prescribe an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety medicine or a medicine for ADD or whatever, that they affect your insurability. Right. That they affect your ability to get health insurance,

life insurance, a pilot's license, but long-term care insurance, disability insurance. And if there's a non-medicine way to do it, isn't it smart to at least try that first? So if I had a 15-year-old, I have a 16-year-old actually, that came to me and said she was depressed, I would be very open, number one. This is what I would do, knowing what we know and what we do. I'd be very open to listening and I wouldn't shut her down. I would just want to hear what she, what's going on with her. But the last thing you should say is you have nothing to be depressed

about. Right. But, and, and the last thing I would want is a school counselor who may not have all the information telling her what she should do. It's good. She goes to the school counselor and talks to her, but giving her advice on things she may not know about, I would want to be in the know more than that. I would want to know what to tell my child. So in Brainware's way, we talked about mastery. One of the questions I would have for my child or that I would have in my own head and that I would have for you if your child is depressed, have you had their blood work done? Because you just talked about omega-3 fatty acids. They should be on fish oil if they need that, if their vitamin D is low.

If they are on birth control, they're likely to have depression. It increases their risk dramatically because it drops their vitamin B, which you can supplement. It also decreases their serotonin, but you can increase that with exercise. So mastery would teach them about what you just talked about exercise nutrition their assessment assessing their blood work so empower them with this information before you just go out and put them on an antidepressant at that age especially and again we're not anti-antidepressants it's just that they do change your brain they're hard to get off of and in the next episode I want to talk about how they change personality. And I'm really happy you brought up all the medical causes of depression

and the end of mental illness, which I would just dearly love for you to preorder. It's not going to be out until March, but it's done. It's great. And I think you'll really love it. I argue that depression really shouldn't be a diagnosis. It's not an illness. It's a cluster of symptoms that have a gazillion different causes. And having low serotonin is only one. Right. And probably one in five or one in seven. But then why did you have to get the low serotonin?

Is it birth control pills see see just just giving someone an antidepressant is like putting a band-aid over a bullet hole if you don't actually figure out what's going on so you don't know and uh as you experience low thyroid is a major cause low iron is another cause yeah Yeah, that was like Lazarus effect for me, just getting on iron. And one of her tests showed really low cholesterol, which is another cause. People get upset about high cholesterol when low cholesterol can be a problem. Well, and being put on the wrong antidepressant can be a disaster. And I learned that the hard way. Do you want to share? Yeah, why don't we share that in the next one when we talk about personality. But being put on the wrong antidepressant when someone is, well, especially

back when I was put on it and they didn't know as much about them and they were just like, oh, it helps with depression, but they weren't taking into account what type of brain you have or if you have ADD or if you have whatever, if you're more anxious brain or a more sleepy brain, they just put you on an antidepressant. And we read horror stories about people on Prozac and on different antidepressants because for some people, it was a miracle cure, but not for everyone, right? It just wasn't that way for everyone. And it's very common after people have had a head injury. And I wrote a column in the local newspaper where I lived in Northern California, the Daily Republic, for years, probably a decade. I wrote a column every week.

And I wrote a column on the connection between head trauma and suicide. And I got a call late one night from a mother who was hysterical. And so I actually stayed late to see her. And she said her 16-year-old son, who was normal and sweet and just one of her closest people in her life. And he got into a bike accident where his front tire hit a curb and he flipped over onto his forehead. And she said after that, he didn't do well in school. He was really irritable. He's very sort of angry and depressed. And at the age of 19, he shot and killed himself. And she said, do you think the head injury had anything to do? because she was really blaming herself. And it's so common. And so what happens, people have head injuries. They get sad. They get disinhibited. They get

mad. They have dark thoughts. And then they go to the pediatrician or the family practice doctor, to the psychiatrist, who this kid meets the dsm-5 criteria for major depression there's eight criteria he has seven of them and so he meets the criteria and the first thing all people do is they put people on ssris and what do sRIs do? They drop activity in the brain. They're inhibitory. So they lower activity. But what happens when you start with low activity and someone puts you on something that lowers it further is it actually disinhibits you. And you're more likely to act in ways that you normally wouldn't act and sometimes can do some really awful things, as is that happened in that case.

So the takeaway I want people to have is depression is a symptom cluster. It's not a diagnosis by itself, and we should always be searching for the cause. And one question I have is if you are suffering from depression or you have a child who's suffering from depression, have you taken them in for a full assessment? I don't mean just someone questioning them. I mean, have you gotten their blood work done? Has someone actually dug deep to figure out what the cause behind the depression could be from a physiological, biological standpoint? We talk a lot about the brain, but when we check someone out, we look at the brain, but we also look at all of these other things.

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