Helen Fisher on Love at Ted.com

[aetrix9]

Helen Fisher talks about Infatuation, romantic love and attachment (At TED.com). Interestingly she speculates that SSRI use is hindering our society's ability to form long-term, deep attachment to other people due to modification of the serotonin system in the brain. (18:13) I don't quite agree with the generalizations she makes about maleness

Comments

SSRI

[therogon]

That is amazing. I actually read up on a drug called Wellbutrin because my pregnant now-fiancee was taking it and I wanted to know exactly what the FDA considers a safe Class-B (pregnancy safe) medicine. And this is interesting - Wellbutrin, an SSRI, isn't known to cause any physical fetal abnormalities, BUT there isn't significant statistical data to back that up because only so many of the trial test subjects (pregnant women taking the drug) reported back. Of course, I believe that the drug may indeed be PHYSICALLY harmless, but as Helen Fisher speculates, and I as well before I ever saw your post on the subject, the FDA cares about jack shit in relation to mental health it seems. Which is how I explained it to my fiancee so she would stop taking it, and now - in addition to ADD, ADHD, Autism, and a host of other high-rate of diagnosis childhood diseases, I firmly believe depression and anxiety to be on the rise do to un-conscientious medicating and a decrease in hands-on parenting (meaning parents who care about how their kids are

Re: SSRI

[aetrix9]

I think the problem isn't that the FDA doesn't care about mental health safety, but that clinical trials of drugs conducted by pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms aren't trying to answer questions about the mental health of their participants

Re: SSRI

[aetrix9]

(I'll post my three comments separately)

The problem with testing drugs on pregnant women is that we can't actually enroll pregnant women into clinical trials UNLESS the drug is specifically for pregnant women and can ONLY offer a known benefit to the pregnant woman. So if mental health drugs were specifically to treat a mental health disorder that only occurs in pregnant women, we could, after establishing a benefit of these drugs in normal people, give these drugs to pregnant women. But most drugs aren't actually tested in clinical trials that include pregnant women and our information on their safety is based, as you said above, on incidental reporting.

Re: SSRI

[aetrix9]

(3)
The toxic environment.

As much as I agree with you that there's a huge problem of broadly-defined psychaitric disorders diagnosed in children, I think attributing the causes solely to medication and parenting neglects an important aspect - the environment. We know there's more and more pollution in our environment, there's more processed foods, record high TV consumption and high divorce rates. All of this is also having an affect. It's hard as hell to raise kids now and I don't think it's all because of bad parents. It's easy to blame parents instead of making society-wide proactive changes to the environment.