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And this analysis of oversight and the possible life ruining disasters that ensued is truly fascinating and somewhat terrifying as well. Forgot to mention that.

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Thanks! Feel free to share with your friends or enemies

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So ambien is not prescribed anymore? You are talking about it in the past tense.

The problem with looking at mental illness apart from insomnia is you cannot tell if you are going extra crazy from not sleeping or if you don't sleep because you are going crazy. Of course people with severe insomnia are likely to

have mental illness but the things that crop up

when you get severe insomnia can be way outside the normal range of your standing illness.

Perhaps this is your point.

One becomes quite desperate if one never sleeps. Oh, the stories I could tell. But it's horrible to even remember.

Ambien seemed an essential thing for me during the period I took it. I was surprised to discover much later you can get high from it. I still don't know how. If it didn't work to help me sleep, then it would not feel like anything much. I would just stay awake.

I wasn't crazy about it because it made me extremely spacey the next day, even worse than not sleeping. However, it did help me sleep more than I was usually able to without it.

Because I seem to have solved this problem (though I still don't sleep normally, I don't go days and days unable to sleep) I don't know what is done for people with this affliction these days.

I hope to God there's something else for them.

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It's still very much prescribed. The story is my mind is that they determined "safe" in people who weren't at risk of psychiatric illness. Then, in the real world, it is much less safe and driving death by suicide. They hyped safety and didn't include assessment of the risk in most peoples who really, really need that extra sleep

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Extremely disturbing. I was at risk I guess but am perhaps wary of prescription drugs because it was extremely hard to function during that period so anything that appeared to churn or disrupt my brain more was something I would be a little afraid of. But sometimes you may not realize it's the medication causing the churn or disruption. Or you are simply having such a bad time you get desperate and use it anyway.

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Every "risk in a report" is a person. And a life. And heartbreak. Risk at scale is heartbreak up close

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Very important to remember. It's ruining many lives.

A problem is that so

much of this mental illness--not just as a cause but the degree as well--is environmental. Then people take pills to survive this harmful environment. And prescribers can't always protect us because sometimes if we can't get the medication, we fear we cannot survive the environment...or we'll do very poorly as we've already started a downward slide.

But changing the environment seems impossible so the market for the pills will be endless. The money made will be astronomical.

And sometimes they work. Often not really, only as a need created by screwy background conditions. We seek treatment for many things we might otherwise manage in a different context than our current society.

It's very irresponsible to ignore the effects on individuals, as you are saying, but the incentives are so large--it's very difficult for research ethics to hold against such weighty incentives--the 'need' and the profits.

Maybe I am wrong how these feedback loops work. It's a very hard problem to solve. It's tough to solve on an individual level because the need is real even if it's created on the social level.

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