the gist: The article is quite interesting, once you get past the I-had-a-friend-who angle that kicks it off. It’s chock-full of compelling bits of info, in addition to the title topic (like how the serotonin-levels theory came about and where it stands today).

Basically, “a seminal study in 1998, whose findings were reinforced by landmark research in The Journal of the American Medical Association” in Dec 2009, found that while anti-depressants are effective “in that they lift depression in most patients … that benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill—a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.”

It’s a four-page article, so there are plenty of details. Some parts I found particularly interesting, both paraphrasing and quoting:

• When one of the new study’s authors (psychology researcher Irving Kirsch) collected inital data in 1998, about 40 percent of the clinical trials from 47 company-sponsored studies—on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Serzone, and Celexahad—had never been published. That is significantly higher than for other classes of drugs, says Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco; overall, 22 percent of clinical trials of drugs are not published. “By and large,” says Kirsch, “the unpublished studies were those that had failed to show a significant benefit from taking the actual drug.”
  
• In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, [Kirsch] and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. In combined published and unpublished studies, about 82 percent of the response to antidepressants had also been achieved by a dummy pill (as opposed to the 75 percent he had calculated from only published studies).
• The FDA requires two well-designed clinical trials showing a drug is more effective than a placebo. That’s two, period—even if many more studies show no such effectiveness. And the size of the “more effective” doesn’t much matter, as long as it is statistically significant.”
  
• In an analysis of six large experiments in which, as usual, depressed patients received either a placebo or an active drug, the true drug effect—that is, in addition to the placebo effect—was “nonexistent to negligible” in patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression. Only in patients with very severe symptoms (scoring 23 or above on the standard scale) was there a statistically significant drug benefit.
  
• In the U.S., most patients with depression are treated by primary-care doctors, not psychiatrists. The latter are in short supply, especially outside cities and especially for children and adolescents. Some insurance plans discourage such care, and some psychiatrists do not accept insurance.

This site also presented me with a new challenge … a cheap-if-not-free mailing list system. My first (and fall-back) plan was phplist, which I use for {open}’s mailing list, but since I’m a big fan of giving my non-techie clients one super-simple admin interface to work through, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to find a *great* mailing list Wordpress plugin to use. And I did!! MailPress is pretty fantastic. Configuring it is a bit technical (and the automated-mail feature can be a bit trigger-happy, which I discovered upon waking up the morning after installing it, so caution is warranted), but the KEY part is that *using* it it pretty freakin’ simple! Yay!

This project was especially close to my heart for a two reasons (besides the MailPress discovery and the joy of building a theme from a pretty design).

1) Buddy Wakefield is a truly inspiring poet, and it was great to be able to work with him and help him sculpt his web presence. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him perform multiple times, at {open}, at the Lightbulb Mouth Radio Hour, and at the ever-so-great Poetry Cruise with the ineffable Derrick Brown. A line from one of his poems has been resonating in my head since last summer.

2) As soon as the site was finished, Buddy took off on tour with none other than Ms. Ani Difranco, opening for her spring 2010 tour. Now, there aren’t that many people living I consider to be role models, but Ani has been a huge influence in my life; not just through her songs, which form a significantly large part of my life’s soundtrack (my plays of Dilate alone rivals any Beatles album I’ve ever had), but as an example of a truly independent businesswoman, who took control of her life and her art, created her own company (and works with amazing people like Buddy), and lives for so much more than money and precedent. She played at the Long Beach Convention Center (the Terrace Theater or one of those) right after I opened {open}, and the fact that I only had to walk down the street to see Ani Difranco was a truly symbolic experience for me (I’m sappy like that). Anyway, it’s always been my pie-in-the-sky dream to have Ani play {open} … and the fact that I am thismuch closer to even that possibility …. well, it’s just really, really, reallllllly rad.

an instinctive stretching, as on awakening or while yawning

It was remarkably easy in the beginning, to reach into memories of old discussions and pull out lines i’ve heard … and i had done a quick 5 minute net search on the stance … but 20 minutes into the half hour discussion, i was drawing blanks. these women, educated, i’m sure, but far from authorities, were making excellent points … in my position i kept having to beat the drum of the government must protect the life of a child, why they argued the defifitno of life was the moral decision best left to the woman … and i just found myself wondering … how do people who feel so strongly about this confront this simple and unadulterated logic that the government should not be able to force women to do something they do not want to do, i.e. have a full term pregnancy?

moral issues aside, that’s the crux. it was very interesting. although it felt weird to be saying things i didn’t believe, whether or not it was for a good cause.

spacing.

so i’ve got that no-sleep aura happening, plus i’m slightly spooked from having watched the ring 2 — when *will* i learn to not watch horror movies?

i have a meeting with my project group in half an hour, which i shouldn’t be late to, as i’ve been late to the last three … and all i want to do on my day off is work to catch up …

i like brianna’s days better than mine. and i keep trying to figure out how to make it so i like my days better.

i have a meeting tomorrow i need to be prepping for!

later.

at home.

while lying on my bed.

i love laptops.