The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Prozac is Risky for Children Too (BBC News UK 12/10/2004)
This article mentions how it is now being discovered that there is no SSRI that is safe for children although the drug companies are disputing this decision.
I have written about how all disorders are caused by collections of stress in the system and that the current treatments always add stress to the system. Inherent in the way the nervous system works is that any subset that becomes stressed will become over-sensitive in regards whatever realm is being dealt with by that part of the system. (Depression involves the highest levels of processing - emotion, the calculation of all the different realms of information into the highest levels of emergent information - which is the switchboard of the brain where there is the greatest amount of connectivity to the largest number of different regions of the brain.) That part of the brain that is the most sensitive, or the most pained, is closest to becoming numb. Stress leads to greater and greater sensitivity until shutdown occurs and numbness results in that subset.
Antidepressants all work by increasing this same stress in a way that is focused to the part of the brain with these many connections so that the stressed parts of the brain that are most sensitive react to the inhibitory drugs by going into a coma or numbness of that subset. (Pain is relieved when this subset shuts down, but a portion of function is lost as well.) The greater the depression (or the greater the collection of stress) the more relief from pain will occur with the inhibitory drug (SSRI) but a healthier brain will not get relief from pain as quickly, it will feel greater and greater pain for a longer period because a greater amount of stress needs to be added to shut down the subset. But the drug is not particular to just that group of cells as drugs effect the whole brain, so the stress increases in parts of the brain that are not going to shut off and give relief as a result.
The older you get the more stressed you get. A child is likely to have less stress in the system than an older person, so a treatment that adds stress to shut off stressed subsets of the system will be more likely to cause longer periods of increased pain to patients without as much stress in their system. So, statistically, more of the youthful patients will have increased risk of suicide taking such drugs. This is information to help us understand that these treatments always get the results they do by making the brains worse - by increasing the stress in the system that was the cause of the disorder in the first place.
The article describes a mess of argument coming from the drug companies about how they don't recommend the drugs for children anyway (although they are quietly encouraging the doctors who are prescribing these drugs to children with greater and greater frequency) and defenses about how suicide is a product of depression that is being treated and the drug may not be to blame. (Statistics being avoided in this case when the statistics are not convenient.)
It should also be noted that all drugs of any kind change the environment of the brain and have an effect on development. The younger you are, the more flexible your brain is and the more the brain is effected in a permanent way by the unnatural changes caused by using a medication or drug. The older you are the less permanent change in the wiring of your brain results from the use of these drugs. They cause changes in development of the brain in all patients, but more interference with development in the young.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
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