However, my interest is in nutritional deficiencies and the role these play with depression.
Unfortunately, many research studies are small scale, the funding is not there, in comparison to the big boys (pharmaceuticals).
Whilst Omega 3 has had mixed reviews, depending on which research article you read, one which has particularly high levels of EPA, is found most effective.
In fact, research shows this can help with a wide range of mental health conditions in addition to behavioural problems in children.
Many psychiatrists in U.S now recommend supplementing with this, but one should research doseage, to make sure it is high enough!
An article in the Guardian highlighted research study,of Omega 3 which had beneficial outcome in a prison, on the behaviour/ violent outbursts of prisoners!
I for one, believe our modern day diets have a huge impact on our mental and emotional well -being!
Glad to say that I am noticing improvement, after being on high EPA oils for only couple of weeks!
And yes, I have taken various ant-depressants in past... some with no benefit, others with increased anger/ agitation... they do not heal!!!
Additionally, fresh fruit (vit c and enzymes), veg plus wholegrains, all help as good mood food!
TAP - Hope you keep improving, Shazza
By Dr. Mercola
Pharmaceutical companies have kept the wool pulled over Americans' eyes for many years, and had many convinced that they were working fervently to develop safe medications that would cure and prevent virtually every disease plaguing the world.But these modern-day messiahs are not the saints they would have you believe … not even close.According to Dr. David Healy, who has had the opportunity to investigate the circumstances behind the approval of certain drugs at a level that very few others have been able to, drug companies frequently hide vital information about their drugs in order to get it on the market and keep it there.The drug companies that manufacture some of the best-selling drugs in the world have committed some of the greatest crimes against human health, and all of them have at one point or another been found guilty of criminal activity—some have been nailed several times.So much so that several pharmaceutical companies are on the Top Corporate Criminals list. Yet we entrust our health, our very lives, to these same corporate "personages" who cannot be put in jail for cutting lives short, and who view billion dollar fines as nothing more than the cost of doing business.As recently as July 2, GlaxoSmithKline plead guilty to three counts of criminal misdemeanor and other civil liabilities relating to the prescription drugs Paxil, Wellbutrin and Avandia, and agreed to pay a total of $3 billion in fines.In 2009 Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion to resolve criminal and civil allegations that the company illegally promoted uses of four of its drugs, including the painkiller Bextra and their antipsychotic drug Geodon.Dr. Healy, a professor of psychiatry in North Wales and Great Britain is a former secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology and author of over 175 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other pieces, and 20 books, including Let Them Eat Prozac (one of my favorites), and Pharmageddon, another favorite.His time is divided between an active psychiatry practice and research.For example, he has studied the serotonin-uptake theory in depressed patients, and is adamant that there's no evidence indicating that depressed patients have something wrong with their serotonin system, which makes selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI's) a dubious treatment for depression. It may even be part of the equation for why some people become suicidal on SSRI's, even if they've never had such tendencies before."We've got 30 to 40 years' worth of work, and no evidence has come to light that there's anything wrong with the serotonin system in people who were depressed," he says.
Profits Before Life—The Sad History of Antidepressant Drugs
Dr. Healy's conviction that SSRI's can make people actively suicidal was originally borne directly out of his own clinical experience. Since then, the research demonstrating this link has become quite clear, and this class of drugs now carry a "black box" warning. What's really infuriating though is the evidence that has since emerged showing that pharmaceutical companies knew about it, and hid it, and it wasn't until it became an obvious issue in clinical practice that a warning was finally issued. People literally lost their lives because these companies didn't want to risk sluggish sales."I got involved as an expert witness in some legal cases that involved these drugs," Dr. Healy explains. "When you get involved as an expert witness in legal cases, you get to go behind the scenes. You get to go into the company archives, and you get to see what the clinical trials really showed, and what the company personnel really thought about the issues.Then it was clear that the trials also really showed those problems. It was clear that the companies knew there was a problem, and they were in the business of trying to hush the whole thing up.... The regulators also clearly knew there was a problem, I would say from very early on. They may well have known there was a problem even before the drugs came to the market. They certainly knew there was a problem shortly after Prozac was launched and a great number of people complained about the fact that they had a problem on this drug.When they looked at the data – the kinds of data that the FDA, for instance, would have been able to see when they held the first public meeting about whether SSRI drugs, Prozac in particular, could cause people to become suicidal – they had a lot of data that the rest of us didn't have. They had data on the other SSRIs that haven't yet been marketed.... I'm sure it was very clear to them then that the SSRIs can cause people to become suicidal."Publicly, the FDA argued that putting a warning on the drug might deter people from treatment, so by doing the right thing, we might end up with a detrimental outcome. However, no one addressed the fact that not putting a warning on the drug might make more people use them, hence killing more people, more indiscriminately. This is exactly the situation we're dealing with now. Even with the warning, antidepressants are prescribed more or less willy-nilly, for everything from anxiety to pain, high blood pressure, and insomnia—minor ailments that in NO WAY warrant such a huge risk."[The information] the FDA had points very clearly not just to the fact that [SSRI] drugs can cause a problem, but that on balance, they harm more people than they help," Dr. Healy says. "How the FDA squared this, I'm not sure."
SSRI's Likely Harm More People than They Help
In addition to suicidal thoughts and behavior, there also seems to be an association between antidepressants and other violent behaviors, such as homicides and school shootings. Unfortunately, while suicide has become a well-established (yet oft-ignored) side effect, the data on other types of violence is, again, being hidden."We haven't had hearings about this issue," Dr. Healy says. "People haven't had access to the data. There's been no publications around it. This is one of the biggest problems on which there's a huge amount of data, but to which we've got little or no access."