All the serotonin was for nought

So, how about those SSRIs? What fucking gets me about this story, this bit of research, is that it's not really research, beakers-and-burners-speaking. It's a literature review - going over the results of existing clinical trials, either published ones or unpublished ones that had been obtained through that delightful Freedom of Information Act. In other words, the fact that SSRIs don't work except for the most depressed people should be old news. Doctors need to present their excuses for not being aware of this news and for massively overprescribing that shit.

It's nice that the UK health minister was quick on the uptake in terms of announcing injecting all those talky-therapists into the system over the next few years. Which boils down to how this is actually all about me. It's making me think again that Jung school might be viable for me, if public funding changes and the talky therapy starts being a right under a viable health system instead of being a bourgeois institution wherein I'd have to listen to bourgeois people like me talk about their bourgeois problems all day while there are children starving in Africa and women being marginalized in council flats.

Notice I linked to The Independent. It's finally happened. I've turned to reading the last pinko mainstream paper in the Anglophone world, and a kind of boring one at that, because The Guardian has just got too fucking stupid. And it was an article about this issue that tipped me over the annoyance edge. First suggesting the study was only about one brand in the headline (it's also about your old friend Effexor, Baywatch, among others), and then this retardment of a paragraph:

"The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better."

Fuck, that's ugly. Ugly. If I wanted ugly, I'd go to work and write an industrial market report for a European ESL audience. In fact, I don't want ugly, but I have to do that now anyways. So the last thing I need is the fucking Guardian uglifying my life even more.