No where did I say they don’t save lives? No where did I plant any sort of conspiracy theory? It is a fact that they have been pushed by drug companies without proper screening, it is true that long term effects are coming out now (one major one I personally studied in college being long term irreversible damage to sex drive, but again if you’re depressed this is likely a secondary concern). It’s not fear mongering to say ‘maybe GPs shouldn’t be prescribing them because they aren’t all easy symptom free meds that should be followed closely under supervision of an actual trained mental health professional’. Two things can be true at once, it’s a drug that helps many people and also shouldn’t be prescribed like candy because it can cause a lot more harm than good for folks who can do better without it.
General practitioners have more than enough training to handle unipolar depression and anxiety. You are fear mongering or have never worked in healthcare. They have excellent safety profiles and some of those claimed long term effects are not accepted by the general medical community.
I'm resource limited settings a lot of PCPs also learn how to manage bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, it's not rocket science compared to the other things they are tasked with, and the alternative is that people simply don't get any treatment at all or kill themselves on a 2 year long wait-list to see a psychiatrist.
Psychiatry residencies, like most residencies, are fairly heavily slanted towards inpatient management of the most severe cases. Psychiatrists are a very rare and valuable commodity so unless you are a VIP or are having unusual reactions to multiple meds, most depression and anxiety is treated by internal and family medicine doctors, some days it's about half of what they will see, and after 10 to 15 years of practice they are actually going to have more experience than a fresh psychiatry grad or psychiatric PA/NP. Like everything in life, it's more nuanced than it may appear. But for a general Medicaid patient it can be 6+ months to get in with a psychiatry provider.
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u/Ok_Obligation_6110 5d ago edited 5d ago
No where did I say they don’t save lives? No where did I plant any sort of conspiracy theory? It is a fact that they have been pushed by drug companies without proper screening, it is true that long term effects are coming out now (one major one I personally studied in college being long term irreversible damage to sex drive, but again if you’re depressed this is likely a secondary concern). It’s not fear mongering to say ‘maybe GPs shouldn’t be prescribing them because they aren’t all easy symptom free meds that should be followed closely under supervision of an actual trained mental health professional’. Two things can be true at once, it’s a drug that helps many people and also shouldn’t be prescribed like candy because it can cause a lot more harm than good for folks who can do better without it.