Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Ecock.

For this last mini episode of Season 2, I present to you everything, well, maybe not everything, but a lot of the important,

relevant, and interesting stuff about psychiatric meds, all in under 20 minutes.

Here we go.

First thing to clarify, the categories under which we group psychiatric meds are a total mess and are often confusing or flat out wrong.

Many meds that are commonly called antidepressants are not, in fact, antidepressants.

Most of the so-called mood stabilizers can help to prevent or treat manic symptoms or agitation, but they typically do

little to prevent or treat depression, which then actually makes them anti-manic agents,

not bona fide mood stabilizers. And many of the newer atypical antipsychotics do little to

treat severe psychosis, but are often quite helpful for depression

and or mania. A confusing start I know, but I think things will get clear as we go. First, let's

start with the meds which revolutionized psychiatry in the early 90s, the SSRIs or selective serotonin

re-uptake inhibitors. Prior to the SSRIs, we had a number of

effective medications such as the tricyclic antidepressants and the MAO inhibitors, but these

meds tended to have a number of serious side effects and were very deadly in overdose.

The SSRIs were the first generally safe and effective psych meds.

But for a complicated set of reasons, they were quickly branded as antidepressants,

even though they tend to do very little for most types of depression,

save postpartum depression or depression arising out of neuroticism or severe anxiety.

The SSRIs are primarily anxiety meds.

They are anti-rumination and anti-panic meds.

They work both on above the neck and below-the-neck anxiety, though, interestingly,

...