[throw18376]

this is more or less exactly what i was trying to say. for most people SSRIs are safe, they experience manageable side effects and little health risk. psychedelics and dissociatives seem like they must be really drastic and risky. but actually SSRIs are pretty risky too, there are all these terrible low-probability outcomes.

so it's good we have all options, but ideally we'd have a better way of judging who is safest with which treatment.

[BjoernKW]

With SSRIs you have a one in three chance for any number of the following side effects; many of them permanent, even after discontinuing medication (if you actually manage to do so, since SSRI come with severe withdrawal symptoms):

- sexual dysfunction

- loss of emotion and creativity

- drowsiness

- insomnia (including real fun stuff like night terrors)

- fatigue

- nausea

- tremors

I'd hardly call that safe or manageable.

With even the most potent psychedelics such as LSD, on the other hand, there's merely a one in thousand chance for severe side effects.

I'd go as far as prohibiting the prescription of SSRIs for all but the most severe cases (such as a severe depression where the patient is actually suicidal). For everything else these drugs are commonly used for, e.g., mild depression, OCD, or IBS, there are other - in many cases better - options with far less devastating (if any) adverse effects.

[Capricorn2481]

> many of them permanent

Almost none of these would be permanent, and you certainly don't have a 1 in 3 chance of them being permanent. Where did you get that number?

> With even the most potent psychedelics such as LSD, on the other hand, there's merely a one in thousand chance for severe side effects.

This is fucking nuts. We're in a thread about how taking too much can clearly cause weeks of psychosis, and how easy it is to do that. There's nothing wrong with warning about the risks of SSRIs, but to claim you have a 1 in 3 chance of having permanent nausea while, in the same breath, claiming psychedelics are 100x safer, is beyond irresponsible.