Quote:
Originally Posted by Drolefille
Here's how it was explained to me by several psych. professors:
First, teenagers are more likely to commit suicide in the first place. Blame the impulsiveness and lack of a fully formed brain.
Second, when you're really depressed you don't even have the energy to kill yourself.
Then you take medicine and in a few weeks you physically feel better, even though mentally you're still depressed. This is because it takes a while for the anti-depressants to build up in your system and really work.
The increase in suicides is tied to this time period where you're emotionally still in the dumps, but have more energy and are probably afraid that the medicine isn't going to help you because look, you're still depressed.
The same pattern occurs in adults who are medicated however they're more likely to "get" that the medicine takes time to work and overall less likely to kill themselves.
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I'm sure your psych professors have a better handle than I do on the symptoms and information regarding the disease, and this sounds like a perfectly plausible etiology - however, this actually doesn't sever causation issues at all - in fact, this actually serves to
enhance the causation portion, whereas most of the research will only find correlation.
So what's the conclusion? Should the kids be under lock and key until the "latency" period is over (I couldn't think of a better term there, it's pretty bad - sorry!)? I feel like these kids really need the help, but at what cost in terms of exposing them to a period of "danger" that may or may not be implicit in the treatment of the disease?
Maybe this should be another thread, but I'm not sure there's enough interest to break it out - still, it's interesting to me, and I doubt this will be the last high-profile case we hear about, unfortunately.