Lexapro

[👁️👃👁️]

Meditation works as well as Lexapro for treating anxiety: study

Mindfulness meditation worked as well as a standard drug for treating anxiety in the first head-to-head comparison.

nypost.com

 

[UpsideDownFace]

I take Lexapro so I found this interesting, but I think I rather swallow a quick pill than spend hours meditating lol so I'll pass for now.

 

[Rounded Agony]

Not surprising. Overprescription is a real and massive problem. As it says in the article, "Dr. Scott Krakower, a psychiatrist at Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York, said mindfulness treatments often work best for mildly anxious patients. He prescribes them with medication for patients with more severe anxiety." Sadly drugs should not be a first line option for people not as fucked up as many of us are. On the flipside, equally sad that meditation often does jack shit for people as fucked up as many of us are, haha.

Also interesting was this comment: "This is because Lexapro is an SSRI. New research has found that low serotonin levels are not responsible for depression, so it doesn't work on half the people who take it for that." Of course there's no source, but I read something similar recently about how severe/long-term/chronic depression actually screws up dopamine pathways and has nothing to do with serotonin.

 

[GrumpyFrog]

I think the most interesting part of this article is the paragraph at the end:

"Cannistraro, 52, has generalized anxiety disorder and has never taken medication for it. She was a single mom working in sales during that earlier study — circumstances that made life particularly stressful, she said. She has since married, switched jobs, and feels less anxious though still uses mindfulness techniques."
In other words "Mindfulness meditation works as well as Lexapro for anxiety. By which we mean they both kind of do something, but aren't really super helpful. Having less shitty life circumstances, however, seems to have a great potential for improving ones mental health significantly without any pills!".
And that makes sense.

I also like that, despite the statement, in the header of the article, it acknowledges that:
- A significant portion of patients not only didn't experience any improvement from meditation, but actually got worse.
- Choosing meditation and mindfulness over meds is recommended to people with "mild garden variety anxiety", not to people with "severe mentally ill person anxiety"
- Most people ain't got no time for meditating for hours anyway.

Overall, I'd say I'm not very surprised with the results of this study. On one hand, it really does seem that many people that simply have anxiety due to high levels of stress in their lives are needlessly medicated and suffer from side effects when they could have as much improvement from techniques such as mindfulness, and they aren't going to be completely anxiety-free unless the factors that stress them out are removed from their lives anyway. On other hand, meditation isn't going to help much with severe anxiety and it seems like SSRIs don't help much with that too, and that's sad.