Common Outreach Practices May Not be Helpful in Treating Depressed Patients

By September 3, 2012July 16th, 2019Uncategorized

A new study that delves into whether common outreach depression treatments are working at preventing patients from committing suicide shows that these efforts just aren’t working. This is according to a study that was recently published in the British Medical Journal.

Most patients being treated with depression are opting for close contact, follow-up treatments and personal interaction to treat their depression, but according to researchers from Mental Health Services in the Capital Region of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen, providing high-risk patients with extra attention doesn’t do anything to curb their suicide attempts.

Researchers found no difference between patients getting standard treatment after an attempted suicide, or in their getting treated with more assertive interventions. The study was conducted with scientists monitoring data collected from 243 participants who had attempted suicide. During the study, the team checked how often patients were attempting to commit suicide while receiving treatment through one-on-one talk therapy. What they found was that the therapy wasn’t working at curbing the suicide attempts. This could significantly contradict current research that is suggesting that talk therapy is a safer and more effective depression treatment than antidepressants like Paxil and Effexor. If this study is followed, many patients could be seriously harmed by their use of antidepressants.

This research may provide some medical practitioners with the excuse they needed to abandon their currently-held notions that the dangers of antidepressant treatments like Paxil and Effexor should be ignored. Both Paxil and Effexor have been known to cause patients to suffer from violent and suicidal thoughts and behavior, as well as causing babies born to women who take the drug while pregnant to be born with birth defects, including PPHN, oral clefts, spina bifida and heart, lung and brain defects. For this reason, this new study could prove dangerous for many patients and their offspring.