Public resistance against SSRIs
Appears to be growing resistance against SSRIs in the public sphere lately related to long-term use and side-effects (e.g. bad "withdrawals" after years of SSRI use, PSSD). Thoughts? What were your discussions related to this? How did you approached these discussions?
Edit:
I'm not talking about individual discussions with patients to take or not take SSRI. Obvious answer: discuss risk/benefits for either choice and letting them choose.
I'm talking about when you're dealing with patients/people (or influenced greatly through proxy by people) who hold strong views against psychiatric meds, particularly with SSRI/SNRIs-either in general or when dealing with a subset of patients who would greatly benefit from it, prone to somatization, and med options with similar amount of evidence are limited (e.g. severe panic disorder, severe OCD, etc). Some less aggressive examples posed to me: "No long-term studies after years to decades of SSRI use" so patients cannot come off of SSRIs without bad discontinuation symptoms (very different clinically than trying to taper off SSRI with <1yr use; this is simple imo); "SSRI cause genital numbing years after stopping its use" (e.g. a symptom of PSSD). To an extent, they are right: we currently do not have studies that investigate years to decades of serotonergic med use and how patients should taper-off if they wish to discontinue in the future; we currently don't have good studies from peer-reviewed sources that we regularly rely on investigating the legitimacy of PSSD (many growing communities and organizations separately looking into this but who knows how reliable their approaches are). Especially with these last two examples, if there are reliable studies that I'm not aware of, please feel free to share.
I like to have conversations with people who disagree with our practices, who tend to be conservative or antipsychiatry. It's an uncomfortable conversation, but ignoring this conversation, avoiding people who disagree with our practices, or labeling them as the problem will not help us know how to have constructive, amicable conversations with them to expand our mutual understanding and improve our practices. We learn the most by engaging with our "enemies."