Antidepressants: The Kids Are Alright, But Are Adults?

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Joseph Goldberg (0:49)

The FDA and the pharmaceutical industry are not required to show when and how to stop a medicine. Imagine if you were training a pilot how to take off but not to land.

Sanjay Gupta (1:07)

Welcome to Chasing Life everybody and Ben Tinker back with us, my longtime producer.

Ben Tinker (1:12)

Nice to be here.

Sanjay Gupta (1:12)

I guess you liked it enough the first time you did this.

Ben Tinker (1:14)

It was okay. It was okay. Try one more. We'll see how it goes. Are they paying you more for this?

SPEAKER_6 (1:18)

No, no more.

Ben Tinker (1:19)

You can believe that, I'm sure.

Sanjay Gupta (1:20)

The topic today is something that I've really wanted to talk about for some time. Anti-depressants. But I think just talking about mental health overall. You've been a long-time health producer, ran the health unit for a long time.

How do you think we do overall media-wise in terms of covering mental health?

Ben Tinker (1:38)

I think we do as well as anybody else and probably a little bit better because we have so many people like yourself who really understand this. I mean, covering it for TV is really hard because there's nothing to see. If you go in and do a brain surgery, that's something we can show. If there's not really anything to see most of the time, even though it's just as important, if not more important a lot of the time.

Sanjay Gupta (1:59)

But I think this is the point though. I think with mental health, unlike a lot of other things, whether it be oncology, whether it be cardiac stuff, it is largely invisible. Out of all the various demographics, women, men, age groups, who do you think are most likely to be on antidepressants?

Ben Tinker (2:17)

I mean, I will tell you who gets talked about the most and that's teens for sure. Right? Like we hear about it with some younger kids and some adults as well, but I think the teenage years are also, I think, just mentally the toughest.

Sanjay Gupta (2:29)

It's actually women over the age of 60, almost 25%, 24.3% of them have been prescribed antidepressants.

Ben Tinker (2:37)

So by far, this is the biggest group we should be talking about.

Sanjay Gupta (2:41)

When I heard that number, I had to let it settle in for a second because I think about, you know, my wife, we're not that age yet, but we're getting closer.

Ben Tinker (2:49)

Do not edit that out.

Yes. I will be depressed.

Sanjay Gupta (2:55)

But just think about all the women in your life that you know that are in that age range, post-menopausal, maybe approaching retirement if they've been working, whatever it may be, one in four, enough of a concern that they take medication for their depression.

Ben Tinker (3:11)

I mean, you think about the teenage brain, like that's still very much developing, there's a lot going on. But I think when you get to that age as well, there's other things that are going on and a lot of other hormone changes too, right?

Sanjay Gupta (3:22)

We'll dig into this, but many of these medications were never tested long term. Even the earliest trials were done for several weeks, maybe months, but definitely not years or decades.

Ben Tinker (3:33)

And my understanding is with a lot of these drugs, they take weeks to even start working the way that they should, right? So if you're only running a trial for a couple of weeks, you're barely getting any usable data about how these drugs actually work in the body, right?

Sanjay Gupta (3:45)

It takes a long time to figure out if they're working. I think the mechanisms by which they work is still a little bit confusing, certainly hard to explain to patients.

And then there's different classes of these medications. So you may try one, wait for a while to see if it's working, maybe come off of that, try something else. So I think it gets really confusing. It's a lot different than my world of neurosurgery, for example. We see things physically on a scan, herniated disc, brain tumor, things like that. With mental health, it is challenging. And I think people have to concede that this is not, this is not an easy discipline.