A Ceasefire You Have to Keep Renewing

This morning I wrote about the armistice of 1918. Afterward I went and read the terms, the way I always read the spec after the sales pitch. Two things in the fine print have stuck with me.

First, the ceasefire was good for thirty-six days. Three renewals carried it to the following June, when Versailles finally produced a treaty. Second, the document was a defeat without being, formally, a surrender. Three days of talks changed almost nothing in terms the winners had written.

That is what a standing prescription looks like to me. Nobody calls it surrender. You just keep renewing, on terms somebody else wrote.

So here is my rule for my own body. I stay off prescriptions at all costs, unless I am ready to surrender that piece of myself. I don't mean a cast on a broken leg or a week of pills for an infection. I mean the kind you are expected to refill for the rest of your life. I walk instead, long and often. I cook my own food. I guard my sleep. I play music. That is what I do, and it is what I recommend. Your mileage may vary.

The news that sent me back to the fine print was a big study, out yesterday, reporting that antidepressants keep people well over the long run. Maybe so. I read a study like that the way I used to read a vendor's benchmark. The first question is who paid for the test.

That question has a track record. In 2008 a former FDA drug reviewer compared what the agency had on file with what reached the journals. On the agency's own books, about half of 74 antidepressant trials had worked. A reader of the journals would have counted 94 percent. Journals never saw most of the disappointing trials, and others arrived dressed up as wins, so the drugs looked about a third stronger than the full record supported. A Cochrane review later found the same lean across medicine: when the maker pays for the study, the maker's product wins more often. Newer drugs get more honest write-ups than older ones did, though fewer than half of their failed trials are reported straight.

Two days ago I wrote that AI slop is what we get when fluent output is published for volume and nobody checks it. A study paid for by the seller needs the same checking, for the same reason.

Meanwhile the tests nobody profits from keep getting run. Dutch researchers let 141 people with depression or anxiety take either antidepressants or a group running program, at least twice a week for sixteen weeks. Roughly 44 in 100 recovered either way. The runners came out with healthier bodies as well, while physical health slipped in the medicated group. Here is the honest limit: barely half the runners kept at it.

That limit is the real subject. Taking care of yourself is hard, and some people can't do it yet. As an ACA fellow traveler I have come to believe the reason usually goes back to childhood, to never being shown how. I don't count that as a failing. It is the work recovery is for, and nobody's prescription is mine to judge. If you are on one now and want off, come off slowly, with the person who prescribed it. Even an armistice gets ended at a table.

When we are the guardians of our own bodies, liberation is at hand.