I don't know how the participant to whom you are replying knows what his post reported, but concern about suicide is definitely one of the motivations for urging more treatment for depression. An organization for suicide prevention
puts up billboards in my town to remind family members to have their depressed relatives treated for depression, saying that untreated depression is the main risk factor for suicide. That factual statement is correct, as I can verify from having read many books by psychologists or medical doctors about mood disorders. I got into this reading back in the 1990s as part of studying suicide risk in different cultures,
and research on this issue continues to be replicated across many studies with different investigators in different places.
You ask about one category of medicines, the SSRI medicines commonly prescribed as antidepressants. They do have a genuine risk of INCREASING rather than decreasing suicidal behavior in some patients, now recognized in their prescriber labeling. The Goodwin and Jamison textbook
details the research on this issue over many pages with lots of footnotes to primary research papers in peer-reviewed journals. My overall impression of the mechanism for increased suicide risk upon SSRI treatment for depression is that some depressed patients go from thinking that there is nothing they can do to thinking that the one thing they can do is to harm themselves. That's why I follow Goodwin and Jamison in thinking that for most depressed patients whose history of mood variation is poorly known, the best initial treatment is a mood-stabilizing medicine (such as lithium, carbamazepine, divalproex, or lamotrigine) rather than an SSRI medicine. But I am not a physician, and I urge persons who are concerned about their depressed moods to check with a physician who has clinical experience with depressed patients to be evaluated for what might or might not be at issue.
I don't know how the participant to whom you are replying knows what his post reported, but concern about suicide is definitely one of the motivations for urging more treatment for depression. An organization for suicide prevention
http://www.save.org/
puts up billboards in my town to remind family members to have their depressed relatives treated for depression, saying that untreated depression is the main risk factor for suicide. That factual statement is correct, as I can verify from having read many books by psychologists or medical doctors about mood disorders. I got into this reading back in the 1990s as part of studying suicide risk in different cultures,
http://learninfreedom.org/suicide.html
and research on this issue continues to be replicated across many studies with different investigators in different places.
You ask about one category of medicines, the SSRI medicines commonly prescribed as antidepressants. They do have a genuine risk of INCREASING rather than decreasing suicidal behavior in some patients, now recognized in their prescriber labeling. The Goodwin and Jamison textbook
http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...
details the research on this issue over many pages with lots of footnotes to primary research papers in peer-reviewed journals. My overall impression of the mechanism for increased suicide risk upon SSRI treatment for depression is that some depressed patients go from thinking that there is nothing they can do to thinking that the one thing they can do is to harm themselves. That's why I follow Goodwin and Jamison in thinking that for most depressed patients whose history of mood variation is poorly known, the best initial treatment is a mood-stabilizing medicine (such as lithium, carbamazepine, divalproex, or lamotrigine) rather than an SSRI medicine. But I am not a physician, and I urge persons who are concerned about their depressed moods to check with a physician who has clinical experience with depressed patients to be evaluated for what might or might not be at issue.