SSRIs may cause personality change --Archives of General Psychiatry (Dec 2009)

From: Can SSRIs Change Your Personality?

Patients taking a SSRI antidepressant to treat depression may experience changes in their personality separate from the alleviation of depressive symptoms, according to a report in the December 2009 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

“Patients taking paroxetine reported 6.8 times as much change on neuroticism and 3.5 times as much change on extraversion as placebo patients matched for depression improvement,” the authors write.

The findings provide evidence against a theory known as the state effect hypothesis, which proposes that any personality changes during SSRI treatment occur only as a result of alleviating depressive symptoms, the authors note. Several alternative explanations could be considered. “One possibility is that the biochemical properties of SSRIs directly produce real personality change,” they write. “Furthermore, because neuroticism is an important risk factor that captures much of the genetic vulnerability for major depressive disorder, change in neuroticism (and in neurobiological factors underlying neuroticism) might have contributed to depression improvement.”