Are serotonin boosters neurotoxic?

According to Dr Joseph Glenmullen in Prozac Backlash studies have shown that some serotonin boosters exhibit signs of neurotoxicity. A study on a drug called Redux (abruptly recalled from the market in 1997 because of heart valve damage) examined the possibility of neurotoxicity.

Under the microscope, as they are injured, the axons look "swollen," "irregularly shaped," and "seemingly fragmented." In one study, monkeys treated with the drug for just four days showed evidence of "persistent" and "possibly permanent" damage more than a year later... If the damage is not too severe, the neurons sprout new branches in what literally amounts to a rewiring of the brain.

Prozac Backlash, p. 96.

Those experiments were done with a dose similar to what humans take for 6 months... a year... sometimes a decade or more. The "antipsychotics" (also known as major tranquilizers) fell out of favor once severe, permanent side effects such as tardive dyskinesia were revealed over a span of 20-30 years. Prozac and many SSRIs came into fashion in the 1990s, which means we are just now at the cusp where the long term effects will begin to be revealed. Conveniently, just after the patent expires, but that's a different story. The main problem is that the brain can sustain quite a bit of damage and still function. You can think of it as sort of a buffer or safety margin that has to be consumed until problems show up. However, aging has detrimental effects on the brain as well. This means that damage may be done by drugs earlier in life that won't reveal themselves until later, once the brain starts deteriorating from aging effects.

Studies of Ecstasy [MDMA] have shown that when damaged neurons sprout new branches, the rewiring of the brain is "highly abnormal," a chaotic jumble that does not follow the original pattern. Most alarming, researchers are concerned that the neurotoxicity could cause "increased risk for developing age-related cognitive impairment." Indeed, they are explicit that the "aberant reinnervation [abnormal rewiring of brain cells] such as that seen after MDMA injury may also occur during the course of neurodegenerative diseases [e.g., Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease]. This is especially worrysome because patient with Alzheimer's type dementia "have significant 5-HT [serotonin] deficits in brain regions implicated in learning and memory" as well as deficits in other neurotransmitters.

Prozac Backlash, pp. 96-97

To be fair, Ecstacy is a serotonin releaser that will cause a sudden release of massive amounts of serotonin. However, most Ecstacy users don't pop pills every day, so it is an acute case vs the chronic case of SSRIs. Dr. Monika Wrona, writing in a June 1997 article published in the National Institude on Drug Abuse Research Monnograph Series, stated that serotonin is "very easily oxidized into a serotonergic neurotoxin." Dr. McCann at NIMH speculated that such damage to the brain caused by serotonin toxicity may be why the effect of the drugs wear off over time.

Regardless of whether it is brain damage from neurotoxicity or simply the brain adapting to the presence of a foreign drug, the before and after pictures are dramatic. Would you take a pill every day for months or years that did this?

Will we ever wake up to the deadly risks of happy pills?

Will we ever wake up to the deadly risks of happy pills?

As new research reveals antidepressants raise the danger of heart attacks, the disturbing cost of this modern addiction

The latest study, by Dr Mark Hamer, a public health researcher at University College ­London, shows that people on the older drugs — tricyclic antidepressants — are at far higher risk of cardiovascular disease than those taking the newer class of pills, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).

But if I were taking SSRIs, I would not be cheered by the findings. Tricyclics were ­discovered in the Forties and it is only now we have identified these dangerous effects.

Moreover, some SSRI drugs are known to cause serious problems such as stomach bleeding. In addition, the withdrawal symptoms can be so severe that patients may become dependent on them.

Dr Hamer says his findings do not only affect people with depression, because antidepressants are also prescribed to people with back pain, headache, anxiety and sleeping problems.

Last year, according to Dr Hamer’s figures, about 33 million antidepressant prescriptions were dispensed in England.

At some point, surely, there will be no one left to prescribe for. In my view, it’s fast becoming one of the greatest medical scandals of our age.

Scientific American: Depression Drugs Affect Personality

Scientific American follows up on the study that showed that antidepressant drugs affect personality.

Experts have long known that the placebo effect explains much of the mood lift patients report after going on antidepressants. This was the case in the new study, published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry—patients with major depressive disorder who were given a placebo saw their symptoms improve about three quarters as much as those given paroxetine, an antidepressant also known as Paxil. But only the patients who took paroxetine displayed personality changes in two key areas of the widely used five-factor model of personality: they scored lower on neuroticism, the tendency to experience negative emotions such as guilt and anxiety, and they scored higher on extroversion, which includes traits such as talkativeness and assertiveness.

Personality traits are thought to be relatively stable over a person’s life—even the onset of depression, which comes with unusually low moods, should not alter a person’s fundamental traits. Personality can affect a person’s risk for mental illness, however—past research has established neuroticism as a key risk factor for depression, explains Tony Tang of Northwestern University, the lead author of the study. Tang and his colleagues found that the more a patient’s neuroticism dropped while taking paroxetine, the smaller the chance that his or her depression would return after they stopped taking the drug.

The study “proves in an elegant way that antidepressant medications and placebo have different actions in many cases,” says Andrew Leuchter, a depression researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not a part of the study. “This may explain in part some of the ways that antidepressants have a therapeutic benefit for some patients.”

Yeah, "therapeutic benefits": start an affair, compulsively lie about it, ditch your marriage, have promiscuous sex. Much more beneficial... or just manic if you ask me. Did they ever stop to ask what you would get if you took someone who already pegged the extroversion meter a drug that would further increase extroversion? My answer: mania.

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.”

Poll: Scientific American readers trust what scientists say about "depression drugs" least, second to only "flu pandemics"

Interesting poll here by the Scientific American: In Science We Trust

The basic point of the article and poll is to see how trustworthy a selection Nature and Scientific American readers thought scientists were in the wake of "climategate" and hyperbolic swine flu epidemic predictions.

The more interesting thing for this blog is how much the respondents trusted scientists in a breakdown of selected subjects.

Flu Pandemics is dead last at 3.19

Depression Drugs is just a few ticks above that at 3.21

And strangely, both pharmaceutical related. Hmm.

I realize that this isn't a scientific poll, but I still find this interesting.

"Antidepressants Under Scrutiny Over Efficacy" --WSJ January 2008

Antidepressants Under Scrutiny over Efficacy -- Wall Street Journal, Jan 2008

More evidence that (surprise, surprise) drug manufacturers attempt to present their products in the best possible light. And why not... if they happen to get called on fraud they just settle for a couple hundred million... peanuts.

A total of 74 studies involving a dozen antidepressants and 12,564 patients were registered with the FDA from 1987 through 2004. The FDA considered 38 of the studies to be positive. All but one of those studies was published, the researchers said.

The other 36 were found to have negative or questionable results by the FDA. Most of those studies -- 22 out of 36 -- weren't published, the researchers found. Of the 14 that were published, the researchers said at least 11 of those studies mischaracterized the results and presented a negative study as positive.

...

Dr. Turner, who once worked at the FDA reviewing data on psychotropic drugs, said the idea for the study was triggered in part by colleagues who questioned the need for further clinical drug trials looking at the effectiveness of antidepressants.

"There is a view that these drugs are effective all the time," he said. "I would say they only work 40% to 50% of the time," based on his reviews of the research at the FDA, "and they would say, 'What are you talking about? I have never seen a negative study.'" Dr. Turner, said he knew from his time with the agency that there were negative studies that hadn't been published.

...

In this week's study, the researchers found that failing to publish negative findings inflated the reported effectiveness of all 12 of the antidepressants studied, which were approved between 1987 and 2004. The researchers used a measurement called effect size. The larger the effect size, the greater the impact of a treatment.

Effexor's estimated effect size was 27% (XR) and 28% in the study. Zoloft 64%. Paxil 40%. Prozac 14%. These are the increased apparent effectiveness of the drug treatments because of the omission of negative reports. You could read this as X% less effective when the positive bias is removed.

Stories of the Effuxed. "Effexor kills your marriage" by Rick.

Yet another story about how Effexor causes marital problems. I don't know how this one ended, but if they were talking about side effects then I believe there is a good chance they worked things out. I'll just choose to believe that.

Anyway, here's Rick's story:

Effexor kills your marriage by Rick

For 10 years, my wife and I have enjoyed a wonderful life togther. I LOVE MY WIFE SO MUCH IT MAKES ME CRY AS I WRITE THIS. We were always having fun, incredible sex, a true passion for each other mentally and physically. She was a gift from God. People often commented what a great relationship we had. We would complete each others sentences and at parties would often catch each others eye from across the room and we hated to be apart even for a few minutes. Then after a really bad two years at her new job, she went into depression and had to quit her job. About ten monhts ago, she went on Effexor. Then started a new job. I supported her every step of the way. Then it all started. First the night sweats. Then the weight gain and constipation. Quit the gym. Working rediculous hours. Then the blackouts when she drank alcohol, even in front of friends. FYI, we are both in our 40's, a little old to have drunken blackouts. Then she just seemed to drift away mentally and physically. The only time she will have sex that she enjoys is when she is drunk. If she is sober and I initiate sex, she just looks into space and looks empty inside. The passion in our marriage is almost gone. I have pleaded with her, tried to buy back her sanity with gifts and surprise gestures, tried anything anyone would recommend to get her to see what this drug is doing to her and our marriage. I even stopped drinking to set an example. I tried being harsh, I tried threats, I tried showing more love, doing more around the house, but it has all failed. I even asked her to chose between me and the Effexor and Alcohol...she did not pick me. That hurt. Nothing is working. She can't even shed a tear anymore. Her memory is so bad she forgot the two years of depression and how I was there every day for her. When she tried to defend herself, she makes no sense at all, but feels she is making sense. She just looks at me and says I am the problem. I think her doctor made a huge mistake and it may cost me the women of my dreams. I am so depressed now that I may need to try one of these drugs....definately not Effexor. I just want my wife back. I would give up everything to get her back. Does anyone have any suggestions or similar expeiences? Please!!!! Time is running out for us. I miss my wife. (Wed Oct 11 13:07 2006)

Here is a list my wife and I put together of all the side effects of using Effexor 150mg.

Effexor 150mg problems

Rating: 1=Minor 5=Serious

Tremor = 2

Restless Legs = 4

Constipation = 4

Night Sweats = 3

Texture Problems =3

Sexual Dysfunction = 5

Intimacy problems

Fatigue= 5

Lacking Self Awareness = 4

“Ticks” or other uncontrollable actions = 5

· Finger Nail clicking =5

· Scratching = 5

· Eyebrow pulling = 5

· Face touching = 4

· Nail biting = 5

· Picking at nails = 4

Weight gain = 3

Lack of emotion = 4

Inappropriate behavior = 3

Poor decision making = 4

Inability to prioritize = 4

Dry Mouth = 2

Startled Easily = 4

Warming sensation of the head = 2

Overwhelming Fear of missing a dosage = 5

Alcohol Related Problems = 5

· Memory loss = 4

· Blackouts or Pass outs = 2

· Poor judgment or decision making = 5

· Decrease in Tolerance = 5

· Constant stroking of hair = 4

(Thu Oct 12 9:59 2006)

Effexor: "Baddest of the bad."

Just ran across this article that claims that the British Medical Journal in 2007 found that people on Effexor were three times as likely to attempt suicide compared to those on other antidepressants.

Effexor, baddest of the bad? I believe it.  Part of the reason is likely the very short halflife of Effexor.  On the order of 18-20 hours.  Prozac in comparison is on the order of 3-7 days.  This makes discontinuation syndrome excruciating for most, if they choose to get off the drug.

Antidepressants: The baddest of the bad is revealed

08 February 2007

Antidepressants are a family of drugs that are bad and dangerous to know – and now researchers have named Effexor (venlafaxine) as the baddest of the bad. Patients are much more likely to attempt suicide while taking Effexor than any of the other antidepressants, a new study has found.

The news comes as no surprise to those who’ve already been exposed to the drug. It’s considered to be one of the most powerful antidepressants, and one of the hardest to tolerate. In fact, around 19 per cent of patients stop taking the drug early because they can’t stand the side effects, which include anxiety, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, high blood pressure and thyroid depression. One patient even reported a sudden change of hair colour.
They are the lucky ones. Once over the initial hurdles of life-destroying side effects, withdrawal symptoms are so severe that it’s almost impossible to stop taking the drug.

Thousands of patients who signed a petition to the drug’s manufacturer, Wyeth-Ayerst, claim the drug company knew about the side effects and the withdrawal problems, but failed to properly disclose the facts.
Most of the problems were slowly drip-fed into the public arena over a period of eight years after the drug was first licensed, they say.

Now the last piece of the jigsaw has been revealed. Researchers from RTI Health Solutions at Manchester Science Park analysed the safety records of 219,088 patients from the UK who were taking an antidepressant between 1995 and 2005. Patients taking Effexor were nearly three times as likely to attempt suicide compared with a patient taking another antidepressant, including Prozac (fluoxetine).

(Source: British Medical Journal, 2007; 334: 242-5).

Quick Links

Mish links to a Bloomberg article stating that half of Americans take at least one prescription pill a month. I agree with Mish's statement that: "Throughout grade and high school, I do not recall any kids with attention problems. How is it that attention-deficit disorder is now so widespread? Are kids today different? Why?"  Very good questions, Mish. 

I personally think kids are kids, and they should allowed to be kids. And if they have problems, it is likely something in their environment (*cough* parenting, or lack thereof) that is causing it.

Almost half of Americans took at least one prescription drug per month in 2008, an increase of 10 percent over the past decade, a U.S. study found.

One of every five children ages 11 or younger took at least one medication each month in 2008, led by asthma and allergy treatments, according to the survey released today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among those ages 60 or older, 37 percent used five or more prescriptions per month.

The most common medications for adolescents were treatments for attention-deficit disorder, a condition in which people have trouble paying attention and engage in impulsive behavior.

For adults ages 20 to 59, antidepressants, including Eli Lilly & Co.’s Cymbalta and Pfizer Inc.’s Zoloft, were the most-used drugs. Cholesterol-lowering medications, including Pfizer Inc.’s Lipitor and AstraZeneca Plc’s Crestor, were the most common drugs taken by people ages 60 and over, with 45 percent of those in that age group on such therapies.

Also, this article from the NYT "Child’s Ordeal Shows Risks of Psychosis Drugs for Young" shows how some parents have gone full retard to deal with their kids.

“

Kyle at the time was very aggressive and easily agitated, so you try to find medication that can make him more easily controlled, because you can’t reason with an 18-month-old,” Dr. deGravelle said in a telephone interview. But Kyle was not autistic — according to several later evaluations, including one that Dr. deGravelle arranged with a neurologist. Kyle did not have the autistic child’s core deficit of social interaction, Dr. Gleason said. Instead, he craved more positive attention from his mother.

“He had trouble communicating,” Dr. Gleason said. “He didn’t have people to listen to him.”

After the neurologist review, the diagnosis changed to “oppositional defiant disorder” and the Risperdal continued.

Just 18 months old. Unreal.

"Anatomy of an Epidemic" Part 2: The Origins of Psychopharmacology

The modern day view of science conjures up almost godlike images of mastery over the physical world. Particularly in the area of medicine, we like to think that for any given ailment, we have a drug that will cure it. The reason we think this is that it is actually true, in some but not all cases. Antibiotics can cure bacterial infections; the polio vaccine has damn near eradicated polio from the planet; pain relievers can do a very good job at helping people manage pain even though they don't cure it. So there are good medicines out there that are clearly beneficial.

Modern day psychiatry is saying they can do the same thing. Feeling a little down? Cure it with this SSRI. Having problems focusing? No problem, how about some ritalin. The problem is that while psychiatry and the pharmaceutical companies want you to believe that these are "magic bullets," and that they understand exactly their long term impact on the brain, they really don't. They basically know that there are three chemicals that affect the functioning of the brain: serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. But how these all interact to produce memory, emotion, ethics, behavior, instinct -- in short, YOU -- they really have no idea. They claim that because 28% of depressed people had low serotonin levels in a study that boosting serotonin levels will cure depression. Nevermind that 25% of the normal control group also had similarly low serotonin levels. But I'm getting ahead of myself. That is for part three which will be about the theory of chemical imbalances in the brain.

The point is, these drugs are not cures. They exhibit certain effects whose ultimate impact are not entirely understood. They also burden the user with uncomfortable side effects, and then later agonizing withdrawal should the user decide to stop. The users of antidepressants are quite literally addicts, and Effexor is one of the worst, if not THE worst to come off of because of it's relatively short half life of around 20 hours (vs Prozac which has a half life of 1-7 days, depending).

Psychopharmacology would like you to think that these drugs were all carefully tailored and engineered specifically for the intended purpose. This isn't really true.

Thorozine, the drug that started it all, was originally discovered when searching for a cure for malaria. When that didn't work, they found it had antihistamine and possibly anesthetic properties. They began testing it in surgery and Henri Laborit noticed it could be used in psychiatry.

This new drug, chlorpromazine [marketed as Thorozine in the U.S.], apparently disconnected brain regions that controlled both motor movement and the mounting of emotional responses, and yet did so without causing the rats to lose consciousness.

...

Although today we think of lobotomy as a mutilating surgery, at that time it was regarded as a useful operation. Only two years earlier, the Nobel Prize in Medicine had been awarded to the Portuguese neurologist, Egas Moniz, who had invented it. The press, in its most breathless moments, had even touted lobotomy as an operation that plucked madness neatly from the mind. But what the surgery most reliably did, and this was well understood by those who performed the operation, was change people in a profound way. It made them lethargic, disinterested, and childlike. That was seen by the promoters of lobotomy as an improvement over what the patients had been before -- anxious, agitated, and filled with psychotic thoughts -- and now, if Laborit was to be believed, a pill had been discovered that could transform patients in a similar way.

Anatomy of an Epidemic, page 49

Physicians in the United States similarly understood that this new drug was not fixing any known pathology. "We have to remember that we are not treating diseases with this drug," said psychiatrist E. H. Parsons, at a 1955 meeting in Philadelphia on chlorpromazine. "We are using a neuropharmacologic agent to produce a specific effect."

Anatomy of an Epidemic, page 50-51

Next was Miltown, a minor tranquilizer that was discovered while trying to discover a compound that would kill gram-negative bacteria, and started development by researching the commercial disinfectant called Phenoxetol. This was eventually synthesized into meprobamate and sold for human consumption.

An article published in the Science News Letter ... put the animal experiments into a human frame of reference. If you took a minor tranquilizer, he explained, "this would mean that you might still feel scared when you see a car speeding towards you, but the fear would not make you run."

Anatomy of an Epidemic, page 52-53

By the spring of 1957, the first antidepressant, iproniazid, was brought to market as Marsilid. It's source? A Nazi Germany substitute for rocket fuel called hydrazine. It was originally used to treat TB (Tuberculosis) patients, but seemed to also act as a "psychic energizer."

Iproniazid was seen as having the greater potential, but initial tests did not find it to be particularly effective in lifting spirits, and there were reports that it could provoke mania. Tuberculosis patients treated with iproniazid were also developing so many nasty side effects -- dizziness, constipation, difficulty urinating, neuritis, perverse skin sensations, confusion, and psychosis -- that its use had to be curtailed in sanitariums.

Anatomy of an Epidemic, page 53

So there you have it. The drugs that launched the Psychopharmacology revolution were originally intended to treat malaria, gram negative bacterial infections, and TB, but were then used to induce certain psychological effects in humans. It seems clear that the developers did not fully understand the full long term implications of the drugs they were issuing and that trend seems to persist today.

I guess the bottom line is, if you knew your antidepressant was derived from rocket fuel... would you take it?

Stories of the Effuxed. Meet "Picking up the Pieces"

This is the latest in a monster thread started in July 2007 (currently 73 pages, 1442 comments) over at topix.com called Marriages destroyed by SSRI's/SNRIs. The stories repeat over and over again, almost as if scripted. Most of them do not have as happy of an ending as this one does. It is also unusual because as she weaned herself off Effexor she became closer to her family, but when she went back on Effexor the cheating started up again. Definitely seems to indicate that the drugs have at least something to do with changing ones personality.

My heart goes out to her husband, as I know how much this hurts, and he's handled it a lot better than I have. Major kudos. I wish them both the best.

But it makes me think about how I would handle things if/when my wife ever regains her senses and wants to try to reconcile. She belittled my manhood like I was a little boy. She told me how I never inspired her, but this other man did. She lied to me. She said the text messages to him asking "whether or not his antenna worked", and whether or not he "had a spot for her in his bed like she has for her cat" were only simply platonic jokes that she would do with any friend. When I discovered these text messages and read them to her, she laughed at me maniacally. She saw nothing wrong with keeping her phone locked and hidden away from me. The list goes on...

What would I do if given the chance? Would I take her back? Would I even want to be friends, or would I cut her out of my life forever? After she said that I wasn't her last resort because I wasn't even an option and that she wanted a divorce, I went to my attorney to file papers and thus far have cut her out of my life. I guess that is just for my own emotional self-preservation and healing. No kids, makes it easier. I can only aspire to do the right thing. I wish I just knew what it was.

But I digress. Here's "Picking up the Pieces" story:

http://www.topix.com/forum/drug/effexor/TQ4I2UR28DFD3N759/p73

I have read a lot of your stories and decided to add mine as well. I suffered from depression and later anxiety since high school. After the birth of my 2nd son, it reached an all time low. When he was about 15 mos old, my doctor tried me on Paxil, Paxil CR, and others due to insurance problems. Finally, I started seeing a therapist when he was 3, and he put me on Effexor XR. At first, as with most everyone, it was amazing. I felt great...better than I had in years! I even recommended it to my friends! But within 9 months, my family noticed that my attitude and personality had been changing...ALOT. I became very selfish and assertive, not in a good way. I started working for a friend and it was great. Too great. Within a couple of months we had an affair. Now let me stop right there for a moment and tell you I came from a very religious background for one thing and always felt very very strongly against anything morally wrong. And I loved my husband for the 11 years we were married at that point. He was the most amazing man I knew, loving, patient, helpful, and the best father ever. But there I was hating him, putting him down, cheating on him. This was so opposite of who I was. That man was also on the meds and his wife had said this was a side effect...so to speak. I thought she was crazy, so did my therapist. So I was on it for another 3 months. The relationship with that man ended, and I stayed with my husband. I finally decided to go off the meds and it was awful. If not for my kids, I would not be alive. Fast forward 18 months, I couldn't take it anymore. Work and everything was getting to me so I went back to my therapist. They put me on Zoloft but it made me sick. He said he saw me at my best on Effexor so I tried again. In 6 months, I was back at it again, my 2nd affair with the same man. Only this time, no matter how much my husband tried, I was determined to divorce him after 13 years, even to the mental distress of my 2 kids! In between the 2 tries of meds, we had no real problems, so this was really a shock to him. The following summer, I finally saw the light. The relationship was a lie. I missed my family so badly. And I realized that I only thought I was happy on the Effexor. It changed me completely. I was not the loving, caring, help you if I can person I always was... I was a lying, cheating, selfish, you know what! I abandoned my family, my values, everything. I have been off of the Effexor for a year now. I am truly happy for the 1st time in a long time. I have gone a different route for therapy: I talk about all of my feelings with my family, no matter how bad. I am fortunate that my ex husband is the amazing man he is and sees that it wasn't the real me that did all of those horrible things...although I still take responsibility for them. We are now trying to work on a fresh relationship, rebuilding our family on truth, trust and knowledge. And I know that it was the Effexor that changed me and will NEVER take AD's again! In fact, I now make it clear to all of my friends that they need to be very careful about the meds they are considering.

"Anatomy of an Epidemic" Part 1: The central premise

I received my copy of Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker today. Over the coming weeks I will post selected facts and excerpts from the book, with a focus on the statistical results of the studies.

I'm only a few pages in, and the central premise of the book is so clear and in some ways the question seems so obvious that it makes me wonder why no one bothered to ask before:

Given this great advance in care [introduction of psychotropic drugs] we should expect that the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States, on a per-capita basis, would have declined over the past fifty years. We should also expect that the number of disabled mentally ill, on a per-capita basis, would have declined since the arrival in 1988 of Prozac and the other second-generation psychiatric drugs. We should see a two-step drop in disability rates. Instead, as the psychopharmacology revolution has unfolded, the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States has skyrocketed. Moreover, this increase in the number of disabled mentally ill has accelerated further since the introduction of Prozac and other second-generation psychiatric drugs. Most disturbing of all, this modern-day plague has now spread to the nations children.

-- Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker, page 3 (bold emphasis added)

In 1987, there were 1.25 million people receiving an SSI or SSDI payment because they were disabled by mental illness, or 1 in every 184 Americans.

-- Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker, page 6

The Food and Drug Administration approved Prozac in 1987, and over the next two decades the number of disabled mentally ill on the SSI and SSDI rolls soared to 3.97 million. In 2007, the disability rate was 1 in every 76 Americans. That's more than double the rate in 1987, and six times the rate in 1955.

-- Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker, page 7

I think I'm going to like this book.

What else in our society should we blame for mental illness? I think that it is likely that it is an effect of mass media: advertising telling us that we'd be happy if only we owned a Mercedes, TV telling us how we should look and talk, magazines telling is what is too fat or too thin and showing us beautiful freaks of nature that we can compare ourselves to, and on top of it all peer pressure to do the rest. But, mass media has been around since radio was invented. I'm not sure we can simply point to that and blame it for the acceleration in mental illness that we've seen. And certainly, if the drugs worked, then we should see a decline, at least in the second derivative, of mental illness cases as new drugs are introduced and as prescription rates soar.

We're not seeing that, so maybe it is something else...

Stories of the Effuxed. Meet Jessica.

One goal of this blog is to centralize all the disparate tales of sorrow and grief that surrounds this drug and other antidepressants of it's ilk. There are far too many.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/youropinions.php?opinionid=19018&p=13#thread

Effexor RUINED My Life

posted by Jessica on 25 Jun 2010 at 1:03 pm

I will try and keep this brief, but it's a lot to explain. I have always suffered from mild depression. But have always had trouble finding the right anti-depressant. Finally my doctor put me on Effexor, I think I started on 75mg, later increased to 150mg. (This all begin in Fall 2007, so the details are a bit foggy now) A year later I got married, my husband later told me I changed the day I started taking Effexor, and that he just sat back and hoped it wouldn't last. Shortly after the wedding, I wanted off Effexor so that we could start our family. I wish some one somewhere had told me about going off Effexor. EFFEXOR SHOULD BE A PERMANENT MEDICATION, OR ELSE DOCTORS SHOULD NOT PRESCRIBE IT AT ALL!!!!!! Like everyone, I went through hell. Months of trying to get off. My husband finally realized on bad days, when I couldn't take the withdraw any more I woud just go take more. So he tried to help me regulate them by keeping them from me(I was fine with this)Except I would refill my pills and hide them. It was like crack to me. I remember laying in bed crying for more to make the symptoms of the withdraw to go away. I lost my job during all of this. Then one day I went for it and went cold turkey(JAN 2009). It was hell. As the weeks went by the symptoms gradually lessened. But NEVER, to this day went away completely. At random, I have very bad days with massive symptoms, and then I can have weeks straight with next to none. However, the biggest issue was my emotions went completely haywire. It was like they were all magnified times a million. I suddenly hated my life and wanted to run away. I started counseling and seeing a new psychiatrist. They all told me a was very bipolar. I started taking 600mg Lithium and 100mg Lamictal in August of 2009They adjust my meds up and down, different times of day everything, and still I will be better for a week or two then I crash. My husband tried so hard to care for me. But one day I loved him, the next I hated him and pushed him away. He couldn't take it anymore, he left. My son from my first marriage is hard for me to care for. My mom is talking about taking him for a while because I can barely care for him most days. I am 120% I am not bipolar. I know the effexor 'broke' me. If I were truly bipolar the meds would eventually help. My doctors all say the effexor has a way of doing that to people, bringing out the underlying bipolar. Then they told me this is how I will be FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. Part of me feels like I would be better off going back on Effexor. But I am too stubborn to do that. Anyone who knows anything about this, I would love some opinions.

Casus Belli

On May, 17, 2006 I married my wife.  May 1, 2010 she begins tapering onto Effexor.  Then on May 29, less than a month later, she forces me to leave our apartment for the last time.  

In the third marriage counseling session she tells me that I couldn't be a last resort because she doesn't consider me an option anymore.  She wanted a divorce, she said.  I went to my attorney and had them file the papers the same day.

What happened in that month?  A lot.  We'll get to that in time.  It is the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with in my entire life.  Harder still because my heartbreak barely registers on her drug dampened emotions.  Almost like if someone shot me in the stomach with a twelve gage, and she, seeing me attempting to hold what's left of my intestines in, says casually, "What?  It's just a flesh wound."

It really feels as if she died in a tragic car accident, only to be resurrected by zombie aliens who implanted her with a Vulcan personality of Bill Clinton.  

The person I knew as my wife is gone, her personality and soul ripped out of her body along with the love she had for me.  It will never return as long as she is on Effexor, and so far she says she really likes it -- that she never felt more like herself, as if that statement makes any sense at all.

Thus, Effexor is the enemy.  This story has been repeated over and over.  I am not the first and I won't be the last.  Fortunately, many of those, who have suffered from taking this drug or have suffered through a loved one taking this drug, are starting to speak out.  I will join the chorus of my allies.

And even though our marriage is mortally wounded, I am not.  And while I live, Effexor delenda est.

This means war.