Quotes About SSRIs

There's every reason to think SSRIs blunt your ability to fall and stay in love.

SSRIs also cause a multitude of troubling side effects. These include sexual dysfunction, suppression of REM sleep, muscle tics, fatigue, emotional blunting, and apathy. In addition, investigators have reported that long-term use is associated with memory impairment, problem-solving difficulties, loss of creativity, and learning deficiencies.

As early as 1992, when the prescribing of SSRIs to children was just getting started, University of Pittsburgh researchers reported that 23 percent of boys eight to nineteen years old treated with Prozac developed mania or maniclike symptoms, and another 19 percent developed "drug-induced" hostility.

dysfunction and weight gain. However, the SSRIs are still often preferred because they target common comorbid conditions, such as depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Benzodiazepines and SSRIs can be initiated together to treat acute panic symptoms; use of the benzodiazepine can be tapered after 3 to 4 weeks after the therapeutic benefits of the SSRI have emerged.

The SSRIs may prolong and exacerbate the severity of zolpidem-induced hallucinations. Deaths have been reported when parental lorazepam is given with parental olanzapine.

Peter Breggin, an American psychiatrist, had been criticising SSRIs since the early 1990s. He wrote 'Talking Back to Prozac' (1995) to repudiate psychiatrist Peter Kramer's 'Listening to Prozac' (1993) - a bestseller which claimed that Prozac made patients 'better than well.'

However, because of the great marketing hype surrounding the SSRIs, one of them, Prozac, now has the distinguished honor of having more adverse effects submitted to the FDA than any other drug in history. More than 40,000 adverse reactions were reported in its first ten years on the market. No other drug even comes close (Breggin and Cohen 67).

Sometimes the psychiatric drugs themselves are a factor as withdrawal from selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can be particularly unpleasant. British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy notes that "almost all the school shooters that we know of have either been on or using these drugs or in withdrawal from them," a condition called SSRI discontinuation syndrome.

SSRIs, a serotonin-enhancing drug, can cause potentially life-threatening damage to heart valves.