Yep. My dad recounted that in 1989, he had to restrain her because she (then age 40) had a psychotic episode described as a "murderous impulse" just after starting a brand new "wonder pill", Prozac. This was quite uncharacteristic for a tiny, docile woman who is often described as "sweet" and "nice" who never had any psychiatric symptoms before or since except a couple of brief times of situational depression. There's a lot of FUD and social ills washing in mass media rather than less biased peer-reviewed research that blames individuals, conflates preexisting conditions with medication side-effects, and clouds the issue of whether SSRIs increase suicide and/or violent psychosis or not.
Somehow, I doubt there is much motivation to look for economically inconvenient and unnerving side-effects in some demographics, especially if they're adults who can easily be blamed entirely for all of their own actions because it's "definitely not" due to a (formerly) profitable pill or a pseudoscientific profession that doesn't exactly know how the medications it prescribes work, who would benefit from or be harmed by them, or have any ability to measure the organ or system they're supposed treating.
It is highly likely that your mother was misdiagnosed as suffering from unipolar depression when she was in fact suffering from bipolar disorder. A sudden switch to mania is a common outcome, even in cases where the patient has no previous history of mania. It is crucially important to take a comprehensive history to rule out bipolar disorder, but many general practitioners (and some psychiatrists) reflexively prescribe SSRIs whenever they see a depressive episode, even where there is clear evidence of a personal history of hypomania or a family history of mania.
Thanks for sharing your mom's experience with big pharma's then-new wonder-drug.
> Somehow, I doubt there is much motivation to look for economically inconvenient and unnerving side-effects in some demographics,
Robert Whitaker examined the pharmaceutical industry's ideological capture of conventional psychiatry in his third book, Psychiatry Under the Influence.
This was inspired by the old SNL skit, Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber. The article is structured around my proposal of a Theodoric’s Principle of Medical Advancement, to explain why medical progress is so glacial.
Yup. There's too much institutional inertia to adopt evidence-based approaches.
I've tried 19 antidepressants over about 15 years. Stuck with mirtazapene-induced obesity that doesn't qualify for GLP-1 coverage, so I can either be fat, broke, or crushingly catatonic.
> I've tried 19 antidepressants over about 15 years. Stuck with mirtazapene [...]
Have you tried any anti-serotonin interventions? (chatbot in comment link below)
Mirtazapene is a "tetracyclic antidepressant". I think the development of antidepressants went MAOI -> Tricyclic -> tetracyclic -> SSRI. My chatbot transcript said the SSRI's are marginal drugs, but "SSRIs are much safer in overdose" than the earlier drugs.
My understanding is that the MAOIs were reasonably-effective at bringing people out of an acute depression, but they interacted with high-tyramine foods (fine cheese, etc) to cause high blood pressure. Reversible MAOIs are less problematic than the non-reversible ones. Methylene Blue [MB] is the most ubiquitous of the reversible MAOIs. I felt a definite warming effect with my first MB microdose (a fraction of a milligram), but I've never noticed anything from larger doses.
