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Prozac Backlash: Overcoming the Dangers of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Other Antidepressants with Safe, Effective Alternatives - Softcover

Glenmullen, M.D. Joseph

 
9780743200622: Prozac Backlash: Overcoming the Dangers of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Other Antidepressants with Safe, Effective Alternatives
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743200624 ISBN 13: 9780743200622
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Roughly 28 million Americans -- one in every ten -- have taken Prozac, Zoloft, or Paxil or a similar antidepressant, yet very few patients are aware of the dangers of these drugs, nor are they aware that better, safer alternatives exist. Now Harvard Medical School's Dr. Joseph Glenmullen documents the ominous long-term side effects associated with these and other serotonin-boosting medications. These side effects include neurological disorders, such as disfiguring facial and whole-body tics that can indicate brain damage; sexual dysfunction in up to 60 percent of users; debilitating withdrawal symptoms, including visual hallucinations, electric shock-like sensations in the brain, dizziness, nausea, and anxiety; and a decrease of antidepressant effectiveness in about 35 percent of long-term users. In addition, Dr. Glenmullen's research and riveting case studies shed shocking new light on the direct link between these drugs and suicide and violence.
Written by a doctor with impeccable credentials, Prozac Backlash is filled with compelling, sometimes heartrending stories and is thoroughly documented with extensive scientific sources. It is both provocative and hopeful, a sound, reliable guide to the safe treatment of depression and other psychiatric problems.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joseph Glenmullen, M.D., is a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is on the staff of the Harvard University Health Services, and is in private practice in Harvard Square. A nationally recognized authority on antidepressant side effects, Dr. Glenmullen testified at the FDA hearing that resulted in the FDA's spring 2004 warning about the dangers of antidepressant use, especially suicidal tendencies. Dr. Glenmullen won the 2001 Annual Achievement Award from the American Academy for the Advancement of Medicine for his efforts in warning physicians about the potential dangers of antidepressants in his widely acclaimed book Prozac Backlash. Dr. Glenmullen lives with his wife and three children in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and can be found on the web at www.drglenmullen.com.

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Chapter One: The Awakened Giant's Wrath (Risking Brain Damage)

Maura: A Case of Disfiguring Tics

Late in her therapy, Maura took to lying back in the chair in my office, so relaxed she looked as if she drifted into a peaceful, tranquil state as we spoke. This involved a whole ritual for Maura: taking off her glasses and gently placing them on the small table beside the chair, leaning her head back into the soft headrest, closing her eyes, and relaxing her body, which seemed to melt down into the chair.

I would especially watch Maura's face at these times. A thirty-nine-year-old native of Ireland, Maura had milk-white skin and soft, delicate features framed by ringlets of auburn hair. As she continued to converse, reminiscing about her past, her face was a study in repose.

Unfortunately, this peace, hard won throughout a year of psychotherapy, was shattered by a chance observation on my part as I gazed at Maura's face. Suddenly I began to notice intense twitching all around her eyes. Her closed eyelids pressed more tightly shut. Waves of muscular contractions circled around her eyes. Bursts of this abnormal twitching punctuated periods of relative calm in which the muscles appeared to relax with just faint background activity.

How long had this twitching around Maura's eyes been present? I wondered. Was I just imagining that it was new? But I had been scrutinizing her resting face for months. Surely I would have noticed before. After I had observed the distinctive twitching for a number of weeks, I began to look for it when Maura was sitting upright with her eyes open and glasses on. Sure enough, the twitching was present at this time, too.

The image of Maura lying with her head as though on a pillow with twitches dancing around her eyes like fire came to haunt me because of what it portended. Maura had been in treatment with me for nearly a year. She originally had come for a second opinion about her medication, and had decided to stay on as a psychotherapy patient. The year before, her primary-care doctor had put her on Prozac for mild depression, because of her complaints of feelings of anxiety and tearfulness whenever she drove on highways. In two brief follow-up appointments, her doctor had doubled Maura's dose to 40 milligrams a day and given her a year's prescription for the drug. Primary-care doctors often see patients just once a year for an annual checkup. They frequently write year-long prescriptions for a host of drugs, from blood pressure medications to birth control pills. So when they prescribe serotonin boosters, writing a year's supply fits the routine for primary-care doctors even though this is not really appropriate to psychiatric drugs. At the end of the year, Maura consulted with me.

Maura grew up in war-torn Northern Ireland, in the small town of Ballymena. When she was eleven years old, she and her parents were innocent victims of a car bomb that exploded while they were driving to Belfast. Maura was badly injured, but she survived both the explosion and the trauma of witnessing the brutal death of both her parents. After living with an aunt for several years, Maura first came to the United States while in college. At the time that I met her, she was living in a Boston suburb with her American husband and their two daughters. As we pieced together her long-ignored, painful history, Maura realized that her depression began shortly before her elder daughter's tenth birthday. Like many parents, Maura would occasionally find herself daydreaming about what her life had been like at an age similar to her child's. As we talked, she realized her daughter was approaching the age Maura had been when her parents died. Her sudden sense of sadness and loss was worst while driving on highways, perhaps because it was a reminder of the fateful trip from her town into the city of Belfast. After several difficult months of reliving some of her traumatic memories and gaining a greater understanding of her symptoms, Maura gradually achieved the calm I was seeing when she leaned back in the chair. In anticipation of the well-earned end of therapy, we had decided to take Maura off Prozac and had lowered her dose from 40 to 20 milligrams.

"Have you noticed your eyes twitching lately?" I asked after observing the phenomenon for several weeks.

"No," said Maura, surprised.

I decided to write off the twitching as an anomaly, although now I wish I had made more of it. Not that this would have changed Maura's clinical course. A week later we stopped the Prozac. Prozac is a particularly long-lasting drug, lingering in the body for weeks. Two weeks after her last dose Maura called one day, frantic. "Something dreadful is happening to me," she said. "I need to see a neurologist. My lips are twitching and my tongue keeps darting out of my head." I told Maura that I would make time to see her, and to come to my office immediately. When she came, I was flabbergasted to see Maura's symptoms firsthand. Her lips now displayed twitching similar to that which I had observed around her eyes. But worst of all was the tongue-darting: fly-catcher-type movements in which her curled tongue darted in and out. The tongue-darting together with the twitching was disfiguring.

"Have I had a stroke? Do I have a tumor?" asked Maura, distraught.

"No," I said. "I don't think so. I believe this is a medication side effect."

"A medication side effect?" said Maura, dumbfounded.

"Yes. It looks like a tic disorder called tardive dyskinesia."

"Tar...what?"

"Tardive dyskinesia. It's a medication-induced tic disorder."

"But I'm not on any medication. I've just stopped the Prozac."

Could Prozac be causing Maura's tics? I wondered. I hadn't heard of Prozac causing these tics, but I had a lot of experience with them in association with major tranquilizers.

"I don't know why you're having these symptoms," I said, "but with other drugs they often worsen or emerge after patients stop taking them."

"What are you talking about?"

My mouth dry, feeling anxious and confused myself, I explained that tics are a well-known side effect of major tranquilizers. Not only do these earlier drugs cause tics, they can also suppress or mask them, as long as the patient is still on the drug. The tics emerge only after the medication is stopped.

"You're not taking any other medications, right?" I asked Maura.

"Right," she confirmed.

"Have you ever been prescribed any other psychiatric medications?"

"Never."

Since Maura had been on Prozac for two years and had not taken any other psychiatric medication, it seemed that Prozac was probably responsible for the tics.

"How can the drug be causing something when it's gone?" asked Maura.

"No one knows the exact process by which the tics come about," I said. "But we do know that they are caused by long-term exposure to certain drugs. Sometimes the tics become severe enough to overcome the drug suppressing them. But sometimes they only appear after the drug is gone. Removal of the drug brings out the tics."

In fact, with major tranquilizers the tics are a result of brain damage brought on by the medication, but in our initial conversation I avoided using these words with Maura, because she was already terribly upset.

"Will this go away?" asked Maura.

"There's a good chance it will."

"A good chance? What are the chances?"

"I don't know. I've never heard of this with Prozac."

"What are the chances with other kinds of drugs?"

"Major tranquilizers? In about half of those cases, the tics slowly go away."

"And the other half?"

"They stay."

"They're permanent?"

"Sometimes they get a little better."

"But they're permanent?"

"Yes."

"Can they get worse?"

"In some...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743200624
ISBN 13 
9780743200622
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
388
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

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Utrecht
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