I will never regret taking Prozac – whatever the scientists say

According to the Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies, prescriptions for antidepressants increased by 10 to 15 percent during the pandemic. The UCL study is great news for me and others who suffer from depression. This goes against everything our doctors have told us in the past. Patients were often told to compare their condition to diabetes and their medication to insulin: but unlike diabetes, there is no blood test for depression like there is for blood sugar. This hypothesis cannot be proven.

In the late 1990s, the “chemical imbalance theory of depression” really took off. I was in my final year of A-levels and very, very poorly. I obsessively washed my hands until they bled, terrified that the germs in the air I breathed would kill me. I was convinced that I had to repeat the phrases to keep my family alive. It was difficult for me to stay in school or leave the house, so my mother made an appointment with a personal doctor. I remember it well: a Friday night in early spring, a sense of danger all around me. I don’t want to sit in the waiting room seats in case I get an infection. I keep my hands in my pockets all the time. Scared.

The doctor had a funny tie. I stared at him as my mother tried to tell him about my behavior. He told me it sounded like I had something called obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) along with clinical depression. He said he was going to put me on a waiting list for cognitive behavioral therapy, that it would probably come in about six months and to come back if anything got worse in the meantime. In the parking lot, as the truth of what he said began to dawn on me, things took a turn for the worse. I whimpered. I couldn’t wait another six minutes for help, let alone six months. So we went back and he put me on anti-depressants.

‘Lifeboat when I was drowning’

I’ve been more or less on them ever since. They were my only constant through breakdowns and suicidal episodes. Sometimes a well-meaning friend will ask me if I ever wonder what life would be like without them, to which I can only say that I know what life would be like without them: absolutely miserable. I’ll probably be on anti-depressants for the rest of my life. Not because I think they’re a miracle cure for mental health problems – I’ve found that there isn’t – but because now, after so long, I’d like to get rid of them, would involve a hellish withdrawal process I have neither the time nor the will to go through.

While coming off antidepressants under a doctor’s supervision is generally not a problem for people who have been on them for a short period of time, every time I have tried it has been very difficult. I know the drill: the brain, the dizziness, the fatigue and the return of the deep depression. It’s become easier, if you will, to just stay with them – after all, they don’t affect my ability to function, nor my ability to feel, as is often claimed.

Research shows that even after taking antidepressants for a short time, up to 50 percent of users may experience a withdrawal syndrome when they try to stop. The problems, which also include depressed mood, anxiety and insomnia, can be so debilitating that many sufferers end up taking years to wean themselves off the powerful drugs. Others are falsely told that their mental health problems have returned and have to take the pills for decades, the researchers claimed.

“I’ve seen patients so dizzy they can’t stand, they can barely sleep and suffer from panic attacks,” says psychiatrist-in-training Mark Horowitz, a clinical researcher at North East London NHS Foundation Trust and UCL. “Worse, the doctor tells them the depression is coming back, not something the medication is causing. People can be trapped on tablets for life. Some are driven to suicide by withdrawal symptoms, not by their original illness.”

Given this new research, not to mention the physical dependence I have on antidepressants, do I regret being prescribed them when I was 17? No. I will always be grateful to them for getting me a lifeboat when I was drowning. Even if anti-depressants are just a placebo effect, that’s something – in fact, I’d argue that it’s essential when access to mental health is so poor in this country and provision is so scarce.

But I think this UCL research should be an incentive to look at other treatment models. Depression is a complex disease that requires a multifaceted approach to treatment; anti-depressants are definitely over-prescribed because they are the only affordable aspect of treatment.

“The wrong coping mechanism”

As a spokesperson for the Royal Academy of Psychiatry said in response to this review: “The effectiveness of antidepressants varies for different people and the reasons for this are complex, so it is important that patient care is based on the needs of each individual and reviewed regularly. Continued research into the treatment of depression is important to better understand how medications work and how effective they are. Medicines must be available to everyone who needs them. Based on this review, we do not recommend that anyone stop taking their antidepressants, and we encourage anyone who has concerns about their medication to contact their GP.

In his excellent book on the history of depression, The Cure for Darkness, science writer Alex Riley explores why the disease, which affects 332 million people worldwide, is so poor when it comes to effective treatment. Riley describes the gruesome ice-pick lobotomies of the 1940s and 1950s, and questions how antidepressants came to be seen as the mainstay of treatment, detailing the aggressive marketing campaigns that led Newsweek to write, “Prozac did the same. knowledge of Kleenex and the social status of spring water.’