By the time Lauren Slater was 24, she had been hospitalized five times for attempted suicide. She was deeply depressed, she cut herself and she obsessive-compulsively tapped objects to calm her overtaxed nervous system. So when Prozac came on the market in 1988, her psychiatrist recommended she try it.
“I knew that living the way I was living, there was nothing good about it,” Slater told The Post. “I was unable to give to others or myself. I was unable to work or write. I couldn’t do anything meaningful.”
She filled her prescription, and the result was “the most miraculous thing that ever happened to me,” she says. Within three days, her obsessive-compulsive symptoms began to recede, and within five days, they were gone. By day 10, she was actually feeling good. “It got stronger and stronger, and pretty soon I wasn’t depressed anymore,” she says. “I was happy, and I had never been happy before. I was without anxiety, without mental illness.”
Now, 30 years and a dozen different psychotropic medicines later, Slater has learned that the pills she took presented something of a Sophie’s choice — her body or her mind.
In her new book, “Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs That Changed Our Minds,” Slater, who is both a science writer and psychologist, describes how the medicines that allowed her to lead a relatively normal life for many years — marriage, babies, books — robbed her of her physical health. At 54, she finds herself with the body of an “octogenarian with issues,” she writes. She has failing kidneys, diabetes, is overweight and is losing her memory.
“My lifetime now seems seriously foreshortened, not because of a psychiatric illness but because of the drugs I have taken to treat it.”
And yet, she says, she doesn’t regret taking them. She just wonders why they have to be so dangerous and why pharmaceutical companies don’t disclose the dangers.
Despite the fact that one in every five Americans is on a psychiatric drug, she writes, there is still no way to actually test for depression or mental illness. Although the theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain is taken as gospel, it’s not scientifically proven, Slater writes. There is nothing measurably different about a normal functioning brain and that of a person with depression.
“There is no correlation between low serotonin and depression,” she says. “It’s a myth. No one really knows why SSRIs (serotonin reuptake inhibitors) help.” Because depression can’t be tested for, the result is that many who take these drugs may not actually need them, she says.
She notes that, according to studies, two-thirds of people taking antidepressants would feel just as much relief if they took a placebo.
More alarming, she writes, is that there are virtually no long-term studies on the side effects antidepressants may cause, despite the fact many people, like her, have been taking them for decades.
“I think it’s odd, and almost sinister, as to why no one is looking at what Prozac is doing to our brains over time,” she says.
‘We just don’t know what they are doing to our brains and our bodies.’
- Lauren Slater
“Why has [drugmaker] Eli Lilly not pursued this line of study? Is it justifiable to start patients on a path to taking a drug for years, or decades, when we know so little about its long-term effects?”
In the absence of studies, Slater made herself into one by writing “Blue Dreams.” While miraculous in some regards, she says, Prozac also has its downsides. Her libido took a major hit. The medicine robbed her of sexual interest entirely, which played a large part in the demise of her 25-year marriage, she says. But the worst was yet to come.
Eventually the Prozac stopped working. She had increased the dosage to 120 milligrams (80 is the highest dose recommended by the FDA), but her symptoms kept breaking through. In a profound depression, she switched to a new psychiatric cocktail — Effexor, a newer-generation antidepressant, and the antipsychotic Zyprexa, which increased the effectiveness of Effexor.
The Effexor kept her libido at zero and elevated her blood pressure. But the Zyprexa, which worked beautifully on lifting her mood, also wreaked havoc on her body. It caused her appetite to increase and her weight to balloon, slowing her metabolism and giving her type 2 diabetes. High blood sugar is destroying her eyesight and has caused her kidneys to malfunction.
“To put it bluntly, I am not aging well,” she says. “I am unhealthy, and this is largely due to psychiatry’s drugs. And yet I cannot live without these drugs.
“We just don’t know what they are doing to our brains and our bodies,” she says. “And it seems like there is a vested interest in not knowing.”