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"The New Yorker
May 8, 2000 in a review by Joan Acocella entitled "The Empty Couch: What is lost when psychiatry turns to drugs." The review (of Prozac Backlash and two other books) was featured on the cover sleeve of The New Yorker under the headline: "Drugs Aren't Enough." The review is accompanied by a full-page illustration of a "Psychiatric Unit" portrayed as an assembly line with patients on a conveyor belt being dispensed pills.
"Considering the tics and spasms that are turning up in SSRI takers--on which, it should be added, there seem to be no good figures yet (Glenmullen says things like 'Mild to moderate spasms may affect as many as 10 percent of patients')--some doctors are worried that Prozac and its cousins may likewise be causing 'silent brain damage,' the effects of which will not become clear for years, perhaps not until the patient reaches old age.
A recent issue of Brain Research reported on a study in which rats were given high doses of either Prozac or Zoloft for four days. Afterward, their brain cells showed 'swollen axon terminals [the terminal ends of brain cells which are the target of the drugs], thick axons and corkscrew-like profiles [in other words, the brain cells became twisted into corkscrew-like shapes]." Corskcrew-like profiles! The drug doses, it should be said, were very high, ten to a hundred times the therapeutic dose for human beings. On the other hand, the rats took the drugs for only four days, whereas millions of human beings have been on SSRIs for years.
Madhu Kalia, who directed the study, says, 'We don't know if the [brain] cells are dying....These effects may be transient and reversible. Or they may be permanent.' If they are permanent, and turn up in human beings as well as in rats, the law courts are going to be an interesting sight in thirty years. Unlike the hospitalized schizophrenics who developed tardive dsykinesia [the type of tics now being seen with SSRIs], the ad executives taking SSRIs have good lawyers.
In Glenmullen's view, seventy-five per cent of people on SSRIs can either go off the drug or dramatically reduce their dose. In any case, they should read this book." |