David McRaney  |  Journalist

Antidepressants not always the best solution

Americans are the over medicated, pill-popping hypochondriacs of the world. Be it alcohol, nicotine or even Tylenol, there's a good chance you are seeing my words though some sort of chemical fog.

To be fair, as I write this article there is enough caffeine coursing though my veins to power a Carnival cruise ship for a weekend, so I suppose I'm as much to blame as anyone.

But, when I recently learned some people give Prozac to their dogs, I thought perhaps there was something I was missing.

The very idea we should give our pets antidepressants reveals something about our time. I remember buying Gravy Train for our German Shepard because it only seemed fair our beloved doggie should be able to share in the glory of gravy. Apparently we have become so inundated with the idea drugs can solve our problems we think Fido deserves to reap the rewards of our miracle pills as well.

The sad thing about drugs like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Xanax is they really don't work very well, and half of the people who take them suffer awful withdrawal symptoms when they try to kick the habit. Over half of the 28 million - that's one in ten - Americans who use antidepressants suffer severe sexual dysfunction. Prozac has even been linked to causing some people to become both suicidal and homicidal.

Even more frightening is according to the results of a recent study by Dr. Irving Kirsch and Dr. Guy Sapirstein, 75 percent of the effectiveness of antidepressants comes from the placebo effect. In other words, for most people, just believing they will get well works better than taking a drug. Take into account even when antidepressants do work, they only work 20 to 25 percent of the time, and you have to wonder how come retail sales of antidepressants reached $11 billion dollars in 2004. Seriously, if you only had a one in four chance of ridding yourself of a headache each time you took an aspirin, would you even waste your time?

Perhaps it has to do with our increasingly alarming faith in medicine. My sister-in-law was 16 when a doctor prescribed Paxil for her depression. Like a lot of teenagers, she felt isolated, ostracized and unhappy. She felt like she didn't belong, and forces were aligned against her. So, concerned, her father took her to a physician. The doctor said take this pill and call me in a few weeks.

A few weeks passed, and she still felt bad, so he upped the dosage. Eventually she was taking five times the dosage she started at, so I got curious.

I didn't know she was on a mood-altering drug, I just knew she seemed to sit in a spaced out catatonic stupor most of the time. I did some research and found a certain percentage of patients who take these drugs actually get worse. She quit taking Paxil, and after a few weeks she started to act like a normal teenager, and by normal I mean she went back to being angry and defiant and painting her fingernails black.

The lesson here? _Doctors today have no problem prescribing pills to cure teenageritus, or rambunctious 5-year-olditus or Idontlike-crowdseritus.

I'm not a scientologist. I believe in psychology, and I think antidepressants are a fine tool. But, I'm wary of how quickly doctors are willing to fall back on them.

Putting faith in a drug that doesn't work for many people is dangerous. Some people should be working through their problems, or be taken for what they are - human beings living in a complicated and often depressing world.

Some people are chemically imbalanced, and for some, Zoloft may be a lifesaver. But for people like my sister-in-law, dulling the pain with anything - no matter the legality - is running from a problem, and it will define her.

One only has to watch television for a few minutes before some sort of miracle pill for some sort of obscure problem no one knew they had pops up. My personal favorites are the commercials where the woman is on a date wind surfing or skipping stones at the lake. Then, while her suitor is distracted with putting up the tent, she turns to the camera and reveals she has herpes, but she takes a drug to prevent outbreaks. Just once I would like the guy in the background to go, "What was that honey?"

Hopefully people will wise up and see the pharmaceutical industry is like any other billion-dollar business with commercials and scandals. Paxil is largely ineffective, but they sell the sizzle, not the steak. There are no miracles, just supply and demand.

So, please, I implore you, when the veterinarian suggests Viagra for your daschund, ask about alternatives.

Originally published in The Student Printz on April 4, 2006