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“I do admit I hold bitterness toward the profit-hungry pharmaceutical companies who have no concern for people’s lives and to the medical profession in general who seem to pass out these drugs like they’re candy.”
Please feel free to post my personal experience on the “Experiences” section of your website. You may use the e-mail address listed at the end of my story, as I am receptive to correspondence through that address. Whether you do or don’t post this, simply writing it has served to vent a little sadness for me. Thank you for that and thank you for your work.
After years of reading so many of these tragic stories about SSRIs, I’ve finally felt compelled to share my own story publicly. I’ve never taken any of these drugs, thank God, but I’m no less a victim than anyone else who has taken them.
I, my wife, and our marriage were all victims of Prozac. I was married for 18 years to the most wonderful, compassionate, and loving lady anyone could ever know. We had a most fulfilling marriage, and we both knew without any doubt that we were forever ‘soul-mates’. Others actually told us they were envious of our marriage because it was so obvious we were so happy together and they knew we would grow old together, unlike other couples we knew who were not so content in their marriage. I’m saying this only to make the point that Prozac, and apparently other SSRIs, can have the most profound and unanticipated effect on a person’s behavior.
I never believed my wife ever really needed to take anti-depressants. That’s the ‘insult added to injury’, as the saying goes. But it was, after all, fashionable to take Prozac, and some of her friends were taking it too. So she decided that the pressures of going to college at 38 years old and struggling with finances were reason enough to get her own prescription. In only a few weeks, I noticed behavior changes in her that scared me. She started spending more and more time away from home, she started drinking alcohol much more often than she ever did before (used to only drink a beer or a glass of wine only rarely), she showed absolutely no emotion to things that used to make her easily laugh or cry, she had trouble sleeping (said she felt like her legs needed to run), she quit going to her classes, she stopped visiting with some of her friends and relatives, she got body piercings (uncharacteristic for her), she ignored all responsibilities, and she generally seemed to me like a zombie. That’s the best way I can describe her demeanor — like a zombie. No emotion of any kind. She ‘didn’t know who she was’, she said.
There were scores of other changes I saw in her too, just not so vivid and apparent to anyone but me. Yes, I was scared to death, and I desperately searched myself for answers to what I had done or not done to cause her to become so distant to me and consider divorce. Divorce hadn’t even been in our vocabulary for those 18 years. Some years earlier, we had seen an episode of Sixty Minutes where the dangers of Prozac were exposed. I remembered it and remembered the name Prozac. I remembered the woman on the show saying she had murderous feelings toward her boss after taking Prozac, uncharacteristic of her. Although my wife showed no harmful tendencies to anyone, in my mind I knew Prozac had to be at fault. It just had to be. The woman whose eyes I looked into then was simply not the same person at all that I knew and who loved me so dearly for 18 years, and Prozac was the only culprit that made any sense.
Of course, when I said that I thought it was a bad idea to take Prozac, she told me I didn’t know what I was talking about because I’d never taken it myself. “You don’t get high on it,” she said, “it just makes things easier to cope with.” We were divorced 11 years ago and I still haven’t come to grips with it. I haven’t seen or heard anything from her, her family, or her friends since then (she wanted it that way), so I have no idea how she’s faired through the years. I do pray she’s well. To this day I’ve never had any bitterness toward my wife, of course, but I do admit I hold bitterness toward the profit-hungry pharmaceutical companies who have no concern for people’s lives and to the medical profession in general who seem to pass out these drugs like they’re candy. Oh, by the way, I had a date a few weeks ago with a psychiatric nurse who told me Prozac couldn’t possibly have done those things to my wife. I must have failed to be a good husband. Yeah, right.
Neal
DeltaDan12000@yahoo.com
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