“Prozac made me speed up,” says Julie, a 38-year-old woman with a family history of manic depression. “I was scouring every nook and cranny. I had two vacuums going in the bedroom at once, one for the corners and one for the floor. I hadn’t cleaned that much for two years, because I was depressed. Once I took Prozac, suddenly I felt like doing a really good job. The night before I went on the cleaning binge, I lay in bed for two hours thinking that I could smell the dust. As soon as I told my psychiatrist, he immediately took me off Prozac and put me on Paxil.”
There also have been reports of anger and irritability among users of Prozac. Very irritable patients usually find their temperaments improving on Prozac, but it’s a different story with manic-depressives. If manic highs involve anger, paranoia, or irritability and you take Prozac without first being stabilized on lithium, the manic side of your mood may break through and you could experience these symptoms. Many scientists believe that Prozac may initially increase manic symptoms because the drug increases a person’s energy before it has successfully altered mood. This could suddenly prompt a suicide attempt in someone who had previously been too lethargic to make the effort. Indeed, several studies have suggested that people who are slowed down by depression in this way do appear to have a temporary increased risk of suicide as the depression eases.
zac, but this anxiety eventually passes.
Indeed, despite the suits and bad publicity, the popularity of this drug never declined; Lilly’s Prozac sales haven’t had a bad year since the drug was released in 1987. In 1993, sales reached $1.2 billion worldwide ($880 million in the United States alone), surpassing the sales of all previously used antidepressants around the world. Sales are expected to increase another 12 percent in 1994.
There also have been reports of anger and irritability among users of Prozac. Very irritable patients usually find their temperaments improving on Prozac, but it’s a different story with manic-depressives. If manic highs involve anger, paranoia, or irritability and you take Prozac without first being stabilized on lithium, the manic side of your mood may break through and you could experience these symptoms. Many scientists believe that Prozac may initially increase manic symptoms because the drug increases a person’s energy before it has successfully altered mood. This could suddenly prompt a suicide attempt in someone who had previously been too lethargic to make the effort. Indeed, several studies have suggested that people who are slowed down by depression in this way do appear to have a temporary increased risk of suicide as the depression eases.
Prozac experienced a temporary backlash in 1990 after reports circulated that it induced violent and suicidal tendencies in some users; the Church of Scientology led the attack against the drug, which focused on a small group of patients who had suicidal or violent thoughts.
In 1990 the church filed a citizen’s petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asking that Prozac be withdrawn from the market, citing a Harvard Medical School study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry stating that 6 out of 172 high-risk mental patients who had been resistant to other drugs had become preoccupied with violent suicidal thoughts while on Prozac. Two of them tried unsuccessfully to kill themselves. Although none of the six had appeared to be suicidal when they started taking Prozac, five had had suicidal thoughts before. At the time, four of the six were also taking other medications (one was taking five other drugs).
The Scientologists took that study’s findings of the six individuals and extrapolated them to the entire United States population, claiming that 140,000 people in the United States have become violent and suicidal on Prozac and charging that widespread use of Prozac would promote waves of violence. They backed up this claim by pointing to mass murderer Joseph Wesbecker, who killed himself and eight coworkers at a printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky, with an AK-47 assault rifle. A Scientology group alleged that Wesbecker, who they said had no history of violence, went berserk because he took Prozac. Subsequent media reports revealed Wesbecker had a large gun collection, had tried to kill himself 12 times in the past, and had often talked about killing his employers.
Because so many depressed people are also suicidal, the fact that a few severely depressed patients taking antidepressants became suicidal didn’t surprise researchers. The FDA was concerned, however, because Prozac affects serotonin, a neurotransmitter known to be linked with aggression.