An American woman told how her life turned into hell because of antidepressants
'01.03.2021'
Source: New York Post
By the time Lauren Slater turned 24, she had been hospitalized five times after attempting suicide. She was deeply depressed, cut herself and suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, says New York Post.
Therefore, when Prozac entered the market in 1988, a psychiatrist strongly recommended Lauren to try this drug to calm her nervous system. Today, one in five Americans takes psychotropic drugs, and Lauren's story is about how it all begins and where it can lead.
“I knew that there was nothing good in my lifestyle. I could not give anything to others and myself, I could not work, I could not do anything that would matter, ”the woman admitted.
The doctor gave her a prescription, and the result was “the most wonderful thing that ever happened,” as Lauren says today. After just three days, the symptoms of the disorder began to recede, and after five they completely disappeared. By the tenth day, Slater felt just fine.
"I was happy, no anxiety, no mental symptoms, no depression."
Now, after 30+ years and a dozen different psychotropic drugs, Slater learned that the pills she took were a choice with no choice - to risk her body or her mind. In the book Slater wrote, Blue Dreams: The Science and History of Drugs That Changed Our Minds, Lauren talks about drugs that have allowed her to live a relatively normal life for many years, but destroyed her body and physical health.
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At 54, Lauren Slater, by her own admission, found herself in the body of an "eighty-year-old woman with problems." She developed kidney failure, diabetes mellitus, has an impressive excess weight, completely lacks sexual desire, which is why a 25-year marriage broke up. And Lauren is gradually losing her memory.
“Now it is already obvious that I will live less than I could. But not because of a psychiatric diagnosis, but because of the drugs I was taking to fight it. ”
And yet, the woman says, she doesn't regret taking pills. Its goal is to ask why such drugs should be so dangerous and why pharmaceutical companies are not talking about it. While the theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain is accepted as gospel, it has not been scientifically proven, Slater believes. There is nothing unambiguously distinguishing the brain function of an ordinary person and a person in depression.
“Because a diagnosis of depression cannot be verified for certain, many of those who take these drugs simply do not need them,” says Lauren.
According to research, 2/3 of all those taking antidepressants would experience the same relief after taking a placebo. The danger is that there are no long-term studies that would clearly give the patient an idea of what awaits him after several years of medication.
"We don't know, Slater stresses, what exactly the drugs are doing to our bodies, and we don't seem to want to know."
