I am telling this story to confirm that antidepressants cause adverse personality changes, that physicians deny it, and that getting off the drugs certainly can result in a full recovery and a return to empathy, kindness, etc. This is a bit long. But I need to show the domino effect one antidepressant prescription had and how much damage this caused to multiple lives.
When my former daughter-in-law met my son, she had already been on and off antidepressants for years. They had cultural and educational differences that challenged their marriage but they seemed to work very well together. I loved her. She was bright and funny and creative. When they married, my son started to see her GP, who had been her childhood doctor. My grandson was born in 2011 with a heart defect, severe allergies, and from at least age eight months started to exhibit signs of autism, which was officially diagnosed in 2015. My son was sole financial supporter for all three of them, was working a high-pressure job and studying for his CPA, which was required for his job. Medical bills were constant and his child needed tons of extra care. His wife was so disabled by antidepressants (though I did not make the connection at the time) that she was sleeping all day and was extremely critical of him (the entire family was shocked by her behavior. He was doing all the housework, shopping, and childcare when he was home. She would get out of bed to yell at him to fold the laundry. It was difficult to observe.
So he developed insomnia. The GP prescribed antidepressants. I think Effexor was the first. Immediately my son experienced stiffness. This is a MAJOR RED FLAG that he could not tolerate these drugs. But the GP just prescribed another, to which he also had reactions, on and on through at least six different ones. He always stopped after a few months because he felt so awful, but then he would have what we now know were withdrawal symptoms and felt he had to try a different one. (I did not know he was on antidepressants during these years till years later, as I will describe. )
His personality began changing soon after starting them. He was by nature very sensitive and empathetic, very protective of his wife, sent me cards and gifts, and had a great and whacky sense of humor. At the time, I was teaching at a college 2500 miles away and flew to visit about three times a year, during school breaks. In the spring of 2018, I emailed him and said I would like to come for a long weekend. He responded with a long, angry letter, hard copy per post, telling me he did not want me coming and “lying around on his couch.” I did not know he was on antidepressants at the time. He stopped answering the phone. Later, my DIL showed me photos she took of him. He had a very dark, scary expression in his eyes.
In the fall of 2018, my son’s wife sent me a message saying my son was acting strange and scary. He was flirting with his wife’s cousin in front of her whole family, saying cruel things to his wife, and scaring her. I saw some social media post and saw a very strange, scary look in his eyes. A few days earlier, he had called me and told me he had been having “mental health problems” but was “fine;” the ER had given him medication, he said. He sounded oddly chipper. Later I learned that he was manic – they had given him Prozac.
After his wife’s messages to me, things quickly got out of control. He became paranoid, coming home from his job during his lunch hour every day – which ate up his break time – and following his wife around the house, accusing her of being unfaithful. According to my other son, she had been flirty with my son’s friend when that friend visited them, but she was nowhere near having an affair. I had told her that if she was afraid, she should go stay with her mother until we figured out what was wrong, but she would not leave. I was speaking to him on the phone every day, and he sounded like a child, could not find words. I talked to a psychologist who told me that “antidepressants reveal bipolar disorder.” Though she was wrong, of course, the good thing was that she urged me to try to move to where my son was so that I could help with my grandson. I feared for my son’s life. I thought he would kill someone or himself. And so my husband very, very fortunately, found a job near my son, and I gave up a tenured professorship and we moved across the country.
My son and his wife had started going to marriage counseling. They had a prescribing psych nurse practitioner who continued to prescribe antidepressants and benzos to my son. (When I later saw my son’s medical records, this nurse practitioner was recording that my son was “drug seeking” because he told the nurse he could not sleep without the Proz .” The counselor suggested my son see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with bipolar 1 and prescribed him Latuda, an antipsychotic, and tapered him, fast, off of the Proz . The psychiatrist called me and asked questions. He made me believe that everything my son had enjoyed as a child – roller coasters, daring rides – was a sign of mental illness. And he was intelligent and artistic. So he *must* be mentally ill.
Within months of starting the Lat*da, he began secretly pacing and having severe panic attacks and ruminating and could not sleep. He did not tell anyone about this at first. He certainly had akathisia, but at the time, we did not know there was a name for this, and no medical professionals recognized it. He was losing hair and having pain in his chest because of stress. So he went back to the GP, telling him that the psychiatrist had said never to take Proz again, but the GP said, “It is perfectly safe, and here is some Xanx as well – you have anxiety disorder.” He took one Proz pill with a Xanx pill and said he felt his brain literally snap, jiggle in his head. (Later I read a study that said Proz enhances the effect of Xanx manifold.) He immediately stopped the Proz but, as he had undiagnosed Lat*da, his anxiety was so severe that he continued the Xanx. Within two weeks, he had interdose withdrawal (we now know) from the Xanx and could not sleep unless he increased the dose. So the GP increased it. Now my son was acting absolutely insane with anxiety within six hours of taking the Xanx. And he could no longer sleep at all – it was the worst nightmare. He could not even yawn. And the doctors were calling this ‘mania.” It was akathisia. He had a mentally demanding job and worked with numbers and if he lost his job, he lost not only his home and food for his child but all medical care for him. So it was terrifying.
By now he was separated and had 50% joint custody of his son, who stayed with him every other week. He was actually providing a much more stable, caring home for this child than his mother was – she just did not do anything with or for the child and left him in front of screens all day long. I did not want my son to lose custody, because he had been a super loving father, and the mother was sleeping all day and leaving the child alone unattended. My spouse and I had barely settled in our new location and I only had a very part time job, though we could not survive financially on it and I was looking for other work, But my son was so sick that I needed to start staying with my him during the weeks that he had his son. He sent me up to 50 texts a day, ruminating about the mistakes he had made, sure he had ruined his life with all his bad choices. He was pacing all day at work; luckily he had his own office so he could shut the door. But his coworkers knew something was very wrong. At home, he would suddenly say to me, “I should jump in front of a bus” and then look horrified and say, “I don’t know why I said that!”
I had already started researching the drugs. At first I thought it was just the benzos. I did not know that ALL these drugs were causing him reactions and that it had started with antidepressants. For the next nine months, he was in and out of ERs (I was always with him so witnessed it), a nightmare – he would be held for hours, psychiatrists would just say “It’s his bipolar disorder” and prescribe more, though he and I were both saying, “it is the drugs – help him get off the drugs -he needs to taper.” They kept him so long that he developed interdose withdrawal from the Xanx and was pounding on this bed pillows and pacing. So hospital security was called because a nurse said I as “agitating him,” and a huge guard came and accompanied me out of the ER and into the filled waiting room, screaming at me that he was going to call the police to make me leave the building. My son thought I had abandoned him. At the end of that horrific stay, he admitted in the ER that he was feeling suicidal (it was again during interdose withdrawal) and they involuntarily committed him to a state hospital for two weeks – a nightmare he escaped only because both he and I flattered the psychiatrist and “complied.” But he came home severely ill, now with no benzo prescription, because the psychiatrist at the state hospital decided that he “had no visible withdrawal symptoms” 24 hours after stopping his prescribed Klonop, one of the five drugs he was on at the time. (By the end of that nine months, he had been prescribed at least 15 drugs.) His prescribing nurse practitioner had dropped him when he became suicidal. So I had to frantically find a psychiatrist who understood withdrawal. The only one who had any openings turned out to be one of the most corrupt psychiatrists in the world. This guy invented the Bipolar II diagnosis and had made millions from drug company “research” and testified on behalf of the medical industry when people sued about drug harm. I learned this after my son started seeing him. Much more that story, but to make a very long story shorter, my son finally decided that if he was going to die anyway, he would rather die off the drugs, so he stopped it all cold turkey in April of 2020. Immediately after stopping the Lat*da, the light and life came back to his eyes. But within two weeks, severe withdrawal anhedonia set in, and it was unlike anything I have ever seen anywhere, not in any film or nightmare. He was literally a zombie. It was terrifying. It was completely different from anything before, during, or after the drugs. Yet he felt better than when on the drugs – the akathisia stopped. At this point, he still did not realize just how damaging the antidepressants had been. Along with the antipsychotic, mood stabilizers, benzos, and lithium, he was also constantly being prescribed mirta, Well*trin, and others.
I knew that healing was possible. I brought him food and left it outside his door. He would tell me, “Don’t come in – I will stab you.” He did not harm his child, but I lived in terrible fear that he would commit a murder-suicide. Yet if I reported this, he would be committed. What I did observe between my son and his child was that they had a close bond. But this was not healthy for the child, not at all, living with a parent in anhedonia.
Windows started happening. He would suddenly decide to take his son out to a zoo or the beach.
During this whole ordeal, he kept working. That was a miracle. It was only because of his son – he told me this – and luck, between working at home from Covid and the fact that at the same time that he was very ill and involuntarily committed, his own boss started suffering from pretty severe dementia and did not notice that my son was missing emails. But at the same time, my son managed to save his company $3 million by finding an error in one of their policies. Many miracles happened. But he had been living with no light, all shades drawn, no movement, eating fast food ordered from McDonalds (he actually wanted to die of a heart attack so that his son would get life insurance and there would be no questions about suicide). He had had terrible physical symptoms for months – severe gastrointestinal issues, crushing head pain, tingling extremities, brain zaps. He had seen at least ten physicians and not one fricking one suggested that the drugs were doing this. Not. One.
At about seventeen months into his withdrawal, I was starting to absolutely lose patience with his refusal to even try to do anything except drag himself to his desk to work. I felt that if he would start walking outside and eating better and consciously reprogram his thinking, choosing his thoughts, refusing to keep repeating he was “damaged for life” (which came from the dmn doctors), he would have a better chance of recovering. We had a huge argument about this. He was so sure that his brain was permanently damaged that he could not see that he was actually recovering. I told him, “Do you want me to believe that all the things you said to me were YOU? That this was not the drugs? It was not you.” I sent him the link to Medicating Normal because the young man in that film is my son’s age, very similar looks, personality, and story and lives literally 30 minutes from both of us. And this lit a little flame for my son. He apologized for raging at me when I told him he had to do something to get better or I was pulling my support – I was exhausted and had reached the end of my rope. Then, through the Mad in America parent support group, a friend there connected me with Ron Bassman, a PhD psychologist who understood the damage of these drugs. Ron was working with this man and his son, and the man asked Ron if he would take on a new patient. Ron called and we talked for ninety minutes, and he agreed to work with my son virtually.Ron had been through it and knew the system. He got through to my son, who just needed to believe, at that point, that he could reclaim his life. And he did, almost overnight. I was a little afraid it was mania, but it was not. He continued to work with Ron for about a year. But since April of 2020, he took no drugs at all. Since September of 2021, he has been beyond stable. He has excelled in his career, returned to whited water rafting, which he so loved and thought he had to give up forever (the rafting community welcomed him back with open arms), and is single-handedly doing all medical care and school meetings for his autistic son, who is now thirteen. He was so traumatized by what happened and is under lots of pressure from his job and parenting – his exwife is still not working, no health insurance, takes my grandson to no medical appointments, rarely or never meets with teachers, and lets my grandson stay on his I-pad every night till 1 am on school nights. She was not always like this. I knew her when she was not on antidepressants, and she was busy, organized, funny, motivated.
If your marriage sank because of these drugs, I am sorry. Do know that it is possible for a person to return to their empathetic, motivated, funny self after getting off. I do not recommend cold turkeying unless absolutely necessary (and because my son’s akathisia was so severe, and he would have eventually died from lack of sleep, I think it was a risk he knew he had to take) and if someone does do this, I hope they have much support and daily encouragement to keep putting one foot in front of the other. There is light at the end.
This fundamentally changed my career – I had to step out for three years at an age where it is very difficult to step back in. And could not explain why because if word got out about my son, he could have lost his job, and no one would believe me anyway. (Most still do not. My circle of friends has shrunk, as I have no patience for any “friend” who does not believe me.) Because I could not work, my husband worked two jobs, seven days a week, twenty hours every weekend, for three years straight. His only break was when he got Covid. I do not know how we all survived this physically and emotionally. But one thing is for sure: Neither my husband nor I touched any fricking psych meds during that time, regardless of how much insomnia or worry we had -that is how we survived. Talk about trauma.
The answer to trauma is not antidepressants or benzos. I have not sworn here, but believe me, I do swear prolifically. That also has helped me survive.