Transcription
For each of my interviews on a catastrophic reaction to a psychiatric med, there's always a comment about that same med really helping someone. I want to address this. There is a huge amount of variability with these medications depending on who takes them, and just because someone had a great reaction doesn't mean that someone else couldn't have an awful or even fatal reaction.
Let's break it down. For example, take Lexapro, an SSRI commonly used for anxiety and depression. Let's give it to four people at the same starting dose, which is 10 mg according to the label. What could you expect to see?
So, person number one, after taking Lexapro, they might feel nothing. The drug's just not effective for them. They don't notice any change.
Person number two may develop a lot of gastrointestinal symptoms. And so, these can be things like nausea or diarrhea, and that's because for them, they're especially sensitive to the serotonin side effects in the gut.
Person number three might have a lot of psychiatric side effects. They might have worsening anxiety, insomnia, they could have akathisia, and they could also have suicidal ideation.
And person number four may have numbing. And this numbing might be experienced by that person to be really therapeutic and actually helpful for their anxiety and depression.
By bringing awareness to these rarer adverse reactions, I'm not trying to invalidate anyone who had a positive reaction to a med. What I want to highlight is both positive and negative reactions coexist for all these medications, but the negative reactions are often not given enough attention during the informed consent process.
Just like the saying, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," it is quite subjective to say whether a drug effect is going to be positive or negative. If someone wants to feel numbed out for relief from their anxiety, they may say they've had a really positive experience with Lexapro. But another person may hate that feeling of numbness, and they'll feel like Lexapro has failed them.
If you read the comments on any of my drug videos, you can see a full spectrum of reactions documented. If you want to learn more about why there is so much variability, check out a video on overmedication that we're going to be posting on YouTube this week.