Furious Seasons

January 22, 2009

Woman Takes Lexapro For Financial Anxiety, Has Awful Reaction

Over at US News & World Report's "On Women" blog, Deborah Kotz recounts a tale of a friend of hers, who along with her husband lost millions of dollars in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme scandal. (BTW, like a lot of investors, they may have put their money with someone else, having no idea it was later invested with Madoff's firm.) She had a fairly natural grief reaction to all of this and developed fairly severe anxiety. She got put on Lexapro. Things did not turn out so well:

"Unfortunately, the Lexapro seemed to make things worse for Loren: 'I had horrible shivering and sweating and would curl up in a ball on my couch after breakfast and lie there until midafternoon,' she recalls. 'I felt like I was in a fog that I couldn't snap out of, like all the color went out of my world.' A psychiatrist friend of hers urged her to go off the medication, and within two days, Loren's fog lifted. She still feels anxious and occasionally has dry heaves but has found outlets to deal with her anxiety: talking to friends who are also Madoff victims; playing tennis; writing and illustrating a children's book (inspired by her Lexapro experience); and teaching art in a local high school. She and her husband also came up with a two-year plan for getting their family through the crisis."

As Kotz notes, there are other ways to deal with anxiety, even ones outside of therapy and medications. You can read her blog for that.

Separately, you've got to wonder how many new scrips for anti-depressants have been written in the last year due to this nation's financial crisis and in hopes of addressing people's natural depression and anxiety. I bet it's in the millions. You've also got to wonder how many of these same people have had nasty reactions to the drugs. I bet that's in the millions, too. Good business for Big Pharma and doctors though. Possibly quite pointless and painful for many Americans, who likely could've found other ways to address their responses to grief.

While I'm wondering aloud, I want to point out that in recent months several of you have written me to suggest that there may be an anti-depressant component to the financial crisis, but one of a different kind--i.e., that loads of people in the financial industry were basically high, or emotionally blunted, on anti-depressants the last decade or so and that their anti-depressant stupor led them to make insanely stupid financial choices for which we are all now paying a very hefty price. I suppose such a dynamic is possible--although I'm not sure you could ever reduce it to a simple Prozac effect--but I've not seen the kind and degree of direct evidence yet to convince me that anti-depressants are weirdly at the root of our financial crisis. But if I ever find such evidence, I can assure you I'll write about it.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at January 22, 2009 12:01 AM

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Comments

http://www.topix.net/forum/drug/effexor/TQ4I2UR28DFD3N759

While it's not direct evidence of anything, I found the above linked forum amazing. It's 300 posts about families destroyed by extremely unusual behaviour and choices due to SSRIs. Most happily married for 10+ years before there spouse abruptly decided they wanted a divorce.

Posted by: Becky at January 22, 2009 03:42 AM

Sorry, but the majority of those involved in the financial crisis were on antidepressants, which dulled their moral sense and contributed to their greedy and selfish decisions? Is that seriously the hypothesis here?

Posted by: dguller at January 22, 2009 04:44 AM

that loads of people in the financial industry were basically high, or emotionally blunted, on anti-depressants the last decade or so and that their anti-depressant stupor led them to make insanely stupid financial choices for which we are all now paying a very hefty price.

That may be the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard........

Posted by: Bromac at January 22, 2009 08:10 AM

"'I had horrible shivering and sweating and would curl up in a ball on my couch after breakfast and lie there until midafternoon,' she recalls"

Hopefully times are changing a little bit! It use to be after you started an anti-depressant and went to your doctor with the above statement, they attributed the symptoms to your depression getting worse and increased the medication and or started another one

Posted by: Jane at January 22, 2009 08:12 AM

I agree that it can't be reduced to a single effect and it might be hard to find evidence because of that (other than the co-relation between number of scrips and degree of financial instability). But I think the tendency to treat problems by medicating people is a symptom of a certain mind-set, a certain attitude to life, that is reflective of the same kinds of attitudes that led to this crisis, at least.

Posted by: Lilian Nattel at January 22, 2009 09:21 AM

Certain commenters can dismiss as ridiculous and preposterous the concept that antidepressants may have exacerbated the financial crisis but I think there's a lot to it that is plausible. Stock and bond traders are in a highly stressful situation and I bet their doctors are all too eager to give them pills for that. And frankly there is no doubt, in my mind at least, that antidepressants impair judgment and lead to emotional as well as moral blunting. Many top honchos in the financial world have been "treated for depression" which is really code for being medicated. In the days after his arrest there was speculation that Bernie Madoff was "bipolar;" if he had that "diagnosis" then that means he was almost certainly medicated. What if he -- and his wife -- were both on antidepressants? Who knows how it might have impaired their joint thinking? I wouldn't be surprised if the IL governor and his spouse are medicated too. But of course there is no proof yet for any of this and it is just hypothesis and speculation but frankly anytime I see bizarre behavior described in the media I smell a rat, the rat of rampant psychopharmacology, and the number of times I've been proved right is really quite astounding. And I don't think any professional should ever underestimate the ability of drugs given to one individual after another to affect the group as a whole. As Charles Medawar said "One cannot exist sanely in a sea of madness."

Posted by: Sara at January 22, 2009 02:23 PM

Blaming drugs on the financial collapse is silly. I know that at the core of the problems in the financial sector is the reliance on fancy computer models dreamed up by physics and mathematician PhD's (who couldn't find work in academia - another subject) which convinced people that risk in the markets could be whisked away into derivatives and other financial wizardry. No one understood these models, but that did not matter. They are computer models; therefore, they must be right! They seemed to allow people to account for debt and risk in the market. So write those sub-prime mortgages, we have a model that allows us to handle the risk! Being in the business of computer simulations, I know first hand the mantra: garbage in, garbage out. When people woke up that you can't have all of this enormous amount of risk and debt ("but the models said we could") without some tangible assets, that is when the panic began and the collapse occurred.

Posted by: Tony at January 22, 2009 02:26 PM

Okay, maybe not "THE" financial crisis...but I'd say at medication could be at the root of MANY families financial crisis'.

Excerpt: “ My husband of 29 years with two lovely teenage daughters, got on Lexapro and within 3 months decided he didn't want to live with me anymore and up and moved to his college town (of 35 years ago!) and left his family… Suddenly he has no emotions. He left an $86,000 job to take another one that laid him off soon after! The loss in income for our family is very difficult…”

Posted by: Becky at January 22, 2009 03:45 PM

well once antipsychotics are mainstreamed for depression, anxiety, insomnia etc; no one will know what is to blame for what anymore; because we will be a medicated nation, with medicated kids who never know the meaning of "normal". "normal" ceases to exist, then we do.

Posted by: Stephany at January 22, 2009 07:44 PM

You all are missing the point about the financial crisis. Of course, there is no direct evidence linking the use of SSRIS and psychotropic medications to what happened.

But in light of the fact that there have been several posts on various boards about how people started acting irresponsibly once they got put on these meds (Paxil Progress has a family section devoted to this issue), it is not inconceivable that this could have happened. Of course, we will never know because in this fantasy land of ours, psychotropic meds are wonderful and cause people to live happily ever after and side effects don't exist. If there are any, it is because of the person's illness worsening and nothing more. After all, you can't believe a word from those psych patients as it is their illness talking.

Now that my sarcasm and rant is over, you might want to go to http://www.pharmalot.com. and look for the blog about a parkinson's med that caused people who never had had gambling problems in their lives to have severe problems. If these types of meds can do this, again, it isn't inconceivable that psych meds could cause these problems in light of the posts we have seen.

Becky, thank you for the link to the posts you found by the way.

Posted by: AA at January 23, 2009 04:34 AM

You're welcome :)
I went to Paxil Progress' family section and found the same types of stories.
It makes me wonder how much my personality was effected. But I've been divorced for 12 years and never established any long term relationships. I guess it's safe to say they made me Apathetic. (Sorry, I have veered off topic).

Posted by: Becky at January 24, 2009 06:05 PM