#ssris

[ninamodaffari]

friendly reminder for those on antidepressants that you have an increased risk of heat stroke this summer so please stay hydrated and wear a hat, invest in one of those cool pads and be careful during long walks outside!

[emohorseboy]

Hey did you guys know that a lot of psych-meds (SSRIs, SNRIs, et al) can cause tooth decay? Because I didn’t until a dentist mentioned it to me; no psychiatrist or GP prescribing me those drugs over the years thought to mention it

(I’m not a dentist but I was told that because they cause dry mouth, that increases your risk of tooth problems, particularly if you’re taking them for a long time)

[precambrianpark]

SSRIs/antipsychotics: we're here to put you at gentle ease! take us daily and we'll do as you please! 🌅🌻

the side effects:

[bedsorebaby]

[weirdpersonifiedpills]

Happy fluoxetine day!!

Something I drew up last year for the anniversary but never posted here. 49 years ago today, compound LY-110140 was given the name fluoxetine. After that, it would be 12 more years before it was finally FDA approved in December of 1987 and subsequently sold on US shelves in January of 1988 (that long ass time span is a whole other can of incredibly interesting worms).

I chose film imagery for this piece as a reference to Prozac’s ‘blockbuster drug’ status, of which nearly everyone was taken off guard by it achieving. No one had high expectations for fluoxetine, even those who developed it in the first place. An antidepressant that acted specifically on the serotonin system could never survive in a world where the current antidepressants, like MAOIs and TCAs, acted on multiple systems, and yet Prozac became a national sensation.

What followed massive success was an outcry that only seemed to get louder as time went on, as the potential dangers of the drug were not being properly communicated or warned about. People were dying, committing suicide. Data was covered up, falsified, never released. The court cases lasted years as people fought pharmaceutical giants in search of retribution. I could talk forever about how interesting Prozac’s history is in particular, and how every other SSRI ties so closely into its story (which, if you want to read, I highly reccomend Let Them Eat Prozac by David Healy, my absolutely favorite book ever I read it over and over).

Next year will be the 50th anniversary of fluoxetine’s official name, and I could not be more excited about that

[theapollosystem]

Our antidepressants have fucked with our system communication, it was bad before like we never really had that good communication but I literally can’t hear my alters, nobody can hear eachother in front anymore. it sucks ass we’re gonna change our meds soon. SSRIs can fuck with system communication, it has already fucked with ours and it’s gotten worse as we went up in dose. it kinda messed up with our healing, like communication is apart of healing.

[ninamodaffari]

ya'll getting off of antidepressants is scary as hell. like, i've been on lexapro since I was 22. that's nearly ten years. since weaning off of it (down to 5mg from 20mg a day), i've been more fatigued, losing interest in things like drawing and games, and just feeling more depressed in general. every bone in my body is like 'well shit, I should probably take it again' or 'oh my god, is this what my actual self is like'

and its kinda like, I can imagine for some, this weird cycle of 'okay, obviously i'm not ready to get off my meds, if this is how I feel normally', but it's not normal. its withdrawl from your medication. lexapro is a BITCH. withdrawls from it is even worse. how i feel right now in the midst of getting off of lexapro isn't how i'll be forever, it just feels like it might be because MY BRAIN WAS REWIRED

this isn't to poo poo on antidepressants btw. they saved my life. it's just getting off of them can be as scary as depression was sometimes. I just hope that things balance out, you know? my brain has to remember how to function without this med

[chappydev]

We Deserve Better

So. I've posted my first post on my hosted blog. The intention is to post things there that are more thought out/serious, so as not to limit my content to "walled gardens" such as tumblr. It's an article about the anti-psychiatry website Mad in America, and how the anti-psych movement continues to fail us because it is not led by us (us being the neurodivergent or mentally ill).

Trigger warning for politics, and for RFK Jr jumpscare (aaa!)

[amanitaknowsbest]

[lord-numbskull]

sertraline is amazing. sometimes im sitting still too long and then when i move i am suddenly sweating lightly from every pore

[weirdpersonifiedpills]

I need zoloft lore. Where did the silly come from.

Also, adderall being a squirrel is funny to me bc that means it's highly likely meth is also a squirrel. Ah yes strung-out squirrel spending 3 hours sorting good acorns

He gives me trust fund nepotism vibes, but not in the “I’m an entitled brat” way, more in the “I know I kinda got special treatment but I’m still gonna do my best with the opportunities I was lucky enough to receive” way, but that’s more of a personal headcanon than anything. He gets lighthearted flack from the other meds for getting in on recommendation.

(Doodle of Zoloft with the Zoloft Blob from those old commercials‼️)

Zoloft was approved in the US on December 30th of 1991 on recommendation from the FDA Psychopharmacological Drugs Advisory Committee, which, funny enough, had convened regarding Prozac on September 20th of that same year, their vote exonerating Prozac and letting his parent company Eli Lilly off the hook for the controversies that had been going on.

Similar to how Prozac is related to the antihistamines, Zoloft is related to the antipsychotics (distantly) and the norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (parent compound). His parent drug was tametraline, but side effects caused its development to be stopped in 1979, which allowed sertraline to be developed from it. Zoloft and Celexa actually have a very similar creation, both being developed from an NRI drug that either showed or was likely to show concerning side effects that halted its development and meant it never hit the market, allowing it to be turned into an SSRI. (Technically tametraline is norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibitor but given a lot of NRIs weakly act on other neurotransmitters, it’s close enough).

They’ve got super thick fur, I designed him with that because when I was on Zoloft all I did was sweat constantly and feel overheated lol, but depending on what I end up personifying the NRIs as (which I need to decide because there’s a bunch I wanna draw) it’ll probably make sense family wise as well.

The way Pfizer chose to market Zoloft lead to an upset between companies. Zoloft hit the US market in 1992, (the same year as Paxil) and had been on the European market as early as 1990 (Paxil had been on the UK market as Seroxat since 1991). Once again, similar to how Celexa was developed and released later than some of the other SSRIs, Zoloft was as well, and Pfizer knew this. To counteract this fact, Pfizer took to advertising Zoloft as “cleaner” than the other SSRIs (mainly Prozac and Paxil, the two biggest SSRIs). Despite not having much, if any, clinically relevant research on their side, the constant pushing of the idea that Zoloft was somehow safer and cleaner helped make it a worthy contender in the market space. Technically Zoloft was the first “enantiomerically pure SSRI drug to hit the market” so that’s probably where that came from. The parent companies of these meds responded to each other as they all fought for dominance on the market. Zoloft was Prozac’s other closest competitor aside from Zoloft. It was only when Lilly realized Prozac had an advantageously long half life that wouldn’t cause nearly as severe discontinuation syndrome that they were able to shake the other two meds off of Prozac’s tail.

(This should say 1992 not 1993 oopsie)

Prozac would’ve met Zoloft first, as they both had launched in other countries before Paxil did, however, Zoloft is closer to Celexa and Lexapro than they are to Prozac and Paxil, who bonded over shared struggles that Zoloft didn’t have. Celexa and Lexapro had a lot more in common with him, both age, experience, and personality wise, and him and Celexa were seen as the “backing chorus” to Prozac and Paxil, the two biggest SSRIs. Zoloft was considerably younger than Prozac and a bit younger than Paxil when he hit the US market.

Zoloft kept his nose squeaky clean compared to Prozac and Paxil, with Prozac’s prime being entangled with controversies about him as a medication (80’s-early 2000’s) and Paxil’s parent company GSK getting into plenty of hot water by withholding and suppressing unfavorable data on Paxil, among other things regarding the medication (early 2000’s to mid 2010’s).

Honestly, Zoloft has a very standard history compared to Prozac, and even to Paxil. They were wrapped up in the same black box warning issues of the early 2000’s, but so was every other antidepressant at the time. Zoloft experienced the blowback from Prozac’s controversies like the other SSRIs did, but still looked up to him as a leader and role model all the same. I remember being surprised to learn that Paxil was the other big SSRI back in the day because it seems like literally everyone I meet is on Zoloft. I’ve got friends on it, my sister is on it, a bunch of her friends are on it, and if I’m talking to someone about antidepressants, there tends to be a good chance they’re on Zoloft as well, even I’ve taken Zoloft. He’s a good guy, he’s the “and Brian” of the group honestly, just an all around decent dude who leaves the drama to the other crazies of his class. They do their job and do it well, he’s soft spoken compared to the high-energy personalities of Celexa, Lexapro, and Paxil, and it’s one of his strengths. He’s empathetic and emotionally intelligent, able to provide comfort as well as confidence that he’s able to protect whoever needs it. They were also the second SSRI and third overall med that I officially designed, he has a special place in my heart 🩵🤍

(Art by @/craftzombie on Instagram who I’ve commissioned to draw all of my medication designs)

Edit- yes meth is a squirrel as well, one day I will sit down and design a meth squirrel 🐿️

[sicksadtumble]

Can we ever have a conversation about consent in psychiatry and medical care in general? Can we talk about it?

Like you guys know what informed consent is, right? Why is that ignored when it comes to treating mental health problems?

Why are psychiatrists allowed to prescribe medications without telling the patient what they do or what the side effects are?

Why can't I talk to a therapist without my physical safety being threatened?

Why are doctors and psychiatrists allowed to coerce disabled and/or ill patients to take medication by refusing to treat/diagnose their problem until they take a psychiatric medication? Like I had doctors tell me, they won't run tests on me until I take an antidepressant.

I've directly asked psychiatrists to give me a full list of possible side effects, and they just told me "Oh it can cause nausea and maybe headaches" and then I go home, Google it, and find out I can't take it because it impairs cognitive function, causes brain damage, it's unsafe to take while driving, causes hair loss, raid heart rate, and possibly seizures.

Why doesn't anyone talk about this? And when we do bring it up, we're immediately shut down.

[theapollosystem]

i’m gonna talk to our psych cause i’m like 90% sure the SNRI we switched to is also fucking with our communication

I wanna try something that doesn’t deal with Serotonin as i’m pretty sure that’s why it’s fucking with it

Cause okay last appointment she was like do you hear your alters right now? and I was like No

It’s very hard to hear my alters again it’s not totally blanked out like before but it’s still hard to

it’s worse than when we were off our meds, I wanna try and slowly lower my dose for the Effexor and raise even like a regular SSRI would be better

cause when we were on Lexapro it was still less worse than this

when we were off our meds like all our communication came back and now it’s being suppressed again

I think part of why they put us on another SNRI in the mental hospital is they just wanted to get rid of our withdrawals

I think switching to either a nonserotongenic antidepressant or a tricyclic antidepressant would be better alternative

cause rn my alter communication is just going down rapidly as the new drug kicks in more

i think that maybe even switching to a high dose of Lexapro or another SSRI and slowly going down on that would even be better cause like SNRIs are so much worse when blocking communication i think the double whammy doesn’t help

[payneandagony]

SSRIs be like: