Mype

April 15, 2008
Who Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really amwithout it.”

At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived severalsuicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.

But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development andcore identity.

It was not an issue I had seriously considered before. Most of my patients, who are adults, developed their psychiatric problems after they had a pretty clear idea of who they wereas individuals. During treatment, most of them could tell me whether they were back to their normal baseline.

Julie could certainly remember what depression felt like, but she could not recallfeeling well except during her long treatment with antidepressant medications. And since she had not grown up before getting depressed, she could not gauge the hypothetical effects of antidepressants onher emotional and psychological development.

Her experience is far from unique. Since their emergence in the late 1980s, serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft have become some of themost widely prescribed drugs in the world, for depressed teenagers as well as adults. Because depression is often a chronic, recurring illness, there are certain to be many young people, like Julie,who are coming of age on these newer antidepressants.

We know a lot about the course of untreated depression, probably more than we do about very long-term antidepressant use in this population. Weknow, for example, that depression in young people is a very serious problem; suicide is the third-leading cause of death in adolescents, not to mention the untold suffering and impaired functioning...