Popular SSRI Antidepressants Linked To Violent Crimes Among Some Patients
This should be in Science and Health but I can't reach it to post a new thread due to Data Base Error.
I have mentioned this before particularly in the case of our mass shootings at schools.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are some of the most widely prescribed antidepressant drugs in the world. Now, an unsettling new study out of Sweden finds that some people given these medications develop a “tendency” to commit violent crimes. According to the research, this violent effect can even last for up to 12 weeks after halting SSRI treatment.To be clear, the study’s authors emphasize that their work detected an association between SSRIs and violent behavior, not a clear-cut case of cause and effect. They warn that their findings should not be used to draw any definitive conclusions.
“This work shows that SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) treatment appears to be associated with an increased risk for violent criminality in adults as well as adolescents, though the risk appears restricted to a small group of individuals,” notes first author Tyra Lagerberg, from the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Karolinska Institutet, in a statement. “We don’t claim that SSRIs cause the increased risk we see in our data. It is possible that the disorders that SSRIs are prescribed to treat, such as depression, are driving the association. In that case our findings may mean that SSRIs are unable to fully remove this tendency towards violent crime, which is also a potentially important insight.”
Lagerberg says earlier studies have made the connection between the drugs and violent behavior in youths, but this latest and larger work is the first to draw a link to adults. Age didn’t seem to make a difference in the outcome.
A massive dataset was analyzed for this research. The medical records of 785,337 people between the ages of 15 and 60 who had been prescribed SSRIs in Sweden between 2006 and 2013. All of those patients were tracked for an average of seven years, regardless of whether or not they continued taking SSRIs.