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CAN PROZAC CHANGE MY REAL PERSONALITY?
23 March 2009
by
admin
Filed under
Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid
Although some patients and physicians have claimed that Prozac has transformed personality very positively, most scientists who have studied personality, clinical psychopharmacology, and genetics do not know that this is true beyond the obvious personality changes seen in all depressed patients whose emotions and behavior are altered by Prozac and other medications.
Scientists do not have sufficient evidence that pharmacological agents such as Prozac cause actual changes either in character, which is acquired through environmental experience, or in the DNA-encoded traits that make up temperament, which is inherited. Character and temperament are the main components of personality.
But in fact these traits are not completely foreign to them, as detailed questioning by a depression expert will reveal; they have simply been buried, frequently for a long rime, under a thick layer of dysthymia, a milder chronic form of depression that may have gone undiagnosed for months, years, or a lifetime. Nonetheless, it shaped the patient’s personality and character development, often with a mixture of “soft symptoms”, such as sluggishness, timidity, and anxiety—traits that might be aspects of someone’s normal personality but that could also be symptoms of subclinical depression. In the latter case, Prozac can lift the patient into a state of normalcy that he or she hasn’t felt for years. Both the patient and other people may then perceive the patient’s personality to have changed dramatically.
Essentially, I don’t believe you can refashion a person’s normal personality with Prozac. Depressive symptoms must be present before obvious changes in behavior and emotions can be brought about with an antidepressant. But when there is a past, often forgotten hypomania. the change may be greater and the patient may interpret this as a “transformed self* or a “new personality”.
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