The two main ways that all animals deal with stress are fight and flight. It is important to remember that a major way of managing stress is to leave it behind. To quit. The term ‘quitter’ has a negative connotation in our culture, but sometimes quitting is the smartest thing you can do. ‘Take your [...]
Bulimia nervosa, with its terrible pattern of compulsive eating binges, self-induced vomiting, laxative and diuretic abuse, and anything else its sufferers can think of to control their weight, affects between 1.3% and 10.1% of American women. Although older antidepressants, especially the MAOIs, have been shown to help, side effects frequently have presented problems, in part [...]
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 [...]
Prozac is only approved in the United States for major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Nevertheless, psychiatrists have also commonly used it for a wide range of other diagnoses, including dysthymia, atypical bipolar depression, the depressive phase of bipolar manic depression, borderline personality disorder, substance abuse, several other personality disorders and subclinical forms of depression. [...]
Since Prozac selectively blocks the uptake of serotonin, which specifically creates anxiety and gastrointestinal disturbances, anxiety is a common side effect (as is nausea). Especially in the beginning, a certain number of people also experience the related sensations of restlessness, nervousness, agitation, decreased appetite, and trouble sleeping. They simply can’t sit still.
Although this feeling of [...]
There is no evidence in laboratory studies of Prozac in animals or in clinical studies with thousands of patients that it is either habit-forming or addictive. The two common properties of addictive substances are tolerance (the need to take increasingly stronger doses to achieve the same result) and withdrawal (the collection of disturbing psychic and [...]