<p>I’ve become more extraverted since starting antidepressants 4 years ago. I wouldn’t call it exactly a personality change, though. I constantly act now more like I used to during the rare, brief times before in my life in which I wasn’t depressed. </p>
<p>Despite the conclusions of the research, I think antidepressants stopped depression from masking my true personality.</p>
<p>" People who take antidepressants such as Paxil often say they feel less stressed and more outgoing, lively, and confident. Now a new study suggests it’s not just because they’re less depressed.</p>
<p>In fact, such drugs may alter two key personality traits linked to depression – neuroticism and extraversion – independently of their effect on depression symptoms.</p>
<p>“Medication can definitely change people’s personalities, and change them quite substantially,” says the lead author of the study, Tony Z. Tang, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The findings show that “those changes are very important,” he says.</p>
<p>I wonder whether the personality changes are temporary or go away once the patient stops taking the meds. I read the article but it did not say.</p>
<p>I would not take them even if they pay me. I already pitched them once and never went back to that doc., who did not even warned me that the pills are anti-depressents. I just complained that I sleep about 5 hours/night. I have been sleeping on average 5 hours/ night for about 20 years now and I am just fine, I will never take these bad drugs. I bet that most people do not need them.</p>
<p>Completely missing from the article – and perhaps from the study? – is whether the patients welcomed these changes, and whether they experienced them as personal growth vs. an inauthentic, externally-imposed change. To me, that’s what matters. And for me, it was the former.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that we have just one true personality. We are all different under different circumstances and at different stages of our lives. Parenthood changes us; education changes us. I am more extroverted and confident on medication than off it, but I’m also more extroverted and confident at age 34 on medication than I was at age 24 on medication. The only time I was not authentically myself was when my spirit was crushed by depression.</p>
agree.<br>
for many people it is definitely the former but for some - it’s the latter. I never really understood why some people would go off their meds, sometimes they blame the side-effects but maybe they don’t like the <em>new</em> me. Also, maybe it is what drives some depressed people to suicide.</p>
<p>I do think it also illustrates why therpy along with medication is so important - maybe more so for some than with others.</p>
<p>Anti depression meds change my DH’s personality. They changed him back to the happy young man I married 26 years ago. Well…not so YOUNG, but we can’t have everything.</p>
<p>Speaking as a biologist, the conclusions of the study are not the least bit surprising. Because, biologically speaking, as a conscious, thinking being, who you are inside your head is the complex sum of the electrochemical activity or your brain. If you alter that activity (for the better in case of antidepressants that work) you have by definition altered who you are. There is no “real” you lurking behind or inside the activity of your brain. The activity of your brain IS you. </p>
<p>I know mental health attorneys who crusade for the legal rights of the mentally ill who would argue that altering “who you are” in this way is wrong and should not be allowed. That if a person is an unhappy, depressive, neurotic that is fundamentally who they are and that changing that is a form of oppression.</p>
<p>From a legal standpoint, the fundamental question would always seem to be this: whether a medication was being taken by an individual voluntarily and with informed consent. If so, then the individual’s “legal rights” have been respected – whatever he or she decides.</p>
<p>My parent overdosed on prescribed anti depressants. I am very sensitive to side affects and have ended up in the hospital (twice) from the rebound effect tHat occurs when stopping medications too quickly.</p>
<p>I think brain chemistry changes with events and time ( too simplistic) and medications can help but the way we find ones that work for us - through trial and error is excruciating.</p>
<p>I am glad that medications are available for those that find they help, but I also have found that the effects don’t last forever and it can be hard to tell when it is time to stop unless you have. A psychiatrist doing tHe monitoring and not a general practitioner doing tHe prescribing as my ins would prefer.</p>
<p>Zoloft made me gain 40 lbs. Yes, I was no longer depressed but then I became depressed about being fat. In the end, I decided it was better to be normal weight and depressed than fat and depressed. JMHO.</p>
<p>Of course antidepressants changed my personality. I went from being a suicidal, tension-wrought, sobbing mess who couldn’t get out of bed to being a happy, healthy, RELIEVED person who is thriving again.</p>
<p>Anybody who doesn’t feel that way about antidepressants likely doesn’t NEED to be on antidepressants. If you don’t need to be on antidepressants, then fine, don’t take them, but they’re definitely not “oppressive”. Let me tell you–“oppressive” is when your brain won’t allow you do anything aside from sit in your closet hiding under a quilt because it’s dark in there and nobody will bother you, while you spend four hours talking yourself into taking a shower for the first time in three days because you’re out of food and you need to go to the store.</p>
<p>That’s certainly clear. It does seem, though, that they are prescribed these days for situations nothing like that. For instance, the insane “on-call” schedule at the hospital my H worked at was making him miserable, along with an overall ridiculous workload and frustrating medical system. He talked to the doctor in charge, who suggested meds to help him “handle” it. In his words “everyone here is on something.”</p>
<p>H quit medicine and kept his sanity, instead.</p>
<p>Obviously, there are real reasons for these medications. Frustratingly, though, I have a sister who could fit your description, aibarr, and has been on every mood-altering medication known to man, with only intermittent results, who has just fallen right back into that hole again. It’s sad and angering, and I have to wonder why, if it’s chemical, she can’t be helped.</p>
<p>Yes. I lost a parent to this horrific disease 10 years ago, despite his trying to fight it with various anti-depressants.</p>
<p>I also regained my confident, content husband. He insisted that the psyciatrist’s recommendation of Prozac was “ridiculous” (this was after having tried and given up on several other meds). A few weeks after giving it a try, he was a new person (actually, close to his “old” person). Still insists that it had nothing to do with the Prozac, but…whatever. I’m just glad. He is no longer on ANY anti-depressants. I’ll take that kind of personality change anyday.</p>
<p>A lot of my situational depression stems from my mother’s continual episodes with major depression and psychosis. The only thing that helps it is electroshock therapy every two to three weeks and quantity of pharmaceuticals that could stun a bison. She has increasingly worsening dementia as a result, and is now divorced from my father, in assisted living, and is a ward of the state, but hey, she’s not depressed. She can’t remember my wedding, but she’s not depressed.</p>
<p>Believe me, if there’s anybody who’s contemplated the ethics of psychiatric treatment, it’s me… but I will still take my Cymbalta every morning, come rain or shine. Depression is so soul-depleting. Some of the methods of combating it border on unconscionable. There’s a balance to be struck, certainly, and I still don’t know where the line should be drawn, but I know it should be drawn FAR beyond at least trying medications and seeing if they help things. Talk therapy first, certainly, but I never recommend that anybody go into a therapist with a closed mind to pharmaceutical help if it turns out to indeed be neurochemical.</p>
<p>Garland and JustaMom, I certainly feel your pain regarding your sister and your parent.</p>
<p>Aibarr, it’s terrific that you found a solution to your depression. You’re a very lucky person. Not everyone is so lucky. I think science still has a way to go for a lot of people.</p>
<p>Thanks for your additional comments, aibarr. You certainly are a terrific young woman. I worry so much about my sister–also a terrific person, but in too much pain. I do hope we learn additional ways to help people. I’m very glad you have found the right balance.</p>