Word: prozac
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...CHOICE OF DRIVER. Lab results released last week indicate that Henri Paul, the Ritz's 41-year-old deputy security director, had been in a state of "moderate chronic alcoholism" for at least eight days. Tests of hair samples, moreover, show that Paul had been regularly ingesting Prozac (since May) and tiapridal (since July), a combination of drugs commonly prescribed for the treatment of alcoholism. Earlier tests had shown that Paul had drunk the equivalent of nine shots of whiskey before taking the wheel of the Mercedes. How could his state have escaped the attention of the people around...
Peter Kramer has a gift for timing. His last book, Listening to Prozac, came out as Prozac was reaching best-seller status, and soon joined it. His new book--a guide for people thinking about leaving their spouse or significant other--hits the bookstores as divorce is becoming an ever more contentious political issue...
Though I was pretty sure I didn't need it, I went home with a prescription for amitriptiline, a tricyclic antidepressant of the pre-Prozac age. The crinkly pamphlet that came with the pills mentioned some side effects: weight gain, dry mouth, sluggishness. It also informed me that it might take weeks for the drug to relieve my symptoms. I filled a glass of water and downed my pills, and within an hour, my mouth was dry as sand. Because all this happened seven years ago, before depression and its chemical basis were staple topics on the morning shows...
...Then the inevitable slippage started. With plottable predictability, as if my brain were a slowly draining beaker, my sense of well-being sank and sank until I felt lower and darker than ever before. I went back to a doctor--a specialist this time--and asked flat out for Prozac, by then the subject of books and articles. One week later I felt fully restored and resigned myself to a humbling new self-image: neurochemical robot. I felt like one of those cutaway human heads used in TV commercials for decongestants...
Once I'd lost my pharmaceutical virginity, it was impossible to get it back. The Prozac, as my doctor had warned it might, stalled my libido. From approximately my waist down to my knees, I felt like the Invisible Man. I tried another drug, Effexor, but didn't like the trembling in my hands. Next came Wellbutrin. It packed a punch. The week I started taking it I was watching CNN when news of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination broke. I wept through the night and the following day. Oddly, the crying felt good, like a catharsis, and I wondered...