Recently, a friend told me that she began taking Prozac. Curious as to the psychopathology which led a psychiatrist to prescribe the drug to her, I inquired as to her symptoms. It began solely as a panic attack. She was out and about and began feeling an overwhelming sense of paranoia. She felt as though everybody was looking at and judging her. Her description continued and seemed to exactly describe a "run of the mill" panic attack. Upon further investigation of her situation, mainly grilling her on what might have brought the situation on, she seemed to lack many of the physiologic indicators of panic disorder, primarily trembling, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, chest pain, sweating, nausea, dizziness, light-headedness or hyperventilation. Nor did she have more than the single incident. That was odd to me. I found it hard to believe that any medical professional would prescribe a drug to a patient who only reported a single attack. So, I asked her about it. She had not seen a psychiatrist or any sort of physician. Apparantly, her mother takes Prozac and she felt it was a wise idea that she began it herself. It was somewhat odd because I have seen those Ad Council public service announcements about children takling prescriptions labelled for their parents or other relatives, but I had yet to meet anybody who admitted to doing so. Additionally, I naturally assumed that the prescriptions likely to be abused would be painkillers, amphetamines, or narcotics, generally the drugs that are usually abused "on the street". It seemed unlikely that an antidepressant would become the target of abuse. I keep using the term "abuse" to describe her actions, because I think that it would qualify for the technical term of the use as she was notj prescribed the drug, but it seems less like abuse because she was attempting to attenuate emotions which the drug was meant to stop.

I, obviously, told her to discontinue her use of it. She followed up by inquiring as to whether Prozac is a "happy" drug. My reply: there is no happy drug, nothing magic to make people feel better about themselves or their lives. But, I think that this is a common misconception. For thousands of years, people shunned those with mental illness and blamed it on the devil or spirits or something else supernatural solely because the brain was a widely misunderstood organ. Even today, there are a wide variety of processes that occur inside that, the most advanced organ we have, which we still do not understand. But we do comprehend enough to fabricate drugs which can affect the inner workings of the biochemical processes, allowing additional seratonin to remain at the synaptic cleft, which in turn allows people to be less likely to experience mood extremes and thereby decreasing depression. Now that we do understand this process more, those with mental illness are no longer the pariah. Sure, some communities do not accept those with mental illness, but there will always be some people behind the curve. Acceptance of mental illness has gone so far that people are willing to openly admit to their own dysfunction. And this makes me wonder: will all pariahs eventually be accepted once their own particular situation is researched as to the cause?

As a postscript, I know, that this post was rather long, but it has been like a month or so since my last post and since regular season school is over I have a bit of extra time, I figured that I should write more than normal.