David Healy

Well, one of them even claimed to me, oh, the effects would be totally different on me than they are on a quote unquote, you know, person with schizophrenia or something.

And I'm like, oh, really? You know, and David Healy and I think some other people famously did take some, right? So the psychiatrist David Healy writes about it in one of his books.

I think it was him.

And yeah, a few of them took it and made notes about their experience.

Yeah.

David Healy on a year or two ago, and he talked about this sexual dysfunction that can be induced by SSRIs.

And it's apparently more common than most people have appreciated.

And sometimes it's quite traumatic.

So SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

So Dr. David Healy, brilliant, brilliant doctor, psychiatrist, but he was also doing some of the early work on the serotonin system, one of the most primitive systems in the body.

And that's what these drugs work on.

And they actually weren't...

So they found these drugs and famously Prozac, it was the biggest blockbuster drug.

And it was given out everywhere.

Well, Dr. David Healy is an expert witness.

So what he gets to do is he gets to go in these court cases.

Many patients failed to recover from the malaria disease.

The ineffectiveness of these early 20th century treatments did not stop psychiatrists from developing new experimental treatments.

In the 1930s, insulin shock therapy was invented, which involved giving patients high doses of insulin that would trigger intense seizures and place the patient in a coma.

Davies writes that, after this procedure, granted, patients would appear to feel calmer, but they would often show memory loss and other neurological abnormalities such as loss of speech.

This all changed in the 1950s with the development of the first generation of psychiatric drugs.

Prior to the 1950s, sedatives and stimulants were commonly prescribed in psychiatric institutions to subdue and control a psychotic or heavily depressed patient.

However, psychiatrists were not publicly open regarding how they were using these drugs.

Official reticence about the old drugs conveys the impression that they were a source of embarrassment, writes the British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrief.

We know some of the adverse effects of, of some drugs, but probably not enough about them.

And then are there any, what David Healy, the psychopharmacologist, has called legacy effects? Legacy effects are effects that continue after the drug has been stopped.

And so examples of these are persistent sexual dysfunction after stopping an SSRI.

So w- we've, we've known for a long time that taking an SSRI antidepressant causes sexual dysfunction while people are taking them, very commonly, probably in the majority of people who take them.