Antidepressants can wreak massive havoc on personalities, morals, and relationships. From Roger McFillan at brownstone.org:
I don’t know who this person is anymore,” James told me, his voice cracking as he described his wife of fifteen years. “She started Zoloft eight months ago for some mild anxiety about work. Now she’s rewritten our entire history together. According to her new narrative, I’ve been emotionally abusive for years. She’s filed for divorce, moved in with some guy she met at a yoga retreat, and told our kids that daddy was never really there for them.”
He paused, searching for words. “The strangest part? She seems completely unbothered by destroying our family. It’s like she’s watching it happen from outside her own body.”
Welcome to the SSRI marriage apocalypse: a phenomenon so widespread that entire online communities have formed to support its casualties. Spouses gathering in digital refugee camps, comparing notes about partners who transformed into unrecognizable strangers after starting antidepressants. The stories are eerily similar: personality changes, moral compass spinning wildly, empathy evaporating, sexual connection obliterated, and a strange, detached willingness to torch everything they once held sacred.
But here’s what makes my blood boil: The mental health establishment celebrates these relationship demolitions as therapeutic breakthroughs. “The medication lifted their mood enough to finally leave that toxic relationship!” they’ll proclaim, completely ignoring that the “toxicity” might be a drug-induced fabrication. This is my fundamental criticism of the therapy industry: therapists attach to their client’s inner world as if it’s absolute fact, unquestionable truth.
Even without SSRIs, people alter reality and create stories to cope with pain. But add psychiatric drugs to the mix, and you’ve got modern therapists providing unfettered validation to chemically distorted narratives, rarely approaching cases with empirical scrutiny. They jump right on the victim mindset, and in many cases, actively create it. “Yes, you were trapped in an abusive marriage!” they’ll affirm to someone whose brain chemistry has been so altered they couldn’t recognize genuine love if it slapped them in the face.
The Spell-Binding Effect
Dr. Peter Breggin, Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health, who’s spent decades exposing the dark underbelly of his own profession, called it “medication spellbinding:” the insidious way psychiatric drugs prevent users from recognizing their own drug-induced dysfunction. (I’m actually traveling to Dr. Breggin’s home next week to interview him, and you can bet your ass I’ll be drilling deep into this spellbinding phenomenon.) It’s not just that SSRIs change you; they rob you of the ability to perceive that you’ve been changed. You become a stranger to yourself while believing you’re finally seeing clearly.
The day I got thrown out of Karen’s psych office while bad mouthing the meds after I told her they were in the trash can was a turning point like the old Mighty Joe Young blues song.
A turn for the better.
More than five years ago, my daughter rejected any relationship with me and the rest of my family. She has been on a SSRI for seven years.