Antidepressants to treat grief? Psychiatry panelists with ties to drug industry say yes

[Ms. Toad]

204. It isn't how frequently they occur that matters -

it is the severity of the consequences, and their insidious nature that is the reason they need to be carefully monitored by someone extremely well versed in all of the known potential side effects. The particular side effect my daughter experienced is rare, but known. Had her doctor been monitoring it carefully and asking the proper questions it would have been identified before she made a date with someone she "met" via an internet dating service designed to support hook-ups, and went to meet him in a hotel, 100+ miles from anyone who could rescue her if his intentions were other than casual sex. That was the first of the compulsive hypersexual behavior - it got worse.

Many, perhaps even most, people react as you did - but when they don't the consequences can have an extremely high cost that may not be recognized until it does severe damage either to the person using the medication or (occasionally) by that person to others. It took a long time before the medical community realized that teens were committing suicide because of the anti-depressants - not because of the underlying depression- because the influence of the anti-depressant on the mind was hard to distinguish from how a depressed mind works.

My point is that monitoring of the first few years of anti-depressant use should be monitored by someone extremely well versed in the known side effects -not because the disastrous ones happen frequently, but because when they happen they are disastrous.