The Chemistry of Happiness

Seroxat rivals Prozac as the world’s favourite anti-depressant. But not everyone is smiling.

The Observer, April 2002

For some unfathomable reason, the key episodes often occur in supermarkets. Two years ago, Jenny Stanaway returned home from her work as a cleaner and went for her big weekly shop in Swindon. Not long in the busy aisles, she was struck by a panic attack and an urgent desire to flee. She abandoned her shopping but the attacks persisted. After three or four, she went to her doctor and was told that for a woman of her age, in the midst of her menopause, such events were not unheard of. She was prescribed a drug called Seroxat. ‘That was the beginning of the end,’ she says. ‘If I’d have known what it was, there is no way I would have taken it.’
Ian Allen was in a supermarket in Gloucester when he decided to buy 150 tablets of paracetamol. The sales assistant told him, quite properly, that he was not allowed to sell him anything like that amount. ‘But I live miles away,’ Allen explained.
‘I can’t come running here every few days.’
Eventually Allen, who is an eloquent 38-year-old wildlife photographer, persuaded the assistant that he should sell him as much as he wanted.
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ the employee said. ‘And don’t do anything stupid with them.’
‘This was rather ironic,’ Allen says now. ‘Because that was exactly what I was about to do.’
The brain remains the great unconquered organ of scientific and medical knowledge. Ian Allen is fond of saying that if we knew as little about the workings of the heart as we do about the brain, then nobody would dare to perform open-heart surgery. When the brain malfunctions we are often at a loss to detect why, and we are still groping towards effective treatments. Paracetamol is a blunt tool most often used in the masking of headaches, but Allen’s intended use was for suicide. He believes that this was a side effect of his doctor prescribing him a drug known as an SSRI – selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor – a family of medications once recognised only by the tradename of Prozac, but now also marketed as Seroxat, Cipramil, Lustral, Efexor, Dutonin and Faverin. They are most commonly prescribed as treatments for depression, but each year new applications are being found for them. The molecular shape of the drugs is designed to be highly specific, but they are often prescribed for the most unspecific of symptoms: anxiety, insomnia, shyness, natural sadness following bereavement. The drugs are now so widely used that it is difficult to find any community or large organisation without members who are taking them.

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