Can My Medication Be Making Me Gain Weight? DEPRESSION Blog 1
Can My Medication Be Making Me Gain Weight?
Depression
Blog 1
"Weight gain has been mentioned as one of the most bothersome side effects of antidepressant treatment." (97, 2178, 2206)
Antidepressant weight gain has become even more interesting because use of antipsychotic/mood stabilizing medications is escalating after the FDA approved their use for major depressive and bipolar disorders, which most likely will increase the incidence of weight gain and metabolic effects. Mood stabilizing drugs/antipsychotic drugs cause more profound weight gain than the traditional antidepressant drugs discussed in the personal story in this chapter. If you are taking a mood stabilizing drug for depression you may refer to chapter 4 for more details on weight gain with this family of drugs. This chapter is about weight gain with the traditional and very popular antidepressants drugs that one in every ten Americans take.
More than 1 in 10 Americans takes an antidepressant drug. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Skeleton Racer
This story is about a young woman taking a drug, Prozac (fluoxetine), in the most popular family of antidepressants, the SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). Although the weight gain is less with this family of drugs than with some of the other antidepressant drugs, it is significant and can be life changing, as this inspiring story based on real events tells us.
Kristin is petite in size but packed with athletic talent. Her skeleton racing was done with complete abandon and fearless competition. Even as a young child, she was quite the dare devil in snowboarding and skiing. When she was only 15 and a sophomore in high school, she took first place in skeleton at the Winter Sports Nationals, racing against all the college women’s teams in the U.S. She impressed everyone with her talent for racing, risk taking, and team leadership skills. In addition to being a talented athlete, Kristin was a gifted student who maintained straight A’s, often without having to study.
Kristin’s parents acknowledged and celebrated her special leadership gifts. She is the middle child in her family, the only daughter.
When she was 15, Kristin was invited to leave high school and travel and train worldwide in skeleton and winter sports. Her parents were concerned about Kristin leaving high school. While they knew, it was a great opportunity for her, they worried about her youth. Because her mother and brother were also competitive athletes in winter sports, her family understood the rigors of training and traveling.
Kristin’s depression was often unexplained. It was characterized by lack of self-motivation, physical exhaustion, and sleeping 20 hours per day for days at a time, all of which were out of character for this active young woman.
Kristin had been dating a young man and fellow student on the ski jumping team for a year, and they had a good, healthy, and fun relationship.
On the outside, Kristin’s life looked wonderful. But as she emerged as a leader at sports and excelled at school, she was experiencing an episode of unexplained deep depression. She felt alienated at school, put off by the meanness she saw in the kids around her. Coming from a close and loving family, she had a hard time understanding why her high school peers often treated each
other in unkind ways. With her worsening depression, Kristin was not to be able to participate in skeleton and winter sports practice with consistency as she had in years past. She managed to pull herself out of bed to participate in crucial races and achieved the best score in the nation for skeleton anyway. She made it to enough high school classes to stay on the team, and she was still getting A’s.
Prozac
During a visit to a psychiatrist with her parents, Kristin was prescribed Prozac (fluoxetine), which is an antidepressant drug of the SSRI (Selective Serotonin
Reuptake Inhibitor) family. SSRIs are the most frequently prescribed family of drugs for depression therapy and are used by millions of people in the U.S. These drugs are also popular worldwide.
Serotonin can be thought of as the “happy hormone” in the brain.
The SSRI drugs increase the amount of serotonin in the brain. However, they do this at a price: possible weight gain.
Suicide attempts
Kristin was a Christian with a strong sense of faith and a supportive spiritual community. Yet her bouts of depression left her feeling lonely, isolated, and racked with despair. Kristin’s ultimate reaction to her depression and the fact that her life felt out of her control was to become suicidal. She was sometimes able to verbalize how she felt, and her suicidal ideation was terrifying to her entire family, who feared they would lose her. And they knew they could for two reasons: 1) she had been to the emergency room on three occasions after having attempted suicide, and 2) her affect often didn’t show the extent of her despair. While attending a sleepover at a friend’s house (where her parents had assumed she was having fun), she had written a long, despair-filled letter to her parents describing how devastating her depression felt to her.
More Prozac
At the next visit, Kristin’s psychiatrist raised her dose of Prozac because Kristin felt better but was still not back to her normal upbeat, cheerful self. Kristin’s mother noted at the time that Kristin seemed more able to cope but was still not her usual bright self.
“Sleepless in Seattle”
Kristin stopped sleeping 20 hours per day. However, with the increased dose of antidepressant, she developed the opposite problem—she couldn’t sleep. The levels of serotonin in her brain increased because she was taking the Prozac SSRI. Serotonin has a side effect of making it difficult to sleep.
Principal Questions We Will Answer in this Story:
For the rest of the story and the answers to the questions please see our remaining blogs (3, 4, and 5) on Depression and weight gain due to drugs.
Leave a comment
Comments will be approved before showing up.
Also in Weight Gain Drugs
Teen Attempts to Combat Weight Gain and Sleeplessness from Drug for Depression DEPRESSION Blog 3
Not recognizing that marijuana has similar slowing effects on sports reaction times as the “benzo” sleep medication she had previously been prescribed by her doctor, Kristin accepted the offer from her friend. She began to smoke the marijuana before bedtime, either outside the family home or in her car on the way home from work. At first it seemed to help her sleep. But the marijuana was not consistent. Plus, she started to like it and began using it frequently-almost nightly.