Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Does anyone have direct experience mixing alcohol with SSRIs, or medical experience treating people who have?
I'm asking in SSQ rather than WW because it's tangential to a red hot culture war question circa 2015: drink spiking.
The percentage of women taking antidepressants has doubled or tripled in the last decade, but there's been no decrease in drinking to compensate. I think Scott may have briefly tangled with this during the feminism wars of the 10s when Vox and Jezebel revived earlier panics, but afaik nobody's actually looked at the likelihood that a lot of the self-reported symptoms you see on reddit are real, but caused by interactions with other drugs.
Apparently there was a recent hysteria in europe about men injecting women with drugged needles in bars which eventually died down after the claims got too wild. The wikipedia article is very carefully written not to call it a social panic, but the writer obviously wishes he could just say it.
I'm worried we're going to keep getting mass panics like this fueled by social media, activists, and a dysfunctional drinking and drug culture that people are unwilling to own up to. But since I don't have any experience with SSRIs, drinking, or european party culture, I'm probably not the right person to make an argument about it.
I've had long periods of taking ssris, and have (and against explicit medical advice) consumed alcohol during those times. I don't know what symptoms you're talking about. SSRIs have not really made me sleepy, in my experience, only other, similar drugs, like SARIs (often presecribed off-label for insomnia) have done that. Maybe the hangovers have been worse. But I can't disentangle that from just the fact that I'm older now.
My gut-level guess has always been that there are theoretical interactions, but most of the "don't mix this with alcohol" advice is based on alcohol causing problems for depression anyway. But I'm also not a doctor, so I don't know what the possible interactions between alcohol and SSRIs are.
Are European women taking SSRIs at similar rates to American women?
Good question. I've found some stats suggesting the increase in Sweden has been similar, but having trouble finding hard data outside the anglosphere.
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