Helen Fisher, PhD

Lust, Romance, Attraction, Attachment: Do the side-effects of serotonin-enhancing antidepressants jeopardize romantic love, marriage and fertility?

Fisher, H and JA Thomson Jr. (2007)
Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience. SM Platek, JP Keenan and TK Shakelford (Eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 245-283.

Today, millions of people of reproductive age take selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other serotonin-enhancing antidepressants. Approximately 80% of these drugs are prescribed by nonpsychiatric physicians, including internists, general practitioners, pediatricians, and gynecologists, who disseminate them to a wide array of men and women. In the first five months of 2004, American doctors wrote 46 million prescriptions for antidepressants, largely for these drugs. In the United States alone, antidepressants account for $14 billion a year in wholesale revenues (Morais, 2004).

Download the PDF