Hunting for the Prozac gene

Very often when people react to Prozac with rage and/or hallucinations they have undiagnosed bipolar disorder. It isn't just Prozac that can do this, but many psychotropic drugs.

I'm not anti-drugs and I'm not anti-psychiatry, but there isn't going to be a simple blood test to determine who should take any of those drugs. Our brains are much too complex for that.

It makes me wonder who would benefit financially from such a test. What we need is comptetent psychological evaluation before using these drugs, but many health insurance won't pay for psychiatric care or won't pay well, leaving the patient and their primary care physician to sort it out.

Gail Perry wrote:

Very often when people react to Prozac with rage and/or hallucinations they have undiagnosed bipolar disorder. It isn't just Prozac that can do this, but many psychotropic drugs.
I'm not anti-drugs and I'm not anti-psychiatry, but there isn't going to be a simple blood test to determine who should take any of those drugs. Our brains are much too complex for that.
It makes me wonder who would benefit financially from such a test. What we need is comptetent psychological evaluation before using these drugs, but many health insurance won't pay for psychiatric care or won't pay well, leaving the patient and their primary care physician to sort it out.

Interesting comment, which makes me wonder how we would be able to determine what a competent psychological evaluation would consist of and who is competent, or qualified enough to determine our mental status, given the fact, that you so accurately stated, that indeed our brains are exceedingly complex. And, I might add, too important to be dabbled with casually.

Sandra wrote:

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Interesting comment, which makes me wonder how we would be able to determine what a competent psychological evaluation would consist of and who is competent, or qualified enough to determine our mental status, given the fact, that you so accurately stated, that indeed our brains are exceedingly complex. And, I might add, too important to be dabbled with casually.

It's not that hard for a skilled diagnostician to identify bipolar disorder, which includes depression but has important differences.

As I said in my post, the problem is that insurance companies often don't pay for psychological and psychiatric services as fully as they do, say, appendicitis. The result is that primary care doctors, who do not have the training to do a differential psychological diagnosis, have to help their patients with depression, since it can be fatal.

Now, if a person with undiagnosed bipolar disorder takes Prozac, they won't hallucinate for the rest of their lives. It's a one time (awful) incident, and then it IS very clear that there's a real emergency, and they DO get that differential diagnosis, and then they get appropriate treatment. But it's a brutal way to get someone the more in-depth care they need.

Looking for a "gene" for the purposes of deciding when to prescribe Prozac is absurd. I think what happened here was that Fox took a press release and turned it into intellectual scrambled eggs. Genes certainly play an important part in brain function. It's probably good research but ridiculous reporting.