Salon.com > anti-depressants

Your tap water is probably laced with antidepressants

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:01:00 +0000

The idea that we’re being unwittingly drugged when we drink a glass of ordinary tap water smacks of dystopian science fiction or political conspiracy theory. Accusations that Communists were spiking America’s water with sedatives—under the cover of the federally instituted fluoridation program—were such a staple of Cold War–era paranoia that Stanley Kubrick satirized it in his 1964 masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove. While such fear-mongering may seem quaint, what’s truly ironic is that Americans today are consuming prescription drugs—including addictive psychoactive ones—via the water supply. Who knew?

There’s a good chance that if you live in an urban area, your tap water is laced with tiny amounts of antidepressants (mostly SSRIs like Prozac and Effexor), benzodiazepines (like Klonopin, used to reduce symptoms of substance withdrawal) and anticonvulsants (like Topomax, used to treat addiction to alcohol, nicotine, food and even cocaine and crystal meth). Such are the implications of environmental studies that have been leaking out over the past decade. Whether or not this psychoactive waste has any effect on the human nervous system remains unclear, but when such pharmaceuticals are introduced into the ecosystem, the fallout for other species is demonstrable—and potentially dire.

“Side Effects”: A chilly, mysterious thriller ends a strange and brilliant career

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

It’s not enough to say that the absence of human feeling is characteristic of Steven Soderbergh’s films. It’s more that the absence of human feeling is Soderbergh’s principal subject matter, and central to his diagnosis of contemporary society and its pathologies. From his 1989 debut with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” onward, Soderbergh has seemed divided between a yearning for human contact and a (supposedly) detached and dispassionate belief that it can’t happen anymore and maybe never could.

In Soderbergh’s new movie “Side Effects,” which he says will be his last as a cinema director, all human interaction is mediated by some abstract force, whether that’s money or a commodified and quotation-marked notion of sexuality or an impressive range of psychoactive pharmaceuticals, most notably a fictional antidepressant called “Ablixa” that serves as an enormous plot MacGuffin. This follows such recent Soderbergh films as “Contagion” (scripted, like “Side Effects,” by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns), whose true protagonist is arguably a pandemic virus; “Haywire,” in which almost every meeting between characters leads to violence; and “Magic Mike” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” tonally opposite but thematically linked films that depict human sexuality as a marketplace and prostitution as its governing metaphor.

The side effects of “Side Effects”

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:00:00 +0000

On Friday, audiences will get to check out "Side Effects," a movie so convoluted that late-coming critics were booted from screenings, as they wouldn't be able to follow the plot. Without spoiling the movie -- or blowing our own minds -- we can briefly summarize Steven Soderbergh's final film: Rooney Mara's character, depressed to an incapacitating degree, is dosed with some SSRIs that cheer her up — a bit. They also cause her to sleepwalk, and it's within the realm of possibility that she committed the horrific crime at the film's center while zonked out on a fictional drug, "Ablixa," prescribed by a doctor (Jude Law) looking to make a quick buck trying new drugs for Big Pharma.

"Everything is accurate in terms of what has gone on and what may be going on," said Sasha Bardey, the medical adviser to the film and a forensic psychiatrist. "As certain medications have gone through the various phases of study, one of the final phases is that it's tried in a clinical setting. The psychiatrist can be reimbursed -- and even paid a fee."