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Antidepressants In the Water Are Making Shrimp Suicidal
Antidepressants may help a lot of people get up in the morning but new research shows they are making shrimp swim into that big bowl of cocktail sauce in the sky. Alex Ford, a marine biologist at the University of Portsmouth, found that shrimp exposed to the antidepressant fluoxetine are 5 times more likely to swim towards light instead of away from it. Shrimp usually swim away from light as it is associated with birds or fishermen.
I don't think it's that they want to die.
They probably just don't fear the light anymore.
When I saw the headline, I wondered just how a shrimp becomes "suicidal".
Suicide is one intentionally taking their own life, not making behavioral or life-style choices that may increase the chance of an early demise. Unless their intent is to swim toward the light so that they can be killed, "suicidal" is quite sensationalist.
Otherwise, we could start describing all kinds of poor decision making and unhealthy lifestyle choices of humans as "suicidal."
Lots of shrimp are already being affected by this. People take the antidepressants which then get into the wastewater which gets into the ocean. That makes it a real environmental concern (albeit a minor one; other ones are justifiably topping the list at the moment) and not a joke.
IMO it just goes to show that the law of unintended consequences is damn near universally applicable.
Your brain is not a computer.
My landlord killed himself with valium a few months ago, after a 12 year addiction. It was pretty obvious where things were headed, but his dealer^H^H^H^H^H^Hdoctor kept supplying him anyway. Eventually the temptation to keep upping the dose and feeling good overpowered his desire to live. A did a little research and found that this is a shockingly common problem.
Moral of the story: benzodiazephines suck. And your doctor may be more interested in paying off his student loans and buying a boat than being honest with himself about what's good for his patients.