I don't pretend to know anything about the studies of side effects, but I do have to disagree with the people who deny the possibility of major personality change -- not just mood change -- after taking psychiatric medications.
I'm sure I've known many people who took them with no negative symptoms at all. They don't require everyone to have side effects before they put warning labels on, though. I took Paxil briefly (for what was thought to be severe anxiety and turned out instead to be severe PMS, which Paxil doesn't treat) and needed constant sleep and got seriously depressed and nasty. As I understand it, the complaints about Zoloft et al. are along those lines -- not just that people who were already depressed end up 1) getting more depressed to the point of killing themselves or 2) improve to the point where they're now able to take decisive action and then kill themselves (depending on which way you look at it), but that people with no signs of depression develop it as soon as they start taking that medication. [edited out some parts that didn't make sense: gist is, I've known several people with serious negative personality change from taking said medications.]
Of course, much of this is subjective. Nearly everyone would agree that going from a nice boy with some psychological struggles to someone who kills his grandparents is not a good change (although some have said that this and other negative changes are proof that the medicine is functioning properly, as it is supposed to help you let out emotions that you've been repressing and not dealing with -- because, you see, everyone who develops a serious mental health problem while on psychiatric medication actually had it already but was just repressing it). Other changes are not as universally agreed-upon, however. In one of the books written for the general public praising Prozac etc. (sorry, can't recall which -- read them years ago), it tells the story of a woman who was giving her life over to caring for her ailing mother and didn't get out much, and the stress was getting to her; once on the drug, she had a serious personality change which the author considered a success story -- she shipped her mother off to a nursing home and started sleeping around. While she may have been taking too little consideration for herself beforehand, once on medication she had the "desirable" consequence of caring only for herself and not for anyone else. While that may be the goal of modern psychology/psychiatry (and, from friends' stories of the advice they get from their psychotherapists (when they're lucky enough to get one who gives advice rather than just a "oh, so how does that make you feel?" guy), it does seem to be the goal of at least some of the practitioners), I don't think "me first" is really a good goal for how to live your life.
So, ramblingly: verdict: I don't know the details of this case, nor details of studies besides what's released to the public, but it's definite that serious personality change can occur from taking psychiatric medications. What's undecided is to what extent that is the goal.
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