Paula J. Caplan, a research and clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has a few interesting thoughts about a largely unacknowledged cause of obesity: psychiatric drugs. Caplan, who wrote They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal, writes in the Boston Globe that "many drugs which are used to treat emotional problems including
depression and anxiety, cause weight gain — often of the rapid and
massive sort — as one of their “side effects,†that brilliant
marketing term for what are simply negative effects of a drug." Caplan points out that the average weight of an adult has increased since 1960
by 25 pounds, and between 1996 and 2006 alone, prescriptions of
psychiatric drugs for US adults increased 73 percent. What's more surprising, says Caplan, is that nearly all researchers and journalists who focus on obesity fail to mention the drug link.
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Sunday, June 1, 2025
I can say that this has been true for me. I gained an incredible amount of weight within the last year after having an antidepressant dosage increased. My satiety center simply stopped working.
Now that I have reduced the dosage, with my doc’s knowledge, I am much better in terms of my food choices/intake. In the past five years since my diagnosis with depression, I have gained fifty pounds.
The last thirty were gained in the past one year during the time that my dose was increased. In my research on the topic, I have found many people with similar stories. It could be that long term treatment/higher doses may have that effect on some individuals?