At 6 years old, he stared through you while you were talking, or fixed his eyes on some distant point above and beyond as if he were watching a plane passing by.
At 8 years old, he often flapped his hands or rocked back and forth for no apparent reason, ignoring attempts to intervene.
This is autism—a condition affecting brain development that can influence communication, social interaction and behavior.
It can also break a parent’s heart.
The message is clear: If you want a healthy baby, don’t take antidepressants during pregnancy.
And now, an Australian study reveals that a mother’s choices during pregnancy can dramatically increase the odds that her child will become autistic. Mothers who used SSRI or SNRI antidepressants during the last three months of pregnancy gave birth to children with nine times higher odds of autism compared to those who did not use the drugs.
So, if that’s what happens if you consume these drugs in the last three months of pregnancy, is it safe to take them during the first six months?
Only if you consider a 6.43 times higher risk of autism for your baby “acceptable.”
Researchers arrived at their conclusions after analyzing data from the Barwon Infant Study, an ongoing long-term research project that follows more than 1,000 children born in the Barwon region of the Australian state of Victoria between 2010 and 2013, tracking their health outcomes over time.
The data leaves little room for doubt. Higher antidepressant use during pregnancy is consistently linked to dramatically higher rates of autism.
And the message is clear: If you want a healthy baby, don’t take antidepressants during pregnancy.
The researchers, however, are cautious. They identify a series of other potential factors that could also influence their findings—including nutrition, air pollution and vinyl flooring.
But the numbers tell a different story.
A US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) press release last spring declares, “Autism Epidemic Runs Rampant.”
The article continues: “One in 31 American children born in 2014 [is] disabled by autism. That’s up significantly from two years earlier and nearly five times higher than when the CDC first started running autism surveys in children born in 1992. Prevalence for boys is an astounding 1 in 20, and in California, it’s 1 in 12.5.”
The obvious conclusion is that if autism has nearly quintupled since, then whatever was an active factor in creating autism must also have nearly quintupled over the same period.
Did the vinyl flooring industry boom nearly five times over since that year?
No, but something else did.
That “something else” entered the psychiatric armory in the late 1980s and exploded in popularity almost overnight: “modern” SSRI antidepressants.
Those of us of a certain age remember what was called the Prozac Revolution. Sample marketing:
- “Are you too shy? Prozac can help.”
- “Do you need more ambition to reach that job promotion? Try Prozac to boost your motivation.”
- “It won’t take away your personality. Depression can do that, but Prozac can’t.”
The handy little pill was a ballyhooed cure-all for any undesirable personality traits. Above all, it promised to chase away the blues.
Similar antidepressants quickly followed—Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa and others.
Sales skyrocketed.
Skyrocketing too were the numbers of patients with side effects, which included vomiting, internal bleeding, anxiety, sexual numbness, suicide and, as the Australian study suggests, autism in unborn children.
Along with the overall boom in antidepressant use, prescriptions for pregnant women nearly quadrupled from 1992 to 2006.
A 2011 study published by The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry begins, “Potential adverse effects of antidepressants during pregnancy have caused concern about their use.”
So, the dangers of taking antidepressants while expecting have already been known and promoted for 15 years.
The arithmetic works out:
- Autism diagnoses have nearly quintupled in the US, comparing children born in 1992 with those born in 2014.
- Antidepressant prescriptions for pregnant women nearly quadrupled from 1992 to 2006.
- Add those additional eight years of likely continued rise in antidepressant prescriptions from 2006 to 2014, and it requires no great stretch of the imagination to infer that this figure, too, may have quintupled over the same span of time.
In other words, the graph of spiking autistic cases parallels the spike in antidepressant use by expectant mothers over the same period.
This past summer, an FDA advisory panel issued an even broader warning: Antidepressant exposure in pregnancy may cause lasting harm that extends well beyond the child’s infancy. The panel specifically cited increased anxiety and depression in adolescence and adulthood—suggesting that the full consequences of these drugs may not be visible for decades.
The moral of the story, then, is: If you’re pregnant, take your vitamins, exercise daily, observe posted speed limits and avoid vinyl flooring.
But above all—and this is your public health warning—do not take antidepressant drugs.
