Antidepressants are linked to a sleep disorder that causes dreamers to act out
Ann Blake Tracy has been screaming about this since 1992
Text from the article:

“Auger called it a relatively rare phenomenon. About 0.5 percent of people have it. More than 90 percent of cases occur in men older than 50. But, possibly because of the rise in antidepressant use, younger men, women and children have begun to complain of the disorder.

“We had a 10-year-old boy who had terrible REM behavior disorder,” said Mark Mahowald, a leading researcher on the disorder at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorder Center in Minneapolis. “He was being given Effexor for some nondescript learning disorder and was falling out of bed constantly. When you see a 10-year-old boy with REM behavior disorder, you can bet that the first 10 causes are antidepressants, antidepressants, antidepressants.”

REM sleep, or rapid-eye movement sleep, is the time in the sleep cycle when people have their most robust dreams. During REM — unlike other periods in the sleep cycle — the brain normally paralyzes the skeletal muscles so the body doesn’t run around while sleeping. But this doesn’t happen in REM behavior disorder.

Scientists suspect antidepressants are acting on neurochemicals in the brain stem that typically cause what’s known as REM sleep paralysis, or atonia. People who later go on to develop Parkinson’s may be getting REM behavior disorder early because certain cells in the brain have begun to deteriorate.

REM behavior disorder usually comes to the attention of physicians only after someone has tossed himself out of bed during a violent dream or, more common, after inadvertently assaulting a spouse.

“One of my patients was hitting his wife in the night, and he didn’t know it,” Romaker said. “They came to me in their 80s. This had been going on for years. His poor wife had never told him until she had a black eye. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

The range of behaviors is as vast as dreams themselves.

“It can be as simple as someone who sits up at night and turns pages because they’re dreaming they’re reading a book,” Romaker said. “I had one gentleman who thought he was fishing. He was gutting a fish, and he was trying to gut his wife. It was fortunate he didn’t actually have anything sharp.””

Its nice that the Mayo Clinic is on the case. Now that the Medical People are starting to take note (17 years too late), perhaps we’ll have these drugs pulled in another 20 years by Congress.
Ann Tracy claims that many of the people who commit crimes while taking Anti-Depressants are in fact in the REM sleep disorder state.
When the Brain Disrupts the Night
The original title I chose for my book Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? was Our Serotonin Sleepwalk Nightmare. At the time of the first edition (1994) everyone argued that no one would know enough about serotonin to understand that the book was about antidepressants so we went ahead with the name of the most popular of the SSRIs – Prozac.
Now for those of you who have read my book or heard me lecture you are aware of the reason for the title I chose – my focus on the most serious of the side effects of SSRIs – the REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD). The largest chapter of my book is devoted to this disorder which I consider the most dangerous of all the reactions to an SSRI. I firmly believe that RBD is the reason for much of the violence we see with the serotonergic antidepressants and the serotonergic antipsychotics as well as Fen-Phen and Redux which are also serotonergic.
To help those who have not read my book and are not familiar with RBD let me quote one statement from an article (below) that ran in the New York Times last month: “REM behavior disorder [RBD] is the only parasomnia routinely associated with violence. But sleepwalkers have also been known to stab their relatives, molest children or confidently stride out of third-story windows, in states varying from confused wakefulness to partial arousal to the deepest stages of non-REM or slow-wave sleep.”
Even though no one else has focused on this disorder as I have for so long and worked so hard to get the public to see that these drugs are causing the REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, the following information shocked even me! In fact I am still trying to catch my breath because the original medical article is even more shocking than this NY Times article.
Let me first give you a little background before you read the article. In 1991 I made a call to Dr. Carlos Schenk, the author of this study. I told him that I was concerned at how much evidence there was that Prozac (the only SSRI on the American market at the time) was causing the REM Sleep Behavior Disorder. I told him what patients on these drugs were reporting that would show they were experiencing this as a side effect.
He listened intently and then told me that there was not any research to back up my conclusion.
I told him that was okay, but that I had ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT that Prozac was triggering this most dangerous sleepwalk state and that someone had better do the research because this was something that had the potential of affecting many people worldwide.
Dr. Schenk never called me back to let me know that he immediately began doing that research. He went back through the records at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis where he and his research partner Dr. Mark Mahowold are known as the leading researchers in America on this disorder. Amazingly he found in going through the records for the past 41 months that an astounding 48.8% of all those who had come through the clinic and been diagnosed as suffering from RBD were on Prozac!
If that information was not shocking enough as the information reached the doctors, who then began to watch for this connection, rather than having to go back through old records to see if there might be someone on Prozac who had this disorder, found that 80% of those with the signs of RBD were on Prozac!!! And on top of that the symptoms of this disorder continued in one patient for 19 months AFTER coming off only short term use of Prozac!! Severe sleep disturbance continued for months after coming off the drug. Which is why I mention the importance of using so many natural alternatives to rebuild after being on these drugs.
Of the significance of this information the author of the NY Times article states, “No one yet knows how common such side effect are, or their implications — if any.”
I would gladly tell them how common this side effect is and how far reaching the implications are!!!! That is what I have been trying to tell them for over a decade! Phil and Brynn Hartman would LOVE to explain to them the implications of SSRI induced RBD if they only could, as would thousands of others who have lost their lives to this side effect.
As I say in nearly every lecture I give, “What could be more terrible than to chemically induce first of all someone’s most horrifying nightmare and then sleepwalk? In this way the individual acts out the one thing that is the most terrifying thing to them.” This is clearly why we have cases of such loving and caring mothers, like Andrea Yates, killing their children – that was her worst nightmare. And no one loved Phil Hartman more than his wife Brynn who even went to a friend’s home after shooting him to the friend to come home with her to tell her if she had shot Phil or if she was having a nightmare because she could not tell which was real.
In my opinion the fact that SSRIs are producing the majority of RBD is possibly the most significant piece of research we have ever seen on SSRI antidepressants.
Dr. Ann Blake Tracy, Executive Director, International Coalition For Drug Awareness http://www.drugawareness.org & author of Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? – Our Serotonin Nightmare (800-280-0730)
REM behavior disorder is the only parasomnia routinely associated with violence. But sleepwalkers have also been known to stab their relatives, molest children or confidently stride out of third-story windows, in states varying from confused wakefulness to partial arousal to the deepest stages of non-REM or slow-wave sleep.
Other sleep disorder patients, who suffer from a condition called nocturnal dissociative disorder, awaken and leave their beds to re-enact scenes of physical or sexual abuse, sometimes cutting themselves with razors or banging their heads against the wall. Afterward, they remember nothing about their nighttime behavior.
Reports of violence during slumber date back to the ancient Greeks.
In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Elpenor, the youngest of Odysseus’ crew, wakes suddenly from a drunken nap and runs off the roof of a house, breaking his neck.
Simon Fraser, a 19th-century Scot who killed his 18-month-old son by dashing him against the wall, said he did so while dreaming that a wild beast had jumped on the bed and was attacking the boy. “I am guilty in my sleep, but not guilty in my senses,” he insisted.
More recently, the defendants in several murder cases have used sleep as a defense, in one instance successfully: a Canadian, Kenneth Parks, was acquitted after experts testified that he was in a somnambulistic state when, in May 1987, he drove 14 miles to the house of his in-laws, where he stabbed his mother-in-law to death and nearly killed his father-in-law.
Such cases, Dr. Mahowald said, make it clear that sleep and waking are hardly distinct states.
In many normal people, he said, detailed neurophysiological studies of the brain show that the signs of sleep persist for an hour after awakening, though an EEG indicates that the person is already fully awake.
“Most people’s concept is that the entire brain is in one state of being, and that’s just not true,” Dr. Mahowald said. “You can have parts of the brain that are awake while others are asleep.”
Jenny Hatch