I don’t know anything about Prozac and alcohol – however, I do know about Seroxat and the way that it can actually make you crave more and more booze. Couple this with the inhibition that comes with SSRI treatment and you’ve got a recipe for real disaster:
On the evening of Tuesday 6 May, Mark Saunders should have been having dinner with the television presenter Chris Tarrant, the latest high-profile client for whom the high-flying barrister had handled a divorce case.
Instead the Oxford law graduate was holed up in his £2.2m townhouse, in a five-hour armed siege that would end in his death.
Asked the question as to whether the police were correct to open fire on Saunders, the inquest jury yesterday answered yes. The unanswered question was what had made Mark Saunders, a 32-year-old family law barrister earning about £500,000 a year, act the way he did?
It seems Mark Saunders had a longstanding drink problem which he had been trying to control for a number of years. According to his wife “What Mark wanted to do was control the drinking, to be able to be a social drinker. There were occasions, probably every three months or so, when it went wrong.” She said that he would be ashamed at having lapsed and would to avoid her for a few hours, then send an apologetic text. Eventually he was prescribed Prozac to “even out his moods”, but she had no idea that he had begun to use cocaine heavily.
I can’t help but wonder why a doctor would prescribe an SSRI such as Prozac to a man who was already drinking heavily… in my experience with another SSSRI, Seroxat, that would be like pouring petrol on a fire.
Add in cocaine, coupled with a craving for more alcohol and an extreme lack of inhibition from the SSRI treatment and you have a suicide just waiting to happen and I think there can be no question Mark Saunders committed suicide.
The full story is here.
seroxat secrets... 
October 11, 2010 at 2:45 pm
I think its terrible what happened to Mark Saunders he has been let down badly by everyone. I also had terrible cravings for alcohol on seroxat and ciprimil I also have two friends who suffered the same on Prozac. When the two are mixed you become very high, agitated, impulsive go into a trance like state and become obsessional with thoughts and feel desperate, you think this would be enough to stop you drinking again but you are so detached and numb you dont care and the cravings are so strong you just keep giving into it. I also read a research paper : Can Serotonin Transporter Genotype Predict Cravings For Alcoholism. It was very interesting so I wrote to one of the research Drs to ask if SSRIS can cause cravings for alcohol. He replied telling me that research has shown that SSRIS can make people with biological worse, they drink more when they take SSRIS. I explained this to my GP and they are not even aware of this. It makes me so angry as so many people are having their lives wrecked because of this lack of very important knowledge by Doctors. I personnelly blame the drug companys and MHRA and Dr for Mark Saunders death they have not helped him at all and if anything had made him worse by giving him Prozac. I know for a fact this would not have happened if he had not been on Prozac. Since I have come off of the SSRIS my cravings for alcohol have gone and I have not had a drink since, I still cant believe a tablet can cause so many problems its actually hard to believe to this day the damage that they have done.