This is quite possibly going to be the most self-aggrandising article I will ever write. Maybe I have finally descended into pure and utter delusion. But the experimentalist in me strongly believes that what I say in the title is true. I think my life accidentally became the near perfect experiment to discover biochemical causes of anxiety.

Alex shares his personal experience with anxiety, which they believe was initiated by taking the antidepressant Sertraline. He discovered several case studies that also describe the development of anxiety symptoms in patients shortly after taking Sertraline. However, Alex’s anxiety symptoms persisted and worsened after cessation of the medication, unlike the patients in the case studies. Alex believes that their experience could be a special case that could help uncover the biochemical causes of anxiety disorders. Alex advocates for a more complex approach to understanding the causes of anxiety disorders that takes into account both nature and nurture.

“How did I miss this?” I say to myself. I had just found a case study by Catalano et al. [1] describing the development of panic attacks in two patients shortly after initiation of the antidepressant Sertraline. Importantly, the patients had no personal or family history of any anxiety condition. I had been searching for an article like this since 2015. It was now 2021.

Continue reading