The Null Device

Shrimp on Prozac

The rise in the use of antidepressants in Britain could be threatening shrimp populations across the coast; scientists have found that shrimp exposed to fluoxetine (i.e., Prozac) concentrations similar to those in waste water are more likely to be fatally overconfident, swimming towards light where they'd be easier prey for predators.

There are 2 comments on "Shrimp on Prozac":

Posted by: Greg http://spill-label.org/blog Sun Jul 11 15:37:24 2010

The evolutionary psychiatrist Randolphe Nesse infamously claimed that the widespread use of Prozac was skewing the stock market in a similar way, ie creating bubbles by making traders unrealistically optimistic. (It's a short, interesting article - text is at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/story/100.html)

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org/acb/ Mon Jul 12 09:33:11 2010

I saw that. I wonder if the falling price of cocaine in the past few decades may have also contributed to the market boom.