Doctors Hope to Cut Out the Guesswork in Prescribing Antidepressants. When someone swallows his or her first antidepressant, it may come as a surprise how the psychiatrist chose that particular pill to prescribe: It’s a best guess out of dozens of antidepressants on the market.

Now, a few psychiatrists have set out to bring some order to this educated guessing game. By looking at 117 studies of the 12 most popular antidepressants, researchers ranked the top 12 drugs in the journal The Lancet.

To view their results, click here.

I was first introduced to bipolar disorder about twelve years ago with the diagnosis of a family member. I witnessed a complete psychotic break up close and personal. The course of the episode went from insomnia and grandiosity to chasing hallucinated white mice with a broom, dodging non-existent cars on sidewalks, and screaming in terror while trying to jump out of a moving vehicle. As you can imagine, it was a horrifying experience for the entire family.

The official name for REM is actually called rapid eye movement and it is the rapid movement of the eyes during sleep. R. Robert Auger, a sleep researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has found links between taking serotonin reputake inhibitors (more commonly known as Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, etc.) and REM behavior disorder.

Do you wake up feeling like you never went to bed at all? REM behavior disorder describes when a person’s body does not become paralyzed during REM sleep, allowing them to act out their dreams. A relatively rare phenomenon affecting roughly 0.5% of the population, REM behavior disorder nearly always surfaced in men over 50 until recently. Now with antidepressants being subscribed for numerous health issues, this sleep disorder is beginning to show up in men, women, and children of all ages.