My OCD has been bad and I’m thinking about starting SSRIs, but they’ve been associated with a 33% increased risk of death and 14% higher chance of cardiovascular incidents. Thoughts?

They list how people died in the paper, and point to an increased risk of fractures on some drugs, and gastrointestinal bleeds in others. All-cause mortality can be a helpful metric for a drug, because it looks at the overall positive and negative effects on the death rate as a whole, to see what the balance is. Additionally, all-cause mortality over a large cohort means not being blinkered by the ways a drug might be ‘expected’ to cause or reduce death. Analysing all causes of mortality is useful in this way, and can give meaningful indicators about whether a drug is worth taking, taken into context with things like quality of life improvements.

Additionally, this is one study. I feel like this always happens when a study is posted to Reddit; people always act it’s trying to tell them what to do, and that is not the case usually. This is one piece of evidence in a broader body about the risks and benefits of antidepressants.

/r/OCD Thread Parent Link - sciencedaily.com