I joined this forum just so I could reply to this particular topic. YES, these meds can cause the end of relationships....and a whole host of other problems. My husband was put on an SSRI med for anxiety. He had LOTS of childhood issues he kept suppressing which caused anxiety his whole life. If a med is powerful enough to cause him to not feel any of the bad, it can also stop a person from feeling any of the good! Think of antibiotics--how it destroys even the good bacteria in your gut because it can't differentiate between good and bad.
We'd been married 20 yrs at the time when he went on the med. I wasn't told to watch for any changes in him. We were just glad to see his anxiety under control. Then came the alcoholism (it gave him intense cravings he couldn't ignore) and the inability to feel the buzz (so he stopped knowing when he'd had too much to drink), p0rn addiction, disinhibition, poor judgement, and on-and-on. When he started behaving inappropriately, I was about done with him. I blamed it all on the alcohol (but sometimes he wasn't drunk when he did things), but then something happened that made me wonder about his Rx med. I did some research and was totally shocked and horrified at the things I was finding. Somehow, he was receptive to weaning off the med (it's been 2.5 years, and we're still weaning him off--I'd read horror stories of withdrawals gone wrong, etc., so we decided low and slow to try and keep him functional and off any meds). At half off he said he could feel a blanket lift from his mind; a little bit more and he apologized for all the crap that had hurt me, saying that it "wasn't him, not who I am". He said that he could see NOW that what he'd done was wrong but he couldn't at the time and would've argued that it wasn't the meds (while still on them). These meds hijack proper thinking in some people. And when you're on them, you can't see the change happening to yourself.
He didn't leave, but he couldn't have cared less if I had packed up and walked out during that time. And, it felt like to me that he was trying to chase me off by his actions and uncontrolled drinking.
Anyway, I just wanted to share this in case it can help someone else. Some people don't realize what's happening to their medicated partners' minds and don't know that maybe they should be looking in that direction (of the med being culpable in dissolving marriages). I started researching for the connection between SSRIs and alcohol (which I found) and then I learned about the rest of it (and the need for slow w/d).
Unfortunately their are no easy buttons, pills or easy fixes, when it comes to these issues.
The person can use these things to look inside themselves and FIX their own issues but a pill by iteself only hides the problem, and likely prolongs the issues.
