"Prozac® enjoyed [a] career of renown... rumors... scandal... and finally a quiet rehabilitation."
Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (1993)
Prozac® is the registered trademarked name for fluoxetine hydrochloride, the world's most widely prescribed antidepressant. It was the first in a new class of drugs for depression called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which work by increasing brain levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter thought to influence sleep, appetite, aggression, and mood. Prozac® works by inhibiting re-uptake of the neurotransmitter (where it-is either destroyed or retrieved into the cell), thereby amplifying its levels.
At Eli Lilly and Company, the team of inventors behind Prozac® included Bryan Molloy Ray Fuller, and David Wong. In the early 1980s it was known that the antihistamine diphenhydramine showed some antidepressant-like properties. As a starting point, the team took 3-phenoxy-3-phenylpropylamine (which is a compound structurally similar to diphenhydramine) and synthesized dozens of its derivatives. Fluoxetine hydrochloride was found to be most effective in mice. Fluoxetine hydrochloride was first tested as an anti-obesity agent, and on people hospitalized with depression, but neither indication proved successful. Finally, Eli Lilly tested the drug on mild depressives, and all five of the subjects instantly cheered up.
Prozac® first hit the market in Belgium in 1986 and has had the fastest ever acceptance for a psychiatric drug. Within three years, 65,000 prescriptions per month were being written in the United States alone, and by the early nineties 4.5 million Americans had taken it. Since then, Prozac® has had a mixed reputation, with reports of the drug changing aspects of personality and also triggering suicide.
