DATELINE–Atlanta, GA

A promising new anti-repressant lets the Prozac generation feel their own pain.

There are no dark clouds on Sophie’s horizon. A junior at a comprehensive high school outside of Atlanta, Sophie is a happy teenager who enjoys hanging out with her friends, surfing the Web and playing basketball. Few would suspect that this same Sophie has been on Prozac since she was six years old.

Before her family doctor placed her on antidepressants, she cried in the presence of strangers and suffered from severe separation anxiety as a result of her parents’ divorce. Attempts to resolve Sophie’s emotional problems using traditional therapy techniques failed.

With the help of Prozac, the little girl who once routinely refused to let go of her mother’s hand at the school door is now a model student. She earns straight A’s, participates in student government, and is the starting point guard on the varsity basketball team. She’s an exemplary teenager in all respects except one – she’s never experienced pain.

It’s been over a decade since the debut of Prozac, and parents and doctors are just beginning to see the effects of long-term use of antidepressants in adolescents. The results are surprising. While the drugs have been extremely effective at stabilizing moods in troubled teenagers, they have also produced a generation of youth on the verge of adulthood who haven’t had to face the emotional trials that once typified the adolescent experience.

“When I went to talk to my college counselor at the beginning of the semester, we talked about essay topics I should be thinking about,” Sophie explains. “When he asked about a difficult life change I had experienced and what I had learned from that, I thought, I don’t have anything to say.”

But for Sophie and others like her, that’s about to change. In therapeutic trials painstakingly scheduled to occur months before college entrance exams, thousands of young people are beginning to supplement their time-tested Prozac regimens with a daily dose of reality.

The reality comes in the form of anti-repressants, a new class of synthetic, mood-altering drugs that simulate the experience of emotional pain. Typically administered under close medical supervision for periods of no longer than two or three weeks, the drugs are now being prescribed to teenage patients by an increasing number of pediatric psychiatrists and psychotherapists.

“The ‘psychic pain pill’ may just be the most influential therapy innovation since the popularization of antidepressants like Prozac in the late 1980s,” predicts Marcus Sodenberg, an analyst with the pharmaceutical industry consulting firm, Brown & Sons. “It’s a big market, huge, in fact. We’re definitely going to see more drugs like DoloRX in the next few years.”

With more and more teenagers growing up on antidepressants these days, there is indeed a “big market” for anti-repressants such as SmithKline Beecham’s DoloRX (pronounced do-lor-ex). In 1997 alone, over 600,000 children and adolescents were prescribed Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft – an increase of 46 percent over the year before. In the same year, adult prescriptions for similar drugs fell off 5 percent.

Not everyone, however, is bullish on the effects of the new drug. Georgia Gottamer, a Los Angeles-based physician and class-action attorney, recently filed suit against the FDA on behalf of an unnamed class of children and parents. Her suit claims that not enough is known about the effects of either antidepressants or anti-repressants on the growing brain to warrant marketing the drugs to children.

“Our grandparents were mainly concerned with staying alive but my grandchildren have the luxury of harboring different concerns,” Gottamer opines. “Still, we have to face facts – you can’t learn without pain. If treating depression with drugs means you have to treat chemical happiness with a pain pill, perhaps the situation is getting out of control.”

Sophie’s mother disagrees with Gottamer and couldn’t be more pleased with the effect of the DoloRX trial. “No parent wants to see her child suffer, but all parents want to see their children live, learn and grow.”