Scientists Find That Dosing Men With Antidepressants Can Cut Down on Domestic Violence

"There are a ton of factors at play. A UN brief from earlier this year explains that extreme weather, housing insecurity, economic instability, and hunger all contribute to increases in violence against women. There's certainly no shortage of any of those elements throughout the world, and unless the global economic system underlining these fault lines is ditched, that's unlikely to change in the near future."

"Now, new research has found that there may be a stopgap - though it's bound to be controversial: a nearly decade-long trial by a battery of Australian researchers found evidence that regularly dosing impulsive men with a common antidepressant could be the key to reducing the rate of domestic violence. To pull off the first-of-its-kind study, published in The Lancet's eClinicalMedicine journal,"

Gender-based violence affects hundreds of millions worldwide, driven by factors such as extreme weather, housing insecurity, economic instability, and hunger. A decade-long randomized, double-blind trial tracked 630 men convicted of violent offenses from 2013 to 2021, randomly assigning sertraline or placebo. Participants receiving sertraline showed reduced domestic violence re-offenses: reported incidents were 5.7 percent lower after one year, and repeated offending (more than one offense in 24 months) was 44 percent lower by study end. The trial used sertraline, an SSRI, and involved blinded allocation. The intervention is presented as a potentially controversial stopgap to reduce violence.

Read at Futurism