This is for a novel im writing. For a point in the story, a girl is taking meds and is convinced by friends to go and drink and she has a negative reaction and wakes go the next day remembering nothing.
But Im not a medic so I dont know how realistic this is. What would happen if a person takes meds like anti depresants, and afterna few hours drink alcohol? What would happen to them?
MOD NOTE:
This question is for a Novel!
Doesn’t seem very realistic for anti-depressant meds to cause what you are describing. Drinking alcohol while on most of the commonly prescribed anti-depressants just makes them less effective and more likely to cause liver damage or trigger epilepsy.
I know people with bi-polar manic depression who stop taking their mood-stabilizer meds because they think they don’t need it anymore, and then they go out and do a ton of crazy stuff while blackout drunk and remember none of it.
The mixture of antidepressants and alcohol causing a blackout alone is not realistic. Maybe just have her drink a lot of alcohol? More realistically (albeit darker), you could do something similar to what the hangover movie did. Maybe even have a drink switch up where the woman intended to be drugged is not (and this ends up alright) and the girl in question is taken home by her friends because she’s acting super drunk.
There’s a very wide range of things that could happen when you mix anti-depressants and alcohol. The drug, the dose, the amount of alcohol, the person, what else they did that day, and about 100 other factors would all be relevant in the likelihood of that happening.
Is that outcome possible? definitely.
Realistic is more of a subjective bar. But people get blackout drunk all the time without antidepressants, I would think most readers would treat it as realistic. Particularly if you have her drinks a lot of alcohol, and wake up with symptoms of a hangover.
Alprazolam is a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety disorders, and it causes exactly what you’re talking about if you take it with alcohol. It’s not an antidepressant but it’s sometimes used for people with depression, at least at first.
