blonde poker forum

Just been reading 'Ace On The River' by Barry Greenstein and he says that if they put Prozac (anti depression drug) in the water, then no-one would ever want to go into a casino and gamble.

Is this true? The stats say a significant number of people in the UK are prescribed such drugs.

DTD (as an example) is full every weekend so there must be a proportion attending who are on such tablets, which got me wondering how many people, if any, take this medication and find it has an effect, good or otherwise on their poker?

sounds like another typically uninformed comment to me. Afaik there's nothing in prozac that would take away the urge to go out and play poker - quite the opposite I would imagine as a depressed person not taking any medication is much more likely to want to stay at home.  Fwiw I was on prozac for most of 2007-8 and I still played poker!

Uniformed or uninformed?

I don't know whether to agree with Barry which is why I was curious and posted to this effect.

Did you not find it made you less inclined to bluff?

He's probably saying that because antidepressants reduce your emotional feelings. With reduced emotions I can see why gambling/poker would be less attractive, less enjoyable without the highs/lows?

Some say reading Mantis's PHA posts has the same effect, but I couldn't possibly comment...

uninformed.

Prozac (and other SSRIs) do not 'reduce emotoinal feelings' in any way Woodsey, although that may be the case with other types of medication, such as mood stabilisers.

OK maybe mood leveller then, affects different people in different ways. This is second hand info from a bird I went out with a while back who used to sell it, I will STFU as I don't know much anyway.

idk - I wouldn't describe it as a mood leveller either. The idea with SSRIs is they increase the amount of serotonin in the brain. If given to a 'normal' person then the obvious effect would be a hightened mood (or, more likely, no effect at all), which would probably make more people want to go out and gamble :D

This is how I assumed it would work too. But that assumption was formed from reading a book about finance and bullet point list of the symptoms of depression.

meh - maybe Greenstein has just got his drugs mixed up. if he'd said 'lithium' instead of prozac he'd probably have a point.

which part of the book did this appear?

dont pretend you can read

found it, in the chapter on brain chemistry. It seems he's just talking about compulsive gamblers.

"If you put Prozac in the bottled water at your local casino, you would diminish the compulsion to gamble to such a degree that the casino would  probably have to shut down."

The context being "Studies have shown that people with compulsive disorders have less serotonin at the synapses in the brain than people who are not deemed to be compulsive" and "drugs like Prozac ... are commonly used to increase seratonin levels at nerve synapses."

I've maybe one or two problems with the logical progression, but to be fair to Greenstein we can't say he was talking about Prozac stopping everyone from going into casinos as the OP implied.  

Greenstein is talking absolute bollocks, a case of people being more dangerous i.e. wrong with a little info rather than a lot.
It(prozac) would, if anything, make people more inclined to gamble!!!

so like, if I took it, I wouldn't be such a nit?

I'm shocked and stunned that a poker player writes a book with a one page chapter called 'brain chemistry' and it turns out he's talking bollox.

it isn't meant literally.

He used the Prozac analogy as a way of illustrating the rush people get from gambling. (basically the increase in serotonin)

I don't think so, it sounds like he meant it literally

My interpretation is that it's either bad science, bad writing or bad statistics

Probably all 3!

Quite interesting....I didnt get into gambling until coming off citalopram....might take a trip to doctors tomorrow, cheers for the headsup!