Athletes Tell of Mental Havoc From Steroids

Athletes who use anabolic steroids to build up their bodies may hear imaginary voices, hallucinate and experience drastic, sometimes violent mood swings in what researchers have dubbed “body builder’s psychosis.”

“It has been widely known that anabolic steroids can have adverse medical effects,” said Dr. Harrison G. Pope, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

“But there has been very little in the psychiatric literature to suggest they could have psychiatric effects. In fact, these effects may be the most common problem,” Pope said.

In the preliminary results of an ongoing study, Pope and his colleagues found a significant percentage of body builders surveyed experienced a wide range of psychiatric side effects that appear linked to their use of anabolic steroids.

Potentially Serious

“The message from this is there is probably a fairly large prevalence of these psychiatric symptoms among athletes . . . and it is potentially dangerous,” Pope said. “I called it ‘body builders psychosis’ but it is not confined to body builders.”

Although exactly how the anabolic steroids would cause psychiatric problems is unclear, the side effects are apparently well-known among athletes, Pope said.

“Indeed, it was common knowledge among body builders and football players that they frequently produce psychiatric symptoms,” he said.

Anabolic steroids are a group of drugs that enable athletes to build up more muscle mass than their bodies would ordinarily allow. The drugs have been previously shown to cause a variety of adverse side effects, such as liver damage.

Pope and Dr. David Katz launched their study after treating two male steroid users for psychiatric problems at the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass.

Clinical Depression

A 40-year-old man whose doctor prescribed the drug methyltestosterone for impotence developed clinical depression within two weeks and had visual and auditory hallucinations.

A 22-year-old male body builder and construction work who took two eight-week treatments of the drug methandrostenolone developed temporary depressive symptoms and later paranoia and religious delusions.

“He believed he was getting messages from the announcer on the radio and believed he was getting religious messages from television shows,” Pope said.

Neither patient had experienced any psychiatric problems before the drug use. The symptoms coincided with the steroid use and both remained symptom-free for more than two years after they stopped.

The researchers began interviewing body builders in gymnasiums in Boston and Los Angeles and hope to interview about 100 subjects altogether within a few months.

They have interviewed about 42 body builders so far and reported their findings on the first 31 in a letter published recently in the British medical journal Lancet.

Of the 42 interviewed so far, the researchers found five had experienced psychotic symptoms, including hearing voices and having delusions.

“One man believed he could tip over a vehicle if he wanted to,” Pope said.

Manic Episodes

Another five subjects experienced manic episodes, which included periods of being hyperactive, having grandiose ideas, feeling euphoric, behaving impulsively or acting aggressively or irritably.

“One subject was cut off by another driver and he pursued the offender and cornered his car and smashed his windshield with a crowbar,” Pope said. “Another subject bought a car and drove into a tree at 40 m.p.h. while a friend videotaped him.”

Another steroid-user bought an expensive car while he was taking the drugs but returned the car after he stopped taking steroids and realized he could not afford it. When he started taking the drugs again, he went out and bought another expensive car.

“That’s a typical characteristic symptom of manic depression,” Pope said. “What is important is that all of the subjects never did this sort of thing normally.”

All the subjects who described such symptoms had taken steroid pills alone or with injections of steroids in doses as much as 10 times higher than those used in previous studies. The steroids included methandrostenolone, oxandrolone and oxymetholone.