Interferons are powerful antivirals but they have the dubious honor of being one of the few medical drugs clearly implicated in causing depression. Others include reserpine, an anti-hypertensive and rimonabant, a weight-loss drug (it got banned for this reason).
The anti-malarial mefloquine can cause a range of neuropsychiatric symptoms including depression but also hallucinations and nightmares, as can the HIV drug efavirenz which I covered recently.
Most people who take each of these drugs don't experience problems but in a non-trivial minority it happens. It obviously poses a serious problem for doctors, but it's also very interesting for people researching mood and depression. Work out why these drugs cause depression, and it might help work out why people get "normal" clinical depression.
For example, just recently it was shown that mefloquine has a unique and unusual effect on cells in the dopamine system of the brain, responsible for motivation and pleasure. Whether this explains the side-effects is an open question but without mefloquine we wouldn't even be able to ask it.
As for interferons, which are actually not drugs as such but rather molecules produced by the immune system during infections, it's given rise to the inflammation theory of depression. There's always a risk, though, that by focussing too much on just one class of depressing drug, you'll end up with a narrow theory that can't account for the others.
Antivirals and Suicide
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