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Gender-based violence is a grim problem around the globe. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 840 million women have experienced domestic or sexual violence during their lifetime, a figure that’s barely budged since 2000.
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, researchers from the University of New South Wales and the University of Newcastle selected 630 men convicted for violent offenses to track from 2013 to 2021. Participants were randomly given either sertraline, an SSRI better known by the brand name Zoloft, or a placebo in a double-blind trial, meaning that neither the researchers nor the participants were aware of who was taking a placebo.
The results were striking. At the end of the trial, the participants who were taking the antidepressant showed a significant reduction in domestic violence re-offenses.
A year into the study, for example, reported incidents of domestic violence were 5.7 percent lower in the group taking sertraline than in the control group. By the end of the study, the rate of repeated domestic violence offending, which the researchers define as “more than one offense in 24 months,” was 44 percent lower in the medicated group.
As the team explains in a blog post on The Conversation, sertraline works by increasing the levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Previous research has shown that serotonin acts like an emotional braking system, allowing people to think out their responses before they act.
Given that domestic violence is largely impulsive, serotonin regulation has been theorized to be a key factor in whether someone attacks their partner in heated moments, or stops to let cooler heads prevail.
“I used to sleep with a hammer under my bed,” one partner told the researchers. “Since he started this medication, I can sleep more easily, and I don’t need to sleep with the hammer anymore.”
Of course there are some important caveats, like that the effects of sertraline on “general violence” were inconclusive. How effective the medication was also depended heavily on how long the men took it, making trauma-counseling, 24-hour crisis support, and proactive monitoring an important factor.
As the researchers write, a large number of the participants struggled with homelessness, mental disorders, substance abuse, and other social ailments. In this light, sertraline wasn’t necessarily a magic pill — but an important piece of a reform-minded social program.
More on medication: Scientists Intrigued by Old Drug That Reverses Signs of Alzheimer’s in Mice
