Research Report: A Link between Sertraline Treatment and Susceptibility to (Mis)information

The paper, in plain language

Asking a question nobody had asked

Susceptibility to fake news has been linked to feedback insensitivity, cognitive rigidity, pessimistic judgment bias and anxiety — all processes that respond to serotonergic medication. With the Kraków psychopharmacology group around Rafal Rygula, Aleksander Gundersen and I compared roughly half of 1,162 online participants who had taken the SSRI sertraline for at least eight weeks, across four dose levels, against controls on no psychiatric medication, on their judgments of true and fake news.

The null, then the finding

The result to lead with is the null: sertraline users did not differ from controls in judging truthfulness or in telling true from false. The title's link is elsewhere — people on sertraline were more likely to engage behaviourally with news, and that held for true and fake news equally. Whatever this reflects — serotonin's association with social behaviour, or reduced fear of social judgment through the drug's anxiolytic effect — it is a general engagement effect, not a specific vulnerability to falsehood.

Why it matters

Millions of people take SSRIs; if medication shifted truth discernment, the public-health stakes would be considerable. The reassuring reading is that it does not appear to. The cautionary reading is that engagement is what spreads content, so a general increase in engagement still touches how misinformation travels. The study is cross-sectional and self-reported, framed explicitly as a first exploration — people on antidepressants differ from controls in many uncontrolled ways, and only longitudinal work can sort cause from correlate.