On a beautiful day in the early 1990s, two University athletes were celebrating the purchase of a brand new expensive sports car. One of them believed he had a promising career in professional sports lurking around the corner. He knew he would be the next multi-million-dollar athlete, complete with championships and product sponsorships.
In homage to this, he bought his new toy. Ready to show off his athletic prowess, he asked his friend to record a video of him in the car.
He revved the engine and smiled at the camera with all the overconfidence of youth. Then he accelerated to the maximum speed, intentionally driving the sports car right into a tree as fast as possible.
This wasn’t your average Epic Fail compilation or dare.
Hyped up on testosterone, he was experiencing genuine psychosis.
He wanted his friend to record him driving his car into a tree to prove that he was “invincible.”
Testosterone Crazy
The youth wasn’t just any athlete.
He was part of a series of studies conducted on the effects of anabolic steroids on young men. Ordinarily, nobody with a promising career and a solid reputation would dream of buying an expensive sports car and intentionally crashing it into a tree at full speed that same day, so their friend could get it on video.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Harvard psychiatrists Harrison Pope M.D. and David Katz M.D. wanted to investigate the psychiatric effects of testosterone on men. They gathered their research subjects and compared two groups of athletes: anabolic steroid users vs. non-anabolic steroid users.
Their studies found, “Major mood disturbances associated with anabolic-androgenic steroids may represent an important public health problem for athletes using steroids and sometimes for the victims of their irritability and aggression.”
Between 1988 to the mid-1990s, many studies showed the destructive nature of testosterone in high amounts.
This has led to the myth that testosterone is inherently a dangerous substance. While testosterone plays a role in risk-taking, fearlessness, and other traits that can lead to aggression, at normal levels, testosterone doesn’t cause this kind of psychosis and behavioral problems.
But in high doses, behavioral problems are precisely what these researchers found.
Many testosterone users experienced radical behavioral problems far beyond what we might deem “emotional discomfort” or a “bad day.”
In one case, a young man who was juiced up on testosterone committed armed robbery and begged the police to shoot him, thinking he was invincible.
The medical literature is awash with countless stories like these, stories of men who plugged exogenous testosterone in hopes of gaining a competitive edge.
Researchers wrote in the 2005 paper Psychiatric Complications of Anabolic Steroid Abuse:
Most strikingly, 23% of steroid users reported major mood syndromes, mania, hypomania, or major depression, in association with steroid use. Steroid users displayed mood disorders during steroid exposure significantly more frequently than in the absence of steroid exposure and significantly more frequently than nonusers. Users rarely abused other drugs simultaneously with steroids.
A 1988 paper by Katz and Pope called Affective and psychotic symptoms associated with anabolic steroid use found that 22% of anabolic steroid users displaced affective symptoms (bipolar, depression, anxiety) while 12% experienced symptoms of outright psychosis.
Messing with hormones is a bad idea in general. But messing with men’s hormones is particularly volatile because of the male propensity to violence that can be observed in every human culture on earth.