WhatFinger

Part 3: "A Walking Nightmare"-- Antidepressants and suicidality

Dead bodies

By Patrick D Hahn ——--January 4, 2015

Health and Medicine | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

In the meantime the media and the FDA were flooded with tales of suicidal and homicidal violence committed by patients, including children, who had been taking Prozac. Faced with mounting pressure, the agency conducted a meta-analysis of 23 industry-sponsored RCT's on pediatric patients for nine antidepressants: Prozac, Celexa, Zoloft, Remeron, Paxil, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Luvox, and Serzone.
Related:
  1. “They’re very safe”
  2. "Better than well”
  3. Dead bodies
  4. "I can't enjoy anything"
The analysis concluded that these drugs were associated with a more than two-fold increase in the risk of suicidal thoughts and actions in children. Accordingly, on 16 September 2004, an FDA advisory committee voted 15 to 8 to include a black-box warning for all antidepressants on the increased risk of suicidality in children--the strongest sanction available to the FDA short of removing a drug from the market. The warning read, in part, "Antidepressants increased the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, adolescents, and young adults in short-term studies of major depressive disorder and other psychiatric disorders." These findings were confirmed last year by a new meta-analysis by Doctor Steven Julious of the Medical Statistics Group of the University of Sheffield. The analysis pooled data from 35 studies, including 12 that had been performed since the original FDA study. Dr. Julious concluded that, compared to placebo, an additional nine out of every 1000 children given these drugs will experience suicidal behavior or ideation. Meanwhile, no clinical trial has ever shown that antidepressants reduce the rate of suicide. Or, as Dr. Healy put it, graphically but succinctly, "When it comes to dead bodies in current psychotropic trials, there are a greater number of them in the active treatment groups than in the placebo groups. This is quite different from what happens in penicillin trials or trials of drugs that really work."
In a telephone interview, Dr. Healy stated, "There' s been very clear evidence for a long time that this group of drugs can cause people to become suicidal. The evidence goes back fifty years or more.
"In the old days, when people who were very severely depressed were being treated, some felt that the issue was that people who are severely depressed, when they were energized by the drug, might then have the energy to try and kill themselves. But it's very clear from these reports that what the doctors were describing was a toxic effect of the drug. "In the case of Lilly and Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, all three of the companies manipulated their data to try and hide the problem. "These drugs are leading to more deaths than they are leading to lives saved. If the rationale behind giving antidepressants is to save lives, then in fact these trials show these drugs are a dud. "Even healthy volunteers put on these drugs can describe becoming suicidal. What you get is a person becoming anxious, agitated and having thoughts that are strange and unusual for them, and finding that these thoughts are not inhibited in the way they would usually be for me and you. "Lots of people confess to having thoughts of harming themselves fairly regularly, but we are all inhibited in our acting on these thoughts, by fear of the consequences. But if you get somewhat disinhibited, or if you are having these thoughts more frequently or in a more malignant form, it may be that you go on to kill yourself."
But isn't it true that millions of people are able to lead normal lives because of these drugs? Perhaps not. A few years ago, Doctor Irving Kirsch filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain data for all industry-sponsored RCT's submitted to the FDA for four antidepressants--Prozac, Effexor, Paxil, and Serzone. After analyzing all the data, including unpublished data, Dr. Kirsch and his colleagues found that these drugs performed no better than a placebo. By the way, all but one of the studies looked at patients with "very severe" depression, and omission of that study did not significantly change the results. Dr. Kirsch's devastating critique of the psychopharmaceutical industry was published in his 2009 book, The Emperor's New Drugs. The following year, author Robert Whitaker published an even more devastating critique of the psychopharmaceutical industry, Anatomy of an Epidemic. Drawing on official facts and figures, Whitaker showed that the proportion of Americans disabled by depression has skyrocketed since these drugs have come into widespread use. That makes no sense if you assume these drugs cure depression. It makes perfect sense if you assume they cause depression. Dr. Healy cautioned against patients stopping antidepressants without medical advice. "More than half of the people who are currently taking these meds are taking them not because they are getting benefits from these meds but because they become physically dependent on them. If they go into withdrawal, they'd also be likely to commit suicide." Next: Part 4: "I can't enjoy anything" List of Sources
  1. Hammad, T. et al. 2006. Suicidality in pediatric patients treated with antidepressant drugs. Archives of General Psychiatry 63:332-339.
  2. Julious, S.A. 2013. Efficacy and suicidal risk for antidepressants in paediatric and adolescent patients. Statistical Methods in Medical Research 22:190-218.
  3. Juurlink, D.N. et al. 2006. The risk of suicide with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in the elderly. American Journal of Psychiatry 163:813-821.
  4. David Healy, telephone interview 29 May 2013.
  5. Kirsch, I. 2009. The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Basic Books.
  6. Whitaker, R. 2010. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Crown Publishing Group.

Support Canada Free Press

Donate
Subscribe

View Comments
Patrick D Hahn——

Patrick D Hahn is the author of Prescription for Sorrow: Antidepressants, Suicide, and Violence (Samizdat Health Writer’s Cooperative) and Madness and Genetic Determinism: Is Mental Illness in Our Genes? (Palgrave MacMillan). Dr. Hahn is an Affiliate Professor of Biology at Loyola University Maryland.


VIEW Comments

Sponsored