By Patrick D Hahn —— Bio and Archives January 4, 2015
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"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 After analyzing all the data, including unpublished data, Dr.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
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.