Bad Medicine?The data on anti-depressants and child suicide aren’t conclusive.

national review online ^ | September 12, 2004 | Sally Satel

[tbird5]

Do anti-depressants cause suicide in children? After simmering for over a year, the question boiled over this summer. A few weeks ago the makers of Paxil, one of a class of drugs called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), agreed to settle with the attorney general of New York who had charged them with "concealing" evidence of harm. Last Thursday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held an oversight hearing on the safety of SSRIs. And now the Food and Drug Administration is considering bolstering warning labels on the drugs.

The safety debate was stoked by a long-awaited FDA report. Released mid-August, the report featured an analysis conducted by suicide experts under the auspices of Columbia University. It garnered sensational coverage — "New FDA Analysis Backs Continuing Antidepressant-Suicide Concern," (Associated Press); "Depression Drugs Could Hurt Youth" (Philadelphia Inquirer); "FDA Ties Some Medicines to Suicide in Kids" (Lexington Herald-Leader) — yet a close look at the 131-page report shows how tenuous these claims are.

The Columbia experts were asked by the FDA to determine whether instances of self-harm that occurred during clinical trials were truly suicide attempts. No child had actually killed himself during the trials — a detail often overlooked in the media coverage — but there were incidents ranging in seriousness from a hanging attempt to lightly scratching one's arm to a girl who slapped herself in the face.

When the Columbia experts parsed these events into various categories they found relatively little cause for alarm.

[Coleus]

Health Experts Warn of Antidepressant Dangers for Children, Teens