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To: neverdem
Sorry about breaking this up but I had to depart for a moment.

Prior to antidepressants at all there was shock therapy..Drug therapy was a huge improvement over it.

It is easy to blame a drug...just like it’s easy to prescribe a drug inappropriately.

You have no argument from me about them being dispensed a little liberally.

You also have the problem that residential psychiatric centers have largely been shut down...The State hospitals used to house most of the schizophrenics but they have been mainstreamed....

It is not simple and straight forward.. Complex issues do not become more transparent by eliminating pertinent variables.

11 posted on 02/17/2008 8:41:41 PM PST by TASMANIANRED (TAZ:Untamed, Unpredictable, Uninhibited.)
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To: TASMANIANRED
It is not simple and straight forward.. Complex issues do not become more transparent by eliminating pertinent variables.

One variable that became obvious with many of the school shootings was that many of these kids were taking SSRIs alone or in combination with stimulants for ADD/ADHD. If you check many of the stories the SSRI dose was recently increased or just started. It sounds like the black box warning when therapy is started or the dose increased. Read the NEJM article on "The Serotonin Syndrome." IIRC, it mentions that some people have different cytochrome P450 genotypes, and they metabolize SSRIs more slowly than others.

Genetic Markers of Suicidal Ideation Emerging During Citalopram Treatment of Major Depression

Talking Back to Prozac

Those risks, Healy perceived, included horrific withdrawal symptoms, such as dizziness, anxiety, nightmares, nausea, and constant agitation, that were frightening some users out of ever terminating their regimen—an especially bitter outcome in view of the manufacturers' promise of enhancing self-sufficiency and peace of mind. The key proclaimed advantage of the new serotonin drugs over the early tranquilizers, freedom from dependency, was simply false. Moreover, the companies had to have known they were gambling wildly with public health. As early as 1984, Healy reports, Eli Lilly had in hand the conclusion pronounced by Germany's ministry of health in denying a license to fluoxetine (later Prozac): "Considering the benefit and the risk, we think this preparation totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression."

As for the frequently rocky initial weeks of treatment, a troubling record not just of "suicidality" but of actual suicides and homicides was accumulating in the early 1990s. The drug firms, Healy saw, were distancing themselves from such tragedies by blaming depression itself for major side effects. Handouts for doctors and patients urged them to persist in the face of early emotional turmoil that only proved, they were told, how vigorously the medicine was tackling the ailment. So, too, dependency symptoms during termination were said to be evidence that the long-stifled depression was now reemerging.

The most gripping portions of Let Them Eat Prozac narrate courtroom battles in which Big Pharma's lawyers, parrying negligence suits by the bereaved, took this line of doubletalk to its limit by explaining SSRI-induced stabbings, shootings, and self-hangings by formerly peaceable individuals as manifestations of not-yet-subdued depression. As an expert witness for plaintiffs against SSRI makers in cases involving violent behavior, Healy emphasized that depressives don't commit mayhem. But he also saw that his position would be strengthened if he could cite the results of a drug experiment on undepressed, certifiably normal volunteers. If some of them, too, showed grave disturbance after taking Pfizer's Zoloft—and they did in Healy's test, with long-term consequences that have left him remorseful as well as indignant—then depression was definitively ruled out as the culprit.

Healy suspected that SSRI makers had squirreled away their own awkward findings about drug-provoked derangement in healthy subjects, and he found such evidence after gaining access to Pfizer's clinical trial data on Zoloft. In 2001, however, just when he had begun alerting academic audiences to his forthcoming inquiry, he was abruptly denied a professorship he had already accepted in a distinguished University of Toronto research institute supported by grants from Pfizer. The company hadn't directly intervened; the academics themselves had decided that there was no place on the team for a Zoloft skeptic.

Antidepressants and Violence: Problems at the Interface of Medicine and Law by David Healy*, Andrew Herxheimer, David B. Menkes

Competing Interests: DH has been an expert witness in nine cases involving antidepressants and suicide or violence. He has given views that the antidepressant was unlikely to be involved in approximately 100 further cases. He has been a consultant or speaker for most of the major pharmaceutical companies. AH has been an expert witness in 12 cases involving antidepressants and suicide or violence. He has given views that the antidepressant was unlikely to be involved in approximately two further cases. DBM has been an expert witness in six cases involving antidepressants and suicide or violence. He has given views that the antidepressant was unlikely to be involved in approximately 20 further cases. He has received research support from Roche and Eli Lilly, and has spoken for most of the major pharmaceutical companies.

David Healy has finally seen the light. It's not murder if it is done in a state mandated psychosis.

12 posted on 02/17/2008 9:58:40 PM PST by neverdem (I have to hope for a brokered GOP Convention. It can't get any worse.)
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