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Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the US. Experts recommend many strategies and treatments to decrease the risk of suicide. Few would put folic acid supplements on that list. The study found patients who filled prescriptions for folic acid, also known as vitamin B9, experienced a 44% reduction in suicidal events (suicide attempts and intentional self-harm). Robert Gibbons, Ph.D. became interested in folic acid in the context of suicide because of a previous study between risk of attempting suicide and 922 different prescribed drugs. The study simultaneously screened each drug for associations with suicide attempts. Surprisingly,...

Beth Palmer was 17 and dreaming of becoming a singer in March 2020 when the United Kingdom went into lockdown because of the coronavirus. One month later, she was dead. "She was a wonderful, wonderful daughter. She was just funny, she lit up the room.," said Mike Palmer, Beth’s father. "She was so affectionate and loving as well. She basically had the world at her feet. She had everything, everything to live for.” Palmer didn’t die of the coronavirus. She took her own life. An aspiring singer and vocal student at the Access Creative College in Manchester, Palmer crumbled in...

Suicide attempts are rising and emergency room visits for mental health crises were up 90% last month. Mental health experts are asking for help. Colorado children are attempting suicide and arriving in emergency rooms in psychiatric crisis at levels never seen in this state, while abuse of alcohol and drugs to cope with mental health struggles is also on the rise. The youth mental health crisis has escalated to the point this spring that hospital beds are full and more parents are sending kids out of state for treatment, according to a Children’s Hospital Colorado panel of experts who sent...

Hospital emergency rooms in the United States saw an increase in patients requiring treatment for drug overdoses and suicide attempts in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, according to an analysis published Wednesday by JAMA Psychiatry... ERs treated 14% more drug overdose patients on a weekly basis last year and treated 6% more patients after a suicide attempt compared to prior years, the data showed. The findings highlight the need to account for the mental health effects on the pandemic as part of the overall public health response, the researchers, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote...

Last week, leading psychiatric researchers linked a 2004 increase in the suicide rate for children and adolescents to a warning by the Food and Drug Administration about the use of antidepressants in minors. The F.D.A. warning, the researchers suggested, might have resulted in severely depressed teenagers going without needed treatment. But the data in the study, which was published in The American Journal of Psychiatry and received widespread publicity, do not support that explanation, outside experts say. While suicide rates for Americans ages 19 and under rose 14 percent in 2004, the number of prescriptions for antidepressants in that group...

Two large new studies in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggest that treatment of depression, either with psychotherapy or drugs, reduces the risk of suicide attempts in all age groups, especially during the first months of treatment. The findings raise further questions about possible links between antidepressant drugs and suicide. In 2005, the Food and Drug Administration, faced with evidence from controlled studies, mandated a “black box” notification on all antidepressant drugs, warning that their use in children and adolescents could increase the risk of suicide. In May, after reviewing controlled data from all age groups, the F.D.A. required an...

In a long-awaited analysis, health officials reported yesterday that antidepressant medications appeared to increase significantly the risk of suicide attempts and related behaviors in adults under 25, while reducing such risks in older people. The analysis, the most comprehensive and rigorous to date, found that suicidal behavior of any kind was rare, and that people taking the medications were no more likely to kill themselves than those taking placebo pills. But adults under 25 taking the drugs were more than twice as likely as those on placebos to report a suicide attempt, or to prepare for one by, say, writing...

The results of two new studies may signal a substantial shift in the way psychiatrists and researchers think about treatment for severely depressed patients. --snip-- In the other, psychiatrists in New York found evidence that antidepressant drugs significantly increased the risk that some children and adolescents would attempt or commit suicide. Doctors have debated this risk for years, but the authors of the study were skeptical of it, and their report may sway others. --snip-- The study of suicide risk, led by Dr. Mark Olfson of Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, was based on an analysis...

After analyzing data from clinical trials, GlaxoSmithKline has sent letters to doctors warning that its antidepressant drug Paxil appears to increase the risk of suicide attempts in some young adults. The company said it had changed the labeling on the drug to reflect the finding of the study, which analyzed clinical trial data involving some 15,000 people. The study found that reported suicide attempts were rare but significantly more common in adults who took the drug for depression than in those who received placebo pills. The Glaxo researchers reported only one suicide in the trials, a number so small it...

Antidepressant drugs raise the small risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior in depressed children and adolescents, scientists at the Food and Drug Administration are reporting today in a detailed published account of findings they reached in 2004. The study, an analysis of 4,582 patients in 24 drug trials, is the first widely published evaluation of data that the agency reviewed that year. The analysis found that about four children and adolescents of every 100 who took the drugs reported suicidal thoughts or behavior, twice the number among those who took dummy pills. The publication of the study is not likely...

Scientist at Work | David Healy His mother in Ireland is entirely unaware of his international reputation, as far as he can tell. His neighbors in the hamlet of Porthaethwy, on an island off the coast of Wales, are equally oblivious, or indifferent. His wife, who knows too well the furor he has caused, says simply, "How could you be right and everyone else wrong?" Dr. David Healy, a psychiatrist at the University of Cardiff and a vocal critic of his profession's overselling of psychiatric drugs, has achieved a rare kind of scientific celebrity: he is internationally known as both...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR London ADOLESCENTS don't conceive the notion of strafing their classmates in a vacuum; they get the idea from cable TV. Bad news in itself, the 10-fatality reprise of the American school shooting last week at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota bolsters the archetype. It makes a trend that had seemed to subside since Columbine in 1999 seem current again, and prospectively gives more boys big ideas. The lessons we've been meant to learn from school shootings have been legion. We need better gun control. We need to be more understanding of misfits. We need to stop...

Polaris Jeff Weise, whose rampage killed 10 people, took antidepressants. RED LAKE, Minn., March 25 - In their sleepless search for answers, the family of Jeff Weise, the teenager who killed nine people and then himself, says it is left wondering about the drugs he was prescribed for his waves of depression. On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that...

EDITORIAL OBSERVER For devoted foes of gun control, September was a banner month. It opened with Congress ignoring pleas from every major national police group to let the hard-won 1994 ban on assault weapons expire, and ended last week with the House approving a loony measure repealing Washington's strict gun laws. And that's not all. In between reinstating every hunter's sacred Second Amendment right to nail Bambi with an AK-47, and mischievously meddling in local affairs to pass a one-chamber bill to weaken public safety in the nation's capital, the National Rifle Association and its busy-beaver allies quietly scored another...

BETHESDA, Md., Sept. 13 - Top officials of the Food and Drug Administration acknowledged for the first time on Monday that antidepressants appeared to lead some children and teenagers to become suicidal. Dr. Robert Temple, director of the F.D.A.'s office of medical policy, said after an emotional public hearing here that analyses of 15 clinical trials, some of which were hidden for years from the public by the drug companies that sponsored them, showed a consistent link with suicidal behavior. "I think that we now all believe that there is an increase in suicidal thinking and action that is consistent...

A top government scientist who concluded last year that most antidepressants are too dangerous for children because of a suicide risk wrote in a memo this week that a new study confirms his findings. The official, Dr. Andrew D. Mosholder, a senior epidemiologist at the Food and Drug Administration who assesses the safety of medicines, found last year that 22 studies showed that children given antidepressants were nearly twice as likely to become suicidal as those given placebos. His bosses, however, strongly disagreed with his findings, kept his recommendations secret and initiated a new analysis. In his memo, dated Monday,...

Amid an international debate about the side effects of drugs taken for depression, a large-scale analysis of British medical records has found little difference in rates of suicidal behavior among patients given some of the most commonly prescribed medications. The risk is highest when patients begin taking the drugs, as doctors have long suspected, and tapers off quickly after that. The study, which is being reported today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no evidence that withdrawal from the drugs put patients at an increased risk of suicide. The analysis, conducted and financed by the Boston University...

Adding to the debate over using antidepressant drugs for depressed teenagers and children, a group of prominent researchers issued a report yesterday saying that Zoloft and similar medicines did not increase children's suicide risk. The group, drawn from members of the American College of Neuro- psychopharmacology, also found that the drugs were effective in treating children's depression. "Depression in children and adults is the major illness that underlies suicide, and we believe that the S.S.R.I. class represents the medication with the greatest efficacy against this very serious condition," said Dr. J. John Mann, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University...