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.
This kid just had a state mandated increased dose of the drug before he killed his grandparents. If you think I'm a bleeding heart, then look up serotonin syndrome, serotonin withrawal syndrome or serotonin discontinuation syndrome. The "chemical imbalance" explanation for depression was just a bill of goods, IMHO.
I am surprised there are more of these cases. Our society drugs way too many kids.
Printer friendly webpage, 2nd paragraph:
Well, well. Finally the truth is seeping out.
I don’t look for this to gain mainstream traction, as the amount of money against the truth is just staggering.
Look for the “you must be a scientologist” crowd to be along shortly. They always show up on any threads that don’t promote drugs-for-mental-health.
Since this charge has been laid on anti-depressives, parents all over the country have stopped giving their kids those drugs or prevented them from being prescribed at all — and the number of suicides in that age group have gone up. What is the solution, then?
The mall killer in Omaha was on anti-depressant drugs — which he did not take. He was also on various kinds of illegal drugs. How many of the people who commit suicide are also on other drugs, legal or otherwise?
If he can murder two people in cold blood at the age of twelve I don’t want him to ever get out. But that’s just me.
Marking
ping
Let’s properly distinguish between SSRI’s for children, on the one hand, and SSRI’s for adults, on the other.
I have personal experience with the almost miraculous benefits of SSRI’s for adults who are severely depressed. Now, if you want to argue that the benefits do not justify the risk of side effects ... tell that to someone who has been saved from emotional misery, and possibly suicide, by these drugs.
A somewhat misleading headline because the issue the Supreme Court is being asked to rule upon has nothing to do with Zoloft or other SSRIs. The only issue before the Court is whether a 30-year sentence is cruel and unusual for a 12-year-old.
What kind of feelings are these drugs supposed to suppress?
Father causes bird flu scare at airport
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Chronic depression and bipolar disorder both have physiological components based on levels of and response to certain neurotransmitters. Of course hormones and behavior also matter.
Do certain individuals, long pacified by a lack of seritonin, become manic and then violent when given a too high dose? Yes.
Do certain individuals become very depressed and a danger to themselves and other when abruptly coming off medication? Certainly.
The court changed its mind due to depression. Thanks ND.
Let him rot, else the real cruelty is subjecting future innocents to his aptitude for murder.
The current Juvenile Court System is responsible for getting a lot of non juvenile innocent folks dead prematurely.