Drug Safety Issues: Suicide
Press Conference prior to the 2006 FDA Advisory Committee Public Hearing on the connection between antidepressants and suicidal thoughts and actions. The press conference was put together by the family of Woody Witczak. Vera Sharav: Watch on Youtube Kim Witczak: Watch on youtube Dr. Joseph Glenmullen discussed a side effect…
U S Federal Court ordered an overhaul of mental health care for veterans, who are killing themselves by the thousands each year because of what the court called “unchecked incompetence” of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The majority of persons who committed suicide in Sweden in 2007 had received extensive treatment with psychiatric drugs within a year of committing suicide.
A large-scale Harvard meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first ever to evaluate the relationship between different anticonvulsant drugs and the risk of suicide in for patients with diverse diagnoses: " the risk was derived from the specific drug that the patient was taking and not their underlying conditions."
Using drugs to cope with battlefield traumas is not discussed much outside the Army, but inside the service it has been the subject of debate for years.
Antidepressants involved in three suicides: 19-year old Chess Prodigy; 50-year old lawyer; 11-year old child
Dr. David Healy, a formidable critic of the iron grip pharmaceutical corporations wield on the practice of psychiatry as well as on psychiatry’s deficient journal reports, directs his criticism at drug regulators in an article in the current British Medical Journal (BMJ).
GlaxoSmithKline Reverses Decade of Denial: in Clinical Trials Paxil Triggered Significantly More Suicide Attempts in Adults than Placebo
The UK adverse event drug reporting system utilizes the Yellow Card system for filing reports.
An analysis published in the current issue of the British J of Psychiatry (BJP) of the suicide rate among schizophrenia patients treated at the same hospital in North Wales (UK) before psychotropic drugs and patients treated (in and out of hospital) with neuroleptics and /or atypical antipsychotics, found a 20-fold increase in the suicide rate since use of psychotropic drugs.
Even Dr. Robet Temple, FDA Medical Policy Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation & Research dismisses the claimed finidings of a flawed, but highly trumpeted recent SSRI study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health.
