10% of American women are on antidepressants but what do we really know about these drugs?

August 25, 2009

“This very important book will demonstrate beyond your worst dreams that the commercial needs of Big Pharma are the natural-born enemy of independent scientific research.” ~ John Le Carré, on Let Them Eat Prozac by David Healy

Phil Hartman’s wife had recently started taking Prozac when she killed her husband and then herself. The leader of the Columbine High massacre was taking a Prozac-like drug before the attack. These are some famous cases. But there are many more you never hear about. I wanted to learn more about the “antidepressant” drugs (also known as SSRI’s – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) that are prescribed so many more times to women than to men, so much so that 10% of American women are now regularly taking antidepressants. What’s it all about?

I’ll share what I learned here.

Some users experience serious side effects from the drugs, including suicide. In case after case, people with no tendency to suicide killed themselves (and sometimes others as well) shortly after being prescribed Prozac or another antidepressant. Phil Hartman’s wife had recently started taking Prozac when she killed her husband and then herself. The leader of the Columbine High massacre was taking a Prozac-like drug (Zoloft and then Luvox) before the attack. Others who went on to commit murder, like the man who killed the Amish schoolchildren, were antidepressant users or suffering from antidepressant withdrawal. These are some well-known cases. But there are many more you never hear about. And such adverse reactions to antidepressants is really nothing new; Sylvia Plath killed herself a week after beginning antidepressant therapy.

Dr. David Healy, author of Let Them Eat Prozac, describes the emotional blunting caused by these drugs and how one previously happy woman during a drug trial decided to throw herself in front of a train one night:

Emotional flatness or blunting is a not infrequent side effect of treatment reported by patients on Prozac. Arguably this effect is all but intrinsic to the mode of action of the drug, which generally reduced emotional reactivity. It has been reported in observational studies, where it has been linked to other potentially harmful behaviors…

The bloom was gone from her normally extraverted and confident self. She now looked almost shrunken, worried, and nervous. She withdrew from interactions with others… That night… she suddenly decided she should go out and throw herself in front of a car or a train. It was as if there was nothing out there apart from the vehicle she was going to throw herself under. She didn’t think of her partner or her child. This lack of feeling for them ate away at her later. When our biology changes, we change, but even in the midst of a high fever, when everything was unreal, she still knew she loved her daughter. Now she felt nothing.

For years, the drug industry led efforts to suppress the evidence about suicide and violent behavior as a side effect of these drugs from the public.. Again from Let Them Eat Prozac:

…there is no longer any guarantee that publication even in the most prestigious journals means that the results adequately reflect the data from clinical trials. As the SSRI and suicide story unfolds in succeeding chapters, we will see how a number of the best-known journals have published articles on the SSRI and suicide issue so riddled with gross methodological inadequacies that it becomes difficult to see how they could ever have been published on the basis of scientific merit. We will also see that in some cases, company defenses have depended on articles that are startlingly inconsistent with the raw data. In contrast, when I approaced British Medical Journal and The Lancet attempting to redress the balance, or at least to open a debate on the issues, initial enthusiastic responses tailed off while the parties called me to tell me the articles would never be published for “political” reasons.

It doesn’t take long to feel side effects from these powerful drugs. But in some cases, the side effects last long after discontinuing the drugs or in many cases are permanent. Other devastating side effects include facial tics (tardive dyskinesia) and other involuntary movements resulting from drug-induced brain damage. From Prozac Backlash by Dr. Joseph Glenmullen:

[There are] four, closely related syndromes – tics, agitation, muscle spasms, and parkinsonism – as the neurological side effects of the drugs. I found reports that they were occurring with all of the serotonin boosters – Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, and Luvox. These neurological side effects represent abnormalities in the involuntary motor system, which is a large group of nerves found deep in the older part of the brain. Normally, these nerves influence autoamtic functions like eye-blinking, facial expression, and posture. When the brain attempts to compensate for the effects of a drug, it can lead to disorganized, chaotic activity in the involuntary motor system and loss of motor control – an example of Prozac backlash. In my experience, patients with any one of these side effects are at increased risk to develop the others, including tics.

How did we get to the point where 10 percent of American women are taking these drugs, many for simple cases of the ordinary sadness or biological realities of everyday life? And these drugs are even prescribed to children in the United States, something that doesn’t happen in Europe. Dr. Healy from Let Them Eat Prozac:

…the antidepressant market is now worth $10 billion a year and projected to grow further, especially among children and teenagers… Far from being the most researched drugs in history, these drugs have been tested only to the minimum extent needed to get on the market and to develop that market. This leaves us a long way from knowing what the drugs do.

Dr. Healy suggests making the drug available over the counter would actually improve patient safety:

Anyone buying Prozac over the counter would quickly decide if it was helping them or not and stop if need be. In contrast, at present the giving and taking of drugs is embedded in a highly dynamic patient relationship with the doctor that makes it more difficult to stop a drug in the face of adverse effects… One quarter of all deaths in health care are now caused by treatments of one sort or another. Doctors would find it very hard to function if forced to face up to all the damage they cause in thier efforts to do good…. Making drugs available over the counter might have another surprising consequence: the disappearance of this terrible illness, depression. If companies could sell direct to consumers, they would market their products the way St. John’s Wort is marketd: for stress, or burnout, or as a tonic. We would all pretty quickly find ourselves interpreting our nervous states in terms of being “out of sorts” or “burned out.” We would see ourselves as being in need of a tonic rather than an antidepressant, and depression would shrink back to the levels at which it occurred in the 1960s.

And what of the rationale for taking antidepressants, the “chemical imbalance” that is supposedly causes depression? Again, from Prozac Backlash by Dr. Joseph Glenmullen:

…doctors frequently tell patients they need to take a serotonin booster “like a diabetic takes insulin.” In fact, even in diabetes, where something is known about the physiology, only about 10% of patients have conditions severe enough to require insulin. For the rest, their less severe diabetes can often be managed with milder agents, diet, and lifestyle changes. What if doctors tried to make all diabetics dependent on insulin?

In recent decades, we have had no shortage of alleged biochemical imbalances for psychiatric conditions. Diligent though these attempts have been, not one has been proven. Quite the contrary. In every instance where such an imbalance was thought to have been found, it was later proven false.

More on the subject from Dr. Peter Breggin:

There are no known biochemical imbalances in the brains of depressed people until they start taking toxic psychiatric drugs and every person who takes one of these drugs end up with a significant biochemical disturbance in the brain. … It’s worth re-emphasizing that used of antidepressants is based more on myth than on science. Here are some proven facts totally at odds with medical propaganda:

First, there is no evidence that antidepressants prevent suicide and a great deal of evidence that they cause it.

Second, antidepressants almost never cure depression and instead they frequently worsen depression.

Third, antidepressants never cure biochemical imbalances. Instead, they always cause them. There are no known biochemical imbalances in the brains of depressed people until they start taking toxic psychiatric drugs and every person who takes one of these drugs end up with a significant biochemical disturbance in the brain. That’s how the drugs work–by disrupting normal biochemical processes in the brain.

Fourth, when all antidepressant studies are examined as a group, rather than cherry picked by the drug companies, antidepressants are no better than placebo.

FDA approval for an antidepressant requires that the drug companies produce only two positive clinical trials showing that the drug performs better than a sugar pill. So the drug companies carry out numerous studies using their more reliable paid hacks. Back at company headquarters, they then manipulate the data until they can make two studies look positive. Meanwhile, when all the studies are examined in what’s called a meta-analysis, the antidepressants are no better than a sugar pill. And of course, they are extraordinarily more dangerous.

Conclusion? Antidepressants are a hoax…