Posts Tagged ‘Zoloft’
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
The Huffington Post
By Peter Breggin
March 3, 2010
On February 24, 2010 the Veterans’ Affairs Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives chaired by Bob Filner (D-CA) held hearings on “Exploring the Relationship Between Medication and Veteran Suicide.” Military suicides have risen rapidly in recent years at the same time that the prescription of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs has escalated. The hearing focused on the dangers of the newer antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Lexapro, Cymbalta, and Effexor.
Starting in the early 1990s, I was the first psychiatrist to write and speak extensively about the newer antidepressants causing suicide, violence, and mania. It was gratifying when Rep. Filner decided to hold the hearings after reading my new book, Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime (2008) and called me as his lead witness. I presented scientific evidence that antidepressants cause suicide, violence and mania. I also emphasized the profound danger of prescribing drugs that cause impulsivity, hostility and suicidality to heavily armed young men and women under stress on active military duty. I recommended that the armed services curtail the use of these drugs and rely instead on psychotherapeutic and educational processes that have already proved effective. I also called for additional research in the military and the VA concerning suicide and violence caused by antidepressants.
There is scant evidence for the effectiveness of antidepressants, and overwhelming evidence for their harmfulness. The military is already moving toward the implementation of better educational programs to help active duty soldiers handle stress. These educational programs, and counseling, need to replace the use of psychiatric drugs.
Read entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/congressional-hearings-on_b_480613.html
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Tags: antidepressants, Bob Filner, celexa, Cymbalta, effexor, Lexapro, military suicides, Paxil, prozac, Veterans' Affairs Committee of the U. S. House of Representatives, Zoloft
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Friday, February 19th, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
February 19, 2010
Women who take certain antidepressant drugs while pregnant may double their child’s risk of being born with a certain variety of heart defect, according to a study conducted by researchers from Aarhaus University in Denmark and published in the medical journal BMJ.
“Anyone who is pregnant or considering becoming pregnant and has any concerns about the treatment for depression should speak to their doctor,” said Cathy Ross of the British Heart Foundation.
Researchers compared the risk of birth defects in 1,370 children born to women who took at least one selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) while pregnant with the risk in 400,000 other children whose mothers had not taken any SSRIs while pregnant. They found that the drugs fluoxetine (marketed as Prozac), sertraline (marketed as Zoloft) and citalopram (marketed as Celexa) all significantly increased the risk that a child would be born with a defect in the septum, which separates the right and left halves of the heart.
Septum defects include a variety of conditions from minor blood vessel problems to outright holes in the heart. The researchers found that one extra septum defect would develop for every 246 pregnant women taking an SSRI during the time period from 28 days before through 112 days after conception.
Taking more than one SSRI drastically increased the risk of septum defects. While the risk of the defects was 0.5 percent in mothers not taking the drugs and 0.9 percent in those taking one drug (an 80 percent increase), it was 2.1 percent in mothers taking two or more (a more than 300 percent increase).
Read entire article: http://www.naturalnews.com/028202_antidepressants_heart_defects.html
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Tags: antidepressants, birth defects, BMJ, British Medical Journal, celexa, heart defect risk, pregnant women, prozac, Zoloft
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Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Jane Feinmann
The Daily Mail
January 12, 2010
Just a few years ago, Yasmin Miller would have been horrified by the suggestion she might take antidepressants for the rest of her life. But today, the 37-year-old can barely imagine a future without this daily chemical boost.
Yasmin’s ‘perfect’ life as a corporate tax adviser was shattered when, in 2003, she developed severe depression. Although incapacitated by the illness, she needed convincing that a pill could make a difference.
‘I was gobsmacked when my GP suggested antidepressants, because I thought they were addictive,’ she recalls. ‘But now I’ve changed my mind: depression is just like epilepsy or diabetes or any other illness where you need to take a daily pill for life in order to stay healthy.’
Just 20 years after the launch of the ’sunshine drug’ Prozac, Yasmin is one of hundreds of thousands of young women who can’t imagine life without antidepressants.
But some experts are warning of disturbing parallels with the ‘mother’s little helper’ scandal of the Seventies and Eighties, when thousands of women became addicted to widely prescribed tranquillisers, including Valium.
Read entire article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1242502/Hooked-happy-pills-Internal-bleeding-Strokes-Birth-defects-The-long-term-effects-antidepressants-terrifying.html
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Tags: anti-depressants, antidepressants, birth defects, David Healy, internal bleeding, Paxil, prozac, Seroxat, SSRIs, stroke, Zoloft
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Monday, January 4th, 2010
Martha Rosenberg
OpEdNews.com
January 3, 2010
With our national love of drugs, sex, celebrities and violence you’d think SSRIstories.com would be more popular.
The 12-year-old web site lists 3,500 crime related news reports linked to the use of SSRI antidepressants with celebrities like Wynona Ryder, Heath Ledger, Brittany Murphy, Anna Nicole Smith, Heather Locklear, Glen Campbell, Carrie Fisher, Sharon Osbourne, Phil Hartman, Princess Di’s driver, Patrick Swayze’s Sister, O.J. Simpson and the Crown Prince of Nepal generously sprinkled in.
You can search and sort stories by drug–Lexapro, Celexa, Luvox, Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil and the related Effexor and Cymbalta–date, location, type of violence and the articles about school shootings, famous cases and legal cases won on SSRI defenses are color coded.
You don’t even have to read the whole article.
SSRIstories founder and manager Betty Henderson pulls out and boldfaces the story’s drug-related citation like Lynyrd Skynyrd harmonicist Mike Caruso’s remark that, “the doctor put me on Cymbalta. That turned me manic,” and Oklahoma murder suspect Ronson Bush’s remark, “I killed my friend when I took these. I’m not going to take them,” when offered SSRIs at the Grady County Jail.
Read entire article: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Before-You-Take-That-Antid-by-Martha-Rosenberg-100103-313.html
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Tags: Antidepressant, Cymbalta, effexor, Lexapro, luvox, murder, Paxil, prozac, ssri, SSRIstories.com, Suicide, violence, Zoloft
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Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
James Ridgeway
Mother Jones
November 17, 2009
As the Senate takes up health care reform, we’re sure to be treated to yet more scenes of our elected officials bending over backwards to kiss the gold-plated butts of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. So far, just about every new turn in the health care battle is confirming what many have known for some time: The US health care system is run largely for the benefit of these corporate giants, rather than for the American people, and no piece of legislation is likely to change that fact.
But to fully appreciate the license these industries have been given to run roughshod over the public interest, you have to take a trip to Connecticut. The state is a longtime home base for the insurance industry, with 72 companies and the nation’s highest concentration of insurance jobs. It also has more than its share of drug and biotech companies. What luck then, for these industries, that the man who appears to hold a swing vote on health care reform is their own Senator Joe Lieberman, who has enjoyed enormous financial support from the insurance companies and plenty from Big Pharma, as well.
While Connecticut may be loyal to its health care companies, the opposite clearly is not true. This week the giant drugmaker Pfizer sent shock waves across the state when it announced its decision to shut down its huge research facility in New London. While some workers will be transferred to a facility in a nearby town, the closure represents a devastating loss of industry and tax base for this working-class coastal city. It also marks the disintegration of an elaborate publically financed urban development scheme that began a decade ago.
Read entire article: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/11/let-them-eat-zoloft
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Tags: Connecticut, health care reform, New London, Pfizer, pharmaceutical, Zoloft
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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Gary G. Kohls, MD
Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel
November 11, 2009
Most of us have been listening to the massive, round-the-clock press coverage of the latest mass shooting incident at Fort Hood, Texas. Seemingly all the possible root causes of such a horrific act of violence have been raised and discussed. However, there is an elephant in the room, and it’s something that should be obvious in this age of the school shooter pandemic.
We should be outraged at the failure of the investigative journalists, the psychiatric professionals, the medical community and the military spokespersons who seem to be studiously avoiding the major factor that helps to explain these senseless acts. Why would someone unexpectedly, irrationally and randomly shoot up a school, a workplace or, in this case, an army post? Why would someone who used to be known as a seemingly rational person suddenly perpetrate a gruesome, irrational act of violence?
The answer to the question, as demonstrated again and again in so many of such recent acts of “senseless” violence, is brain- and behavior-altering drugs.
Read entire article: http://baltimorechronicle.com/2009/111109Kohls.shtml
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Tags: antidepressants, Dr. Peter Breggin, Fort Hood, luvox, mind altering drug, Nidal Malik Hasan, Paxil, prozac, psychiatrist, senseless violence, shooter, Zoloft
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Saturday, November 7th, 2009
Dr. Peter Breggin
The Huffington Post
June 20, 2009
Here are the starting facts: Death by suicide is at record levels in the armed services. Simultaneously the use of antidepressant drugs is also at record levels, including brand names like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa and Lexapro. According to the army, in 2007 17% of combat troops in Afghanistan were taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills. Inside sources have given me an even bleaker picture: During Vietnam, a mere 1% our troops were taking prescribed psychiatric drugs. By contrast, in the past year one-third of marines in combat zones were taking psychiatric drugs.
Are the pills helping? The army confirms that since 2002 the number of suicide attempts has increased six-fold. And more than 128 soldiers killed themselves last year.
One theory states that the increased prescription of drugs is a response to increased depression among the soldiers. In reality, the use of psychiatric drugs escalates when, and only when, drug companies and their minions target new markets. In this case, the armed services have been pushing drugs as a cheap alternative to taking genuine care of the young men and women in our military. Instead of shortening tours of duty, instead of temporarily removing stressed-out soldiers from combat zones, and instead of providing counseling–the new army policy is to drug the troops.
Read entire article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/antidepressants-cause-sui_b_218465.html
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Tags: antidepressants, army, military, prozac, psychiatric drugs, shooting, Suicide, troops, violence, Zoloft
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Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Mark Thompson
TIME
June 5, 2008
Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad’s dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. “We’d been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me,” LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own messes. He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. “You don’t always know who the bad guys are,” he says. “When you search someone’s house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there’s little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor — things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would.”
So LeJeune visited a military doctor in Iraq, who, after a quick session, diagnosed depression. The doctor sent him back to war armed with the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam. “It’s not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they’re having over there for a variety of reasons,” LeJeune says. “If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills.”
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Tags: antianxiety drugs, antidepressants, drugs, Malik Nidal Hasan, medicated army, medication, military, Nidal Malik Hasan, Paxil, post-traumatic stress, prozac, PTSD, Suicide, violence, Zoloft
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Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Fred Grimm
Miami Herald
October 10, 2009
Gabriel Myers finally matters.
Too late for him — the foster kid we addled with anti-depressants and anti-psychotics without quite knowing the effects drug cocktails might have on a 7-year-old.
One potential side effect of feeding Lexapro, Zyprexa and Symbyax to a 67-pound child became grotesquely obvious. Young Gabriel coiled a shower hose around his neck and hanged himself in the bathroom of his Miramar foster home.
Gabriel’s death on April 15 roiled child advocates, critics of the pharmaceutical industry, the media. But this week, a child’s suicide finally elicited a reaction where it matters.
“I tell you, we’re going to do something. We’re going to do a full-court press,” said State Sen. Tony Hill, a Jacksonville Democrat, still shocked after members of the Senate Children, Families and Elder Affairs Committee were briefed Wednesday by the Gabriel Myers Task Force.
Read entire article: http://www.miamiherald.com/431/story/1277059.html
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Tags: antipsychotics, foster kids, Gabriel Myers, Lexapro, pharmaceutical industry, prescriptions, symbyax, Zoloft
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Monday, September 28th, 2009
Salynn Boyles
WebMD Health News
September 24, 2009
New research adds to the evidence that babies born to women who take antidepressants during pregnancy have a small increased risk for a specific heart defect.
The Danish study also shows that the risk is greatest when moms-to-be take more than one selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant or switch SSRIs early in pregnancy.
SSRIs such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro are the most widely prescribed drugs for depression; millions of women take them during pregnancy.
The new study shows the overall risk for congenital heart problems associated with SSRI to be quite low.
But babies born to women who had filled prescriptions for more than one SSRI had a fourfold increase in septal heart defects — a malformation of the wall that divides the left and right sides of the heart.
Read entire article: http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20090924/antidepressants-linked-to-birth-defect
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Tags: antidepressants, birth defects, celexa, Heart defects, Lexapro, Paxil, prozac, SSRIs, Zoloft
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