We spend more than £250 m a year on antidepressants in the UK – and it’s a complete waste of money. They are not much better than sugar pills, they have nasty side – effects, such as sexual dysfunction, and they increase young people’s risk of suicide. New research shows they don’t even work on the brain in the way we thought they did.
The SSRI antidepressant makers are desperate to find new customers, so they recently have been focusing on capturing groups for which the drugs were usually considered off limits. The latest marketing coup managed to open up sales to roughly 614,000 American pilots. Under a new policy announced on April 5, 2010, pilots diagnosed with depression can seek permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to take one of four SSRIs, including Eli Lilly’s Prozac, Pfizer’s Zoloft, and Forest Laboratories’ Celexa and Lexapro.
Copenhagen, Denmark: A recent Danish study found a high number of Prozac birth defects among the children of women who took the drug while pregnant. The study, conducted by the University of Copenhagen, warns that Prozac and other psychotropic drugs can cause serious birth defects and other maladies, according to United Press International.
Ken Kramer, a researcher with the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Florida, says the numbers underestimate the extent of the problem, because medical examiners do not track deaths attributed to antipsychotic drugs or to antidepressants, both of which carry black-box or black-label warnings. The warnings on antidepressants, required by the Food and Drug Administration, state that the drugs increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children, adolescents and young adults up to age 24. (Antidepressants include Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Lexapro and Celexa.)
The purpose of this investigation has been to find data about the preceding psychopharmacological treatment for all persons who committed suicide in Sweden 2007. The conclusion is that a large percentage of the persons who committed suicide in Sweden in 2007 had received extensive treatment with psychiatric drugs within a year of and close to the suicide. This is a report about suicides committed in Sweden (with around 9 million citizens) in 2007 and the psychiatric drug treatment that preceded these suicides.