Fwd: [drugawareness] ALL SSRIs NOW IN DANGER OF BEING BANNED IN UK

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Thu, 12 Jun 2003 23:43:14 EDT

[drugawareness] ALL SSRIs NOW IN DANGER OF BEING BANNED IN UK

 

 

 

Thank God for the BBC! Their reporting has produced enough public pressure to

result in hearings which have lead to action being taking against the SSRI

antidepressants.

 

" This followed a BBC Panorama programme last autumn that highlighted claims

that the drug [Paxil] has pushed some people into suicide and caused others

withdrawal problems, provoking the biggest response in the programme's history

with 67,000 calls and 1,400 e-mails " .

 

" But the ban announced this week by the MHRA on prescribing Seroxat to

under-18-year-olds is the first official acknowledgement that the SSRIs do

increase

suicidal thoughts and impulses, at least in the young.

 

" The outcome of the inquiry could be of momentous significance. Like many

new drugs, the SSRIs are following a familiar trajectory: soaring popularity on

launch as they are hailed as a wonder drug, followed by the emergence of

doubts about safety leading to plummeting prescribing. "

 

 

But obviously this reporter remains totally unaware of the serious problems

associated with the mechanism of the SSRIs. When you understand the problems

behind the SSRI hypothesis it becomes clear that these are among the most deadly

drugs the world has ever seen and should NEVER be reserved for anyone for any

reason. They are in the same class as LSD and PCP.

 

As I have continued to state for a decade and a half now what is low in

depression, anxiety, etc., is low serotonin metabolism, not low serotonin. There

is

a very big difference in the two! The SSRIs impair serotonin metabolism even

further leading to the deadly results we have witnessed with these drugs -

results that according to research we will witness for years to come as we work

to wean patients off these extremely addictive drugs and assess the extent of

the damage.

 

Research over the past 60 years has been clear that impairing serotonin

metabolism leads to: psychosis or schizophrenia, mood disorders, organic brain

disease, mental retardation, autism, impulsive murder and suicide, Alzheimer's,

depression, anxiety, violence, arson, substance abuse, insomnia, violent

nightmares, impulsive behavior with no concern for punishment, reckless driving,

exhibitionism, hostility, argumentative behavior, etc.

 

We have a high rate of use of these drugs. Clearly lowering the metabolism of

serotonin in such a large number of people can produce very serious,

widespread and long term problems for all of society. I have spent 14 long

years

attempting to wake up the world to the potential deadly impact of the use of

these

drugs, hopefully this is the beginning of the end.

 

 

Dr. Ann Blake Tracy, Executive Director,

International Coalition For Drug Awareness

www.drugawareness.org & author of Prozac: Panacea

or Pandora? - Our Serotonin Nightmare (800-280-0730)

_____

 

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HREF= " http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=414766 " >http://new\

s.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=414766</A>

 

 

What price happiness?

 

In the early 1990s a range of wonder pills seemed to offer a cure for

depression with no side effects. Now the drugs are in danger of being banned.

What

went wrong? Jeremy Laurance reports

 

12 June 2003

 

Happiness. It is what everybody wants and nobody knows quite how to get. Some

people are born three drinks ahead of everybody else. Others - the sad, the

grumpy and the withdrawn - have a low enjoyment of life. Then along comes a

little white, torpedo-shaped pill that promises to even out nature's imbalance

and inject a little " joy juice " into those whom happiness had passed by.

 

It may seem astonishing in the light of safety concerns today, but the

arrival more than a decade ago of the antidepressants Prozac, Seroxat and their

relatives inspired the hope that unhappiness could be banished. The drugs

belonged

to a new class of antidepressants that were claimed to be better and have

with fewer side effects than any that had gone before. They held out the promise

of an end to mental suffering.

 

Such is the burden of misery in the western world that the SSRIs (Selective

Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors) have become among the mightiest selling drugs

of all time. Of the 22 million prescriptions written for antidepressants in the

UK last year, most were for SSRIs. Prozac, the best known brand, made by Eli

Lilly, was the world's fastest selling drug until it was outstripped by

Viagra. Seroxat [Paxil], made by GlaxoSmithKline, now outsells Prozac in the UK

and

is estimated to have been taken by 17 million people around the world since it

was first licensed in 1990.

 

However, the warning this week by the Department of Health that Seroxat

should not be prescribed to under-18-year-olds because it can provoke suicidal

thoughts and impulses could be the first seismic signal of a major earthquake.

 

The warning comes from the expert panel appointed last month by the Medicines

and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), to review the safety of

Seroxat. This followed a BBC Panorama programme last autumn that highlighted

claims that the drug has pushed some people into suicide and caused others

withdrawal problems, provoking the biggest response in the programme's history

with

67,000 calls and 1,400 e-mails.

 

The expert panel has met twice and is due to meet three to four more times

before producing a report that is to be published later this year. If it finds

that Seroxat causes similar problems in adults to those already identified in

young people, as thousands of users have claimed, it will lead to a serious

reappraisal of the use of Seroxat and the other SSRIs. After more than a decade

in which it seemed as if medicine might vanquish misery, it is the drug

companies who are feeling miserable.

 

Wind back a decade to Wenatchee, a small American town in Washington State,

once known only for its apples. In the mid-1990s it acquired a new, more

dubious claim to fame: as the Prozac capital of the world.

 

Peter Kramer had already published Listening to Prozac, in which he described

the drug as a " mood brightener " that could lift the episodically down moods

of those who are not clinically depressed without causing euphoria or the side

effects associated with energy boosting drugs such as amphetamines. It was Dr

Kramer who asked why a person born with too little " joy juice " , but who falls

short of being clinically depressed, should not be given more.

 

James Goodwin was one of those who was persuaded by Dr Kramer. A psychologist

in Wenatchee, he claimed to have prescribed Prozac, or a close equivalent, to

every one of his 700 patients. He argued that everyone is depressed - they

just didn't realise it until they took the drug. He became known as the Pied

Piper of Prozac.

 

Even then, in 1994, Dr Goodwin was opposed by a group of patients called the

Prozac Survivors Support Group, who claimed the drug could cause personality

changes and violent behaviour.

 

He was also taken to task by a psychiatrist, Peter Breggin, who argued

against the widescale prescribing of antidepressants on moral grounds. He was

against treating all kinds of misery and wanted suffering reinstated as an

acceptable and necessary fact of life. While this represented the extreme end of

the

debate about the uses to which the new antidepressants might be put, it

illustrated an important point about the SSRIs. They were regarded as so clean,

safe

and effective that non-medical reasons had to be found for not using them.

 

In 1992 the Royal College of Psychiatrists to launch its Defeat Depression

campaign. Here was a new type of antidepressant that did not leave you with a

leathery tongue, a sluggish gut and cotton wool between your ears.

 

Depression causes enormous suffering and takes the lives of over 4,000 people

a year, many of them young, by suicide. Prozac and its relatives looked like

the answer that psychiatrists and their patients had dreamed of.

 

This is the serious part of the Prozac story and the reason why these SSRIs

are important additions to the pharmaceutical armamentarium. Depression is a

serious illness. It is not the same as ordinary sadness. Divorce, redundancy,

bereavement all cause sadness, but it is when the sadness cannot be shaken off

that it acquires the label of depression (though it can also occur without any

trigger).

 

Depression drains the pleasure, as well as the point, from life. People in

its grip lose the sense of their own value, and then of the value of anything.

They fear being taken for malingerers and feel to blame for their condition.

The shame adds to the depression.

 

Fear of the stigma of mental illness and professional reluctance to

investigate emotional problems conspire to keep the suffering hidden. The Royal

College

of Psychiatrists argued that much of the suffering was unnecessary because

with the advent of the SSRIs effective, and acceptable, treatment was now

available.

 

The SSRIs are not mere lifestyle drugs. They are life-savers. But that is not

the way they have been portrayed. As prescribing of Prozac and its relatives

rose, so did headlines mocking this " pill popping nation " .

 

One of our most serious social ills is our unreasonable fear of psychoactive

drugs. Most people have no difficulty with the insulin given to diabetics to

control their glucose level, but suggest a pill to boost serotonin levels and

they react as if confronted by a drug pusher.

 

The common view is that people should be able to cope without such chemical

aids. Put another way, they should pull their socks up. That is to ignore the

mind-numbing paralysis caused by depression. Yet it is true that the

exaggerated hopes for the SSRIs made them easier for doctors to hand out. For a

busy GP

confronted with the sixth depressed patient of the morning, the promise of a

safe, effective drug made it simple to reach for the prescription pad.

 

Many doctors claim that while genuine depression still goes untreated because

of the stigma, there are many other patients who are not clinically depressed

who are being inappropriately treated with the drugs. In any treatment,

doctors have to assess the balance of risk and benefit - the more serious the

illness, the greater the risk that can be tolerated. As the threshold for

treatment

has lowered, so the importance of the risks of the SSRIs has increased.

 

Last autumn, Colin Whitfield, a retired headmaster aged 56, locked himself in

his garden shed in Wales and cut both his wrists while his daughter was

asleep in the house. He left no note and in the days before had given no sign

that

he meant to take his life. He had recently been prescribed Seroxat.

 

His wife, Kathryn, told Brecon coroner's court that the act was so out of

character he could not have been in his right mind and she had " no doubt that it

was the drug that caused him to do it " . The coroner, Geraint Williams, was so

alarmed by the case that he wrote to Alan Milburn, the Secretary of State for

Health, asking him to hold an inquiry into Seroxat " and consider whether it

should be withdrawn from sale in the UK " .

 

That inquiry is now under way, following similar reports and other evidence

amassed over more than a decade. The charge is that these SSRIs cause some

patients to become extremely agitated and potentially violent or suicidal when

they first start taking the drugs, while others suffer withdrawal symptoms when

they try to stop them. One self-help organisation, the Seroxat Users Group, has

4,000 members who claim to have direct experience of problems with the drugs

or are relatives of people who have had.

 

A central problem for the inquiry is disentangling the effects of the drugs

from the effects of the condition they are given to treat. Depression is the

main cause of suicide and the makers of the SSRIs maintain that their drugs have

been unfairly blamed.

 

But the ban announced this week by the MHRA on prescribing Seroxat to

under-18-year-olds is the first official acknowledgement that the SSRIs do

increase

suicidal thoughts and impulses, at least in the young. The biology of

adolescents is said to be different from that of adults, but at the press

conference

called to announce the ban, Jonathan Chick, a consultant psychiatrist at the

Royal Edinburgh Hospital and a member of the Seroxat inquiry panel, admitted

there could be problems in adults too. It always puzzled him, he said, why

suicide

rates in adults taking Seroxat were not lower than among those taking

placebo, when he would have expected them to be lower given the beneficial

effect of

the drugs on depression.

 

The outcome of the inquiry could be of momentous significance. Like many new

drugs, the SSRIs are following a familiar trajectory: soaring popularity on

launch as they are hailed as a wonder drug, followed by the emergence of doubts

about safety leading to plummeting prescribing.

 

The hope must be that use of the SSRIs will eventually arrive at a plateau

where their risks and limitations are recognised and they are reserved for

serious illness. If Seroxat and its relatives were lost it would be a tragedy.

If

they are saved it will be a lesson in the dangers of hype.