Antidepressants: Can they turn kids into killers?

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atracyphd2

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 19:58:08 EST

 

 

 

 

[drugawareness] Antidepressants: Can they turn kids into

killers?

 

Another front page article yesterday out of Binghamton, NY on Kurt

Danysh's

case. An interesting side bar is that Binghamton is where I lectured

at the

college about two years ago when friends of mine, a husband/wife team of

psychologists, Ben and Elaine Perkus, invited me to speak there.

Septemember 13, 2004

as I rushed to attend the FDA hearings in DC on antidepressants and

children I

got a call from them. Ironically they called about a young man who was

having

severe reactions to his antidepressant and they were looking for help

on how

to avoid a fatal reaction.

 

What a shame that few knew enough when Kurt Danysh took Prozac to do

the same

for him! His father would still be alive and Kurt would be going on with a

normal life instead of being behind bars with the pain of knowing he

took his

father's life.

 

Dr. Tracy

_________________

 

Ann Blake Tracy, Ph.D.,

Executive Director, International Coalition For Drug Awareness

Website: www.drugawareness.org

Author: Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? - Our Serotonin Nightmare

& CD or audio tape on safe withdrawal: " Help! I Can't Get

Off My Antidepressant! "

Order Number: 800-280-0730

________________________

 

 

http://www.pressconnects.com/today/news/stories/ne022005s149577.shtml

 

Sunday, February 20, 2005

 

Antidepressants: Can they turn kids into killers?

 

New cases, evidence to test 'Prozac Defense'

 

BY KARA M. CONNERS

Press & Sun-Bulletin

 

Kurt Danysh can't explain why he fired a shotgun blast into his father's

head. He only knows he felt the need to shoot him.

 

 

 

Kurt Danysh and twin sister Nikol are shown during a 2004 visit Nikol

made to

Frackville Correctional Facility.

Submitted photo

Antidepressants in court

Here are some highly publicized cases in which murders or suicides were

blamed on negative reactions to antidepressants:

 

* 1989: Joseph Wesbecker, 47, shot and killed eight people, injured

12, and

shot himself at a Louisville, Ky., printing plant. He had a history of

depression and was prescribed Prozac a month before the killings.

Wesbecker's

relatives sued manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co. in 1994, alleging that

Prozac caused him

to commit the crimes. The company won, but it was later revealed Lilly

struck

an agreement with the family during the trial, making the verdict invalid.

 

* February 1998: Donald Schnell, 60, took two Paxil tablets before

shooting

his wife, daughter, granddaughter and himself in Wyoming. Schnell's family

brought a case against GlaxoSmithKline, the producer of the drug. The

family won

$8 million in damages in 2001.

 

* August 1999: David John Hawkins, 76, strangled his wife at their farm in

Australia. The retired mechanic suffered from depression and took five

tablets

of Zoloft the night before the killing, five times the dose prescribed

by his

doctor. An Australian court acquitted Hawkins in 2001.

 

* March 2000: Christopher DeAngelo, 28, robbed a Connecticut department

store, gas station and two banks four months after being prescribed

Prozac and

Xanax. A judge determined the drugs impaired DeAngelo's judgment. The

2000 ruling

was the first time the " Prozac defense " stood up in an American

criminal court

as a defense.

 

* June 2002: Amby Cole sued Eli Lilly after her husband hanged himself 13

days after being prescribed Prozac. According to court documents, the

drug made

Cole's husband " nervous, jittery and aggravated. " Lilly settled the

case in

2003 for an undisclosed amount.

 

* January 2004: Christopher Bernaiche, 27, fired at least 20 bullets in a

Michigan bar, killing two and injuring three. Bernaiche claimed Prozac

sparked

his behavior. His dose of Prozac had been doubled two months before the

shooting. In February, Bernaiche was convicted of two counts of

first-degree murder.

 

* April 2004: Andrew Meyers, 28, struck his friend in the head four times

with a brass knuckles-type weapon after a fight over a bicycle. Meyers

took

Zoloft for two weeks before the fight. The California man was found

innocent of

attempted murder and assault.

 

* February 2005: Christopher Pittman, now 15, was found guilty of two

counts

of murder and sentenced to 30 years in a South Carolina prison. Three

years

earlier, Pittman shot and killed his grandparents while they slept,

then set

their house on fire and fled in the family car. The defense claimed

Zoloft caused

his violent behavior.

 

SOURCE: Press & Sun-Bulletin research

 

Nor does Danysh, then 18, remember how he came to steal the gun, or the 8

miles he walked to Wasyel Danish Jr.'s Brooklyn Township, Pa., home on

that April

1996 day. But today, 7 1/2 years after pleading guilty to murder and being

sentenced to 22 1/2 to 60 years in prison, Kurt Danysh remains certain

of one

thing: An antidepressant made him pull the trigger.

 

" Prozac killed my dad, " Danysh said last week at the maximum-security

Frackville (Pa.) Correctional Facility, an 1,100-inmate prison between

Wilkes-Barre

and Harrisburg. " But it used my hands to do it. "

 

Danysh's case was one of the first in which lawyers in the United States

tried to blame antidepressant medication for a murder. His attorneys

claimed that

withdrawal from the widely prescribed antidepressant Prozac

contributed to the

rage that led to the shooting. That strategy has come to be known as " The

Prozac Defense. "

 

Since the murder, new evidence has emerged about possible connections

between

antidepressants and suicidal and violent behavior in children and

teenagers;

Danysh hopes the recent findings will enable him to appeal. A hearing

in April

will determine if new evidence regarding his case warrants a new trial.

 

There will be plenty to consider:

 

* Lawyers for 15-year-old Christopher Pittman this month claimed

Pittman was

impaired by Zoloft -- the nation's most prescribed antidepressant --

when he

fatally shot his grandparents and set their house on fire when he was

12. A

South Carolina jury didn't buy the argument; jurors convicted Pittman

on two

counts of murder and sentenced him to 30 years in prison.

 

* The Food and Drug Administration now requires all antidepressant

manufacturers to include " black-box " warnings on drugs prescribed to

children and

teenagers. The warning, one step below a ban, indicates the drugs can

cause an

increase in suicidal behavior. Still, antidepressants have been

prescribed to more

than 11 million children each year; 80 percent of those prescriptions are

written by primary-care doctors rather than mental-health specialists.

 

* Federal studies also have shown that the drugs can cause increased

agitation, anxiety, hostility and violence in a small number of

patients -- especially

males.

 

All that raises this question: Can antidepressants turn some people into

killers?

 

Fighting depression

 

Depression is thought to be linked to the central nervous system's

" uptake "

of a substance called seratonin. Antidepressants, in a nutshell, are

drugs that

help some nerve cells in the brain work better.

 

The brain of a nondepressed person has an adequate supply of

" neurotransmitters " -- chemicals that help nerve cells send and

receive messages that

influence mood. The brain of a person who has depression has a low

level of

neurotransmitters, meaning nerve cells don't communicate effectively.

Anti depressants

also are used to treat obsessive-compulsive-disorder, eating

disorders, panic,

social anxiety and stress.

 

More than 18 million Americans suffer from depression, according to

the Food

and Drug Administration, and Americans take more antidepressants than any

other type of drug. In Broome County alone, experts estimate that one

in 10 adults

are taking or have taken antidepressants.

 

In 1987, Prozac became the first of a family of drugs called selective

serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) approved by the FDA for use in

adults and

children. Prozac, produced by Eli Lilly & Co. of Indianapolis, was

launched in

the U.S. in 1988 and is prescribed to more than 40 million people

worldwide.

 

Within several years of its release, the debate over potential violent

effects reached the courts.

 

In a high-profile 1994 case, the family of a Louisville printing-plant

worker

sued Eli Lilly & Co., claiming his four-week use of Prozac caused the 1989

rampage in which he fatally shot eight people and wounded 12. Lilly

won the

case, but the verdict was later rendered invalid when it was revealed

that Lilly

had struck an agreement with the family during the trial.

 

Since 1994, Lilly has faced more than 300 lawsuits over Prozac's

alleged side

effects. In 2002 alone, the company spent about $13 million in

litigation and

contingencies.

 

Lilly representatives did not return calls seeking comment for this

story. In

past court cases, including a 2000 civil suit filed after a man

stabbed his

wife and hanged himself, the company has insisted that Prozac did not

cause the

deaths.

 

Manufacturers of other anti depressants also have been targeted in court

cases stemming from violent incidents.

 

GlaxoSmithKline, makers of Paxil, lost an $8 million verdict to the

relatives

of a 60-year-old Wyoming man who gunned down his wife, daughter and

granddaughter in 1998. Courts in Australia and California returned

innocent verdicts in

cases of men charged with murder and attempted murder, respectively, while

taking Zoloft.

 

Dr. Ivan Fras, a semi-retired psychiatrist who has practiced for 38

years in

Broome County and was identified by several local mental-health

professionals

as the Tier's expert on child and adolescent depression, said handing out

antidepressants with little follow-up is a thing of the past.

 

Diagnosing and treating depressed children and adolescents today, Fras

said,

requires trial and error to determine the best combination of drugs and

therapy. Treating depression, he said, isn't an exact science.

 

" Depression does not equal (automatically prescribing an)

antidepressant, " he

said. " This is not best-practice anymore. "

 

The U.S. government has helped bring about the change in treatment. In

October, the FDA wanted to warn the public of the risk of suicidal

behavior

associated with antidepressants in some patients. The so-called

" black-box " warnings

are now required on all antidepressant labels.

 

The warnings -- the government's strongest safety alert -- are one

step below

a ban.

 

In response to the warning, Lilly issued a statement:

 

" Lilly supports the recent FDA efforts. " However, a " black box warning on

antidepressants may have a dangerous effect on appropriate prescribing for

patients who urgently need proven treatment options. "

 

Troubled past

 

Kurt Danysh, known to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as prisoner No.

DL-4879, grew up in New Jersey, saw his parents divorce when he was

young, and

dropped out of school in eighth grade. He recalled Tuesday, in his

first public

comments since his conviction, how in 1995 he moved in with his father

at his

Brooklyn Township home -- about 40 miles southwest of Binghamton -- to

" start

over. "

 

Danysh later received his GED and attended a semester at Keystone College

north of Scranton. Along the way, he said he used marijuana, cocaine and

hallucinogens.

 

He said he made several suicide attempts as a teenager, but never sought

treatment until he was sent to Susquehanna County Jail in 1996 for an

unpaid fine.

 

 

There, Danysh said, he tried to slit his wrists with an ashtray and choke

himself with a sheet. He wrote goodbye letters to his friends and

family, and set

his cell on fire.

 

In a meeting with the jail physician, Danysh said he was depressed and

" needed to feel better. " He had seen an advertisement for an

antidepressant in a

Reader's Digest while in jail, but had never taken the drugs before.

 

" I had no idea what they were, " he said. " All I knew was that they

would make

you happy. "

 

Danysh was given a two-week dose of Prozac, which he claimed made him

suffer

paranoia and violent mood swings. A week before his father's murder,

Danysh

left jail with four doses of Prozac in a plastic bag.

 

The morning of the killing, he punched out the windows in his truck

and drove

into a wall. Yet he recalls being calm and emotionally numb -- even

when he

climbed to the top of the Nicholson Bridge, where he planned to commit

suicide.

He wanted to jump, he said, but he couldn't be sure that the fall

would kill

him.

 

Instead, he returned to his truck and wrote obscenities in marker on the

windshield. He also wrote " KMD is crazy; broken; I love me and no one

else ...

don't look back. " Then he walked the eight miles to his father's house

with a

stolen shotgun.

 

Wasyel Danysh was in the front yard planting a tree. The shotgun was

in his

son's bag as the pair walked into the house.

 

" I was about to walk out the door and I saw dad looking down, " Kurt Danysh

said. " I don't know how the gun got out of the book bag. "

 

Danysh mopped up the blood with towels, took a set of keys from his

father's

pocket, and drove the dead man's car to a girlfriend's house. There,

he told

her what he had done.

 

A Montrose psychiatrist who examined Danysh after he was arrested said

Danysh

had a history of drug abuse. The doctor's report also said the teen

suffered

from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anti-social personality

disorder, and intermittent explosive disorder. Prozac, the

psychiatrist concluded,

did not cause Danysh's violent behavior.

 

In October 1997, two days before jury selection was to begin for his

trial,

Danysh pleaded guilty to murder. In return, prosecutors agreed not to

seek the

death penalty.

 

He had just turned 19.

 

A dark world

 

" Major depression " occurs in about 12 percent of children and adolescents.

Depressed youngsters, Fras said, hate themselves and live in a world

of " dark

colors. "

 

Antidepressants, he and another local psychiatrist said, can help

bring about

wonderful results in patients. But not all those experts agree on how a

depressed child or adolescent will respond if medication has a

negative effect.

 

Fras said he has seen no violent or suicidal behavior in his patients,

though

he said antidepressants sometimes can cause suicidal behavior. That

normally

occurs when a patient is misdiagnosed or given a drug he doesn't need,

Fras

said. And, he said, some adolescents may harm themselves after

initially taking

antidepressants because the drug gives them energy and motivation to

complete

the act.

 

Dr. Leslie Major, an adult psychologist and head of mental health

programs at

Binghamton General Hospital, said he's never seen an adverse or violent

reaction to antidepressants in 17 years with the hospital.

 

Major said all SSRIs like Prozac target the same area of the brain and

essentially perform the same task. A patient's behavior, he said,

shouldn't

drastically change based on an individual drug. Legal defenses such as

Danysh's, Major

said, don't excuse the behavior.

 

" Is that really any different, " he asked, " than saying 'I was drunk when I

did it?' It's the same thing as saying they were impaired by a substance. "

 

And the black-box warnings?

 

" The concern with children and adolescents is that it's a vulnerable

population and the FDA wanted to err on the side of caution, " he said.

" The risk is

extremely small. "

 

Fras said the warnings alarm parents unnecessarily, but he supports the

precaution because it promotes dialogue and close follow-up between

doctor and

patient.

 

The benefits of antidepressants, Fras concluded, greatly outweigh any

possible consequences. He said he's seen antidepressants save lives

and improve the

quality of life for thousands of people.

 

" We hear a lot about the cases that have gone wrong, " he said. " But we

don't

hear about the majority of cases that have gone right. "

 

'My guilt'

 

Kurt Danysh is 6-foot-2 and barely 150 pounds. He is sitting on a couch in

the prison visiting room, wearing a brown jumpsuit with " DOC " printed

in pink on

the back, leafing through newspaper reports of his arrest. It is

Tuesday, the

same day the FDA would announce it is creating an independent Drug Safety

Oversight Board to monitor FDA-approved drugs once they are on the

market and

update doctors and patients of new information on risks and benefits.

 

A day earlier, Broome County's Office of Mental Health began issuing

letters

from the state explaining the side effects of antidepressants and the

black-box warning.

 

Danysh is 27 years old now. His blond hair is thinning and crow's feet are

forming around green eyes partially hidden behind tortoise-shell glasses.

 

On his right thigh, he says, is a constant reminder of his crime: a

tattoo he

burned into his own skin using a staple, cigarette ash and shampoo,

the few

materials he could find in prison. The message is direct: " I'm sorry dad. "

 

If Danysh is unable to appeal his conviction, his first chance for parole

will come in 2018 -- when he's 40. In the meantime, he said he'll continue

teaching other prisoners to read, working at the prison library and

writing articles

for Frackville's newsletter.

 

From his 6-foot by 9-foot cell, Danysh corresponds with other

prisoners who

have attempted the antidepressant defense, and he has started a

grass-roots

legal aid fund to help finance his appeal. He's never used the Internet or

e-mail, but he can rattle off the addresses of several Web sites for

anti depressant

research.

 

He completed a paralegal course in prison. And he said he sleeps on

the floor

in his cell because nine years worth of legal files occupy his bed.

 

Among his paints and books, Danysh keeps a photograph of his father.

 

It used to haunt him, he said. But now, it gives him peace.

 

" Ninety percent of my life is penance, " he said. " Nothing will take

away my

guilt. "

 

 

About depression

 

More than 12 percent of all children and teenagers suffer from major

depression. In 2003, more than 11 million antidepressant prescriptions

were written

for children in the United States.

 

In October, the Food and Drug Administration required all antidepressant

manufacturers to put " black box " warnings on all drugs given to

children and

teenagers, indicting the drugs could increase suicidal behavior; the

warning is the

government's strongest safety alert.

 

The state Office of Mental Health offers tips for parents regarding

depressed

children. In December, the state issued a letter to parents regarding the

black box warnings. Read the letter at www.omh.state.ny.us/

omhweb/advisories/parentltr.htm

 

WHAT TO DO AS A PARENT

 

Tips for parents of children diagnosed as having depression:

 

* Be clear and honest when talking with your child about possible

risks and

benefits of antidepressants.

 

* Talk to your child about any suicidal thoughts. Let the child know he

should tell you immediately if he has suicidal thoughts or other

troubling symptoms

while taking medication.

 

* Develop a safety and crisis plan with your child's doctor. The plan

should

identify an adult your child can call if he or she is thinking about

suicide.

 

* Monitor your child's behavior, especially during the first few months of

treatment.

 

* Any child or adolescent taking antidepressants should visit or speak

with

the prescribing physician at least bi-monthly during the first months of

treatment.

 

* Don't abruptly stop or change your child's antidepressant medication

without consulting a doctor.

 

WARNING SIGNS

 

* Watch for behaviors or symptoms that your child exhibits for the first

time, that seem to worsen, or that worry you or your child.

 

* Watch for suicidal symptoms -- such as ideas of hurting oneself,

thoughts

or threats of committing suicide or any self-harming behaviors or

attempts.

 

* Watch for signs of new or increased depressed mood or anxiety

(nervousness,

panic).

 

* Watch for insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness and

impulsivity.

 

* If any of these behaviors or symptoms appear, call your child's

doctor imme

diately.

 

Sources:U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Eli Lilly & Co., New York

Office

of Mental Health.

 

Online resources

 

Here are some Web sites that offer information on Prozac and depression.

 

* Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, www.dbsalliance.org.

 

* Depression and Related Affective Disorders Association, www.drada.org.

 

* Eli Lilly & Co., www.lilly.com.

 

* American Psychiatric Association, www.psych.org.

 

* American Psychological Association, www.apa.org.

 

* National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, www.nami.org.

 

* National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression,

www.narsad.org.

 

* National Foundation for Depressive Illness Inc., www.depression.org.

 

* National Mental Health Association, www.nmha.org.

 

* To view label revisions of several antidepressants and other drugs,

visit

www.fda.gov/search/databases.html and click on Drugs (AT) FDA (DOT)

 

* An online community for people who use antidepressant medication and

mood

stabilizers, www.antidepressantfacts.com.

 

* International Coalition for Drug Awareness,

www.drugawareness.org/home.html.