Warning: PROZAC, this wonder drug could seriously damage your health

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Warning: PROZAC, this wonder drug could seriously damage your

health JoAnn Guest

Jun 28, 2006 12:49 PDT

 

PROZAC Warning: this wonder drug could seriously damage your health

[CSPP thanks The Bulletin, Brussels' newsweekly in English, for

their kind permission to reprint this article which appeared in

their June 5, 1997 issue.]

http://www.breggin.com/bulletinprozac5.html

 

Woke up this morning feelin' so blue. Took an antidepressant. But

what'll it do?

 

Thousands of people are being prescribed Prozac and other so-called

wonder drugs to stop them feeling depressed. Do they risk doing

themselves more harm than good?

 

Clare Thomson reports.

 

I'm not mad " says Frank van Meerendonk, a former English teacher

who is now unemployed and on sickness benefit. He runs the Benelux

section of Prozac Survivors Support Group (PSSG, founded in the

United States in 1990. Its members all claim to have suffered

serious adverse reactions to the so-called miracle drug.

 

Sitting in the lounge of his red-brick home in Oisterwijk, near

Tilburg in the Netherlands, the Dutchman is calm and lucid, despite

evident difficulty concentrating for long periods. " I don't want

anyone taking the drug to panic, " he insists. " I'm not against

Prozac or biological psychiatry, but I want people to know the other

side of the story. "

 

 

After five days on Prozac, Van

 

Meerendonk was a wreck:

 

" I felt as if a magnet was

 

pulling my head. There

 

were electrical surges

 

rising in my body "

 

 

 

 

Van Meerendonk was prescribed Prozac in 1990 by a psychiatrist: he

was not suffering from depression, but dizziness, fatigue, tinnitus

and hearing loss, after severe flu. " I stopped taking it after my

head began to feel strange and my muscles started twitching, " he

recalls. His old symptoms persisted, despite visits to specialists

and an ear operation.

 

A year later, his family doctor prescribed Prozac for " masked

depression " , assuring him that any apparent side effects were " all

in the mind " . But after five days on the drug, Van Meerendonk was a

physical wreck. " I felt as if a magnet were pulling the back of my

head.

 

There were electrical surges rising through my body. The tinnitus

got much worse. I was terrified. "

He recalls lying in bed, sweating and hallucinating. Even after his

doctor took him off the drug, the symptoms persisted.

 

" It appeared to

have caused a huge chemical imbalance, " says Van Meerendonk. He was

referred to a psychiatric ward. " They wanted to give me medication,

including Prozac. I refused. They said I was a hypochondriac, that

Prozac couldn't have done this. "

 

Desperate, he looked elsewhere for help, finally finding a doctor of

Chinese medicine at Utrecht University Hospital, who continues to

treat him with acupuncture. He has partly recovered, but still

suffers from

muscle twitching and tinnitus.

 

" I phoned the Dutch drug authority many times to complain but they

weren't interested, " says Van Meerendonk. " Everyone said that Prozac

was

harmless. "

 

Convinced that the drug was to blame for his ailments, he began

collecting information about it. He found out about serotonin, a

compound involved in the transmission of nerve impulses. Low levels

of

the compound, which is thought to influence mood, have been found in

the

brains of people who have committed suicide: some scientists believe

that " selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors " (SSRIs),of which

Prozac

is one, can alleviate depression by raising the serotonin level.

 

But problems can occur if receptors in the brain stem and spinal

chord

are over-stimulated. Sufferers experience fever, chills, muscle

spasms,

agitation and confusion, dubbed " serotonin syndrome " .

 

Prozac is made by US drug company Eli Lilly. The company's official

line

is that serotonin syndrome can occur when Prozac is used with other

antidepressants. " You don't get this syndrome with the recommended

twenty milligram per day Prozac pill, " says Marc Czarka, director of

pharmaceutical affairs for Eli Lilly Benelux.

 

" Van Meerendonk is among the thirty percent of patients who don't

respond to Prozac, " he adds. " People who have had psychiatric

diseases

often have a distorted view of their symptomology. These illnesses

change their perception of reality. "

 

 

When Securimed, which provides facts about drugs,

 

asked doctors to note reactions to Prozac, these

 

included suicidal tendencies and violence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Van Meerendonk and others argue that their deterioration was sudden

and

happened after taking Prozac. " Eli Lilly doesn't listen to

patients, "

claims Van Meerendonk. " If you're satisfied with Prozac, they say

it's

because the drug is effective. If not, they say it's because of your

underlying disease. " Van Meerendonk is certainly not alone: the US

Food

and Drug Administration (FDA) has received a record number of

complaints

about the drug: 35,000 by 1996.

In 1995, Prozac accounted for 1 billion BF of the 70 billion BF

spent on

medication by Inami, Belgium's national health insurance group. It

is

the sixth best-selling drug in Belgium, where Eli Lilly has a

research

laboratory (in Louvain-la-Neuve) that is responsible for a sixth of

its

drug development work. This country was the first to authorise the

drug,

in 1986, a year before FDA gave it the US go-ahead.

 

Yet things aren't all going Lilly Benelux's way. Recent developments

in

this country include:

 

fears of over-prescription were raised in the federal Parliament in

March;

a Belgian doctor is collecting anecdotal evidence about the drug's

side-effects;

a Flemish group set up last year, Patients' Representation in Mental

Health (PRMH), is questioning the safety of Prozac and other

psychiatric

drugs;

later this year, Van Meerendonk will testify in a murder trial

involving

a Dutch naval mechanic who last year bludgeoned his mother to death

with

a hammer. He says Prozac changed his personality. It is the first

Benelux case in which the defense will argue that the drug can cause

violent behaviour. The " Prozac defense " has been used nearly 70

times in

the United States, but with little success.

Czarka insists that the drug is safe. " We're far ahead in

neuro-science, " he says, pacing his office and bombarding me with

scientific documents. " We're researching drugs for Parkinson's

disease,

for Alzheimer's, for osteoporosis. "

Last year, the company wrote to doctors condemning a September 1996

Paris-Match article that criticised Prozac and referred to the

Wesbecker

trial in the US (see box). " No one has won a case against Lilly

involving Prozac, " says Czarka. Despite such confidence, the company

is

quick to attack anyone and anything that questions the drug's

safety.

 

The letter to doctors dismissed the Paris-Match article as

unscientific

and insisted that Prozac, which had up to then been taken by 21

million

people world-wide (that figure is now 25 million) is safe. It said

that

clinical tests with over 30,000 patients prove that the drug reduces

aggression and suicidal tendencies.

 

One of the letters arrived on the desk of Dr. Robert Bourgignon, who

runs Securimed, a small company on Avenue Louise that provides

doctors

with information about drugs. He sent questionnaires to doctors,

inviting them to note their patients' reactions to Prozac.

 

Eighty responded and reported reactions that included suicidal

tendencies and violence.

 

Lilly has consistently denied a causal link between Prozac and

suicidal

tendencies. The company claims that the drug has fewer side effects

than

other antidepressants (for example, it causes less drowsiness), that

it

is safe because there is no risk of overdosing (SSRIs are less toxic

than earlier antidepressants and are absorbed more slowly) and

because

it has been authorised by national regulatory bodies like the FDA.

 

" Prozac is a scientific advance, " says Bourgignon. " Many people have

benefited from it, but some have had bad reactions. I'm worried

because

the number of people taking it has risen tenfold since 1990 and more

and

more side-effects, including sexual dysfunction, hallucination and

psychosis, are beginning to emerge. "

 

In March, Lilly took Bourgignon to court, accusing him of conducting

a

non-scientific survey that was commercially damaging to Lilly. Lilly

lost the case, but has appealed. The verdict is due in September.

 

The company has also received adverse publicity from Van Meerendonk,

who

bases his information on a substantial library of books, articles,

videos, documents and scientific papers about Prozac and its

manufacturers. Last year, Lilly accused him and the Benelux PSSG of

being " pseudonyms for the Church of Scientology " .

 

The Church of Scientology, which opposes all psychiatric drugs,

offered

to support the founders of the US PSSG after its members had

experienced

adverse reactions to Prozac. Since then, PSSG groups world-wide have

disassociated themselves from the sect.

 

" I'm convinced Lilly uses the scientology ruse to deflect

criticism, "

says Van Meerendonk, who is backed on this issue by writers and

commentators. Van Meerendonk took Lilly to court for linking him

with

scientology. " I was convinced that I'd win and didn't prepare a

defence. "

 

He lost. The judge said it was understandable that Lilly had

connected

him with the Church because of the early links between scientology

and

the PSSG, and because Van Meerendonk had not personally

disassociated

himself from the sect. Van Meerendonk is preparing an appeal.

 

" Van Meerendonk's story is no reason to ban Prozac, " Czarka insists.

Yet

Van Meerendonk is not asking for a ban. " I realise how bad

depression

can be and that psychotherapy doesn't always help, " he says. " But

I'm

convinced that many people have been wrongly prescribed Prozac: when

they're in mourning, want to give up smoking or drinking, want to

lose

weight or have been mugged. What these people really need is empathy

and

support. "

 

Last year, Rose Chambers, an Englishwoman living in Belgium, was

prescribed another SSRI, Seroxat. " I wasn't depressed, just feeling

a

bit low, " she says. " My doctor asked if I was tired and had trouble

getting up some mornings. When I said yes, he told me that this drug

would make me feel better. It didn't. I became feverish and my head

felt

as if it was going to explode. He blamed it on a virus, but I'm sure

it

was the drug, so I stopped taking it. "

 

" Nobody knows the long-term side-effects of Prozac or other SSRIs, "

argues Van Meerendonk. " For years, doctors denied that there were

problems with Valium and benzodiazepines. Now we know that they can

be

addictive. Prozac should be prescribed only when absolutely

necessary. "

 

When Ecolo politician Thierry Detienne raised the issue of Prozac

over-prescription in Parliament in March, he referred to a 1994

study by

David Healy, one of Lilly's consultants, which concluded that

antidepressants, including Prozac, could induce suicidal tendencies.

 

Health Minister Marcel Colla said that there was no reason to doubt

the

drug's safety, since regulatory bodies throughout the EU have

authorised

it. But he admitted that doctors need objective information, that

they

should take possible side-effects into account and prescribe with

care.

 

The Prozac controversy in the US was fuelled by two books written by

psychiatrists. In Listening to Prozac (1993), Peter Kramer claims

that

the drug transformed the personality of some of his patients, making

them feel " better than normal " and that if you introduced it into

mains

water, everyone who drank it would be happier.

 

Kramer's book boosted Prozac sales. Talking Back to Prozac (1994),

by

Peter Breggin, had the reverse effect. Breggin's criticisms of Lilly

are

devastating. He researched clinical trials of the drug before it was

marketed and concluded that they were inadequate because:

 

they were too short (four to six weeks);

they did not include children, the elderly or the suicidal;

many patients dropped out following adverse reactions;

patients were given sedatives to reduce Prozac's stimulating effect;

fewer than one in three trials showed Prozac to be effective; even

these

suggested that it was no more effective than previous

antidepressants.

" The FDA supports the drug industry and its needs at the expense of

the

public and the consumer, " writes Breggin, adding that an early in-

house

FDA report, ignored by the organisation's top decision-makers,

described

Prozac as a stimulant that could, in a few cases, over-stimulate the

central nervous system and worsen depression.

Lilly has dismissed Breggin's criticisms. " We have no evidence that

anything Kramer or Breggin says is true, " Czarka insists. But Lilly

did

not sue either author and neither has had to retract any of his

conclusions.

 

According to Van Meerendonk, giant pharmaceutical companies like

Lilly

persuade people that clinical depression is a physical illness that

can

be cured by medication. " Lilly gave 'educational' grants to organise

American National Depression Screening Day in 1994, " he

claims. " They

even orchestrated an edition of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which

participants spoke glowingly of Prozac: some said it had saved their

lives. What they didn't reveal was that Lilly's PR company,

Burson-Marsteller, was behind the programme, hand-picking members of

the

au- dience and flying them in from around the country. "

 

Czarka concedes that Lilly funds the American Psychiatric

Association

and that, with other pharmaceutical companies it sponsors and helped

create the Belgian League of Depression in 1995. " It's useful for us

because, unlike American law European law does not allow us to talk

directly to potential patients, " says Czarka. " The league does it

for

us.

 

" We're not marketing depression. We're providing funds to fight a

disease that can be deadly. It shows our dedication to patients.

That's

why we fund research and studies through-out Belgium. "

 

Psychiatric patients are waking up to the possibility of information

manipulation. In terms of patient representation Belgium lags behind

the

Netherlands, but the Flemish group PRMH is lobbying Parliament to

make

people more aware of the power wielded by pharmaceutical companies.

 

Founder Jan Vanhaelen was prescribed an anti-psychotic drug for back

pain. " I developed severe depression, was given a series of

antidepressants, tranquillisers and sleeping pills and ended up in a

psychiatric hospital for three months. I had to take a year off

work.

 

" Doctors should know more about the drugs they prescribe, " he says,

adding that Belgian doctors prescribe twice the amount of

psychiatric

drugs per person as their Dutch counterparts. " Most psychiatrists

know

little apart from the promotional material companies send them.

Several

years later, they make their own observations about a drug's

efficacy.

Meanwhile, patients suffer.

 

" I've talked to around a hundred patients who've had Prozac, "

Vanhaelen

continues. " Ten percent say that it helped them enormously, ten

percent

said they reacted badly and the rest didn't respond to the drug at

all. "

 

 

Many doctors admit that Prozac is not as effective as they had at

first

believed. Dr Guido Peeters, a Flemish psychiatrist who works with

the

Community Help Service, suggests why.

 

" It's well known in medical circles that you are more likely to

prescribe a drug when it's new. There's a placebo effect that

produces

hope in the scientific community and among patients. Prozac seemed

to

work well in the beginning and it can be useful, although it's

probably

over-prescribed. It's easy for doctors to hand out pills and many

patients prefer to go for the 'quick-fix' pill rather than discuss

their

problems.

 

" It is vital that doctors who prescribe antidepressants monitor

their

patients closely. Serious side-effects should be reported promptly

to

the Government. There's been a lot of talk about Prozac, partly

because

of the debate about whether all psychiatric problems can be

explained by

biochemical mechanisms. There are arguments on both sides. We try to

judge the value of research. "

 

Eli Lilly insists that depression is a biochemical

disease. " Depression

kills " says Czarka. " You shouldn't put people off medication when it

can

save their lives. "

 

For Van Meerendonk, this is a reductionist view. " It's naive to say

that

a malfunction in the neurotransmitter system is the main cause of

depression and that the illness can be treated by drugs. It's also

convenient for employers, families and society to blame individual

failings on biochemistry, rather than confront social problems like

unemployment. "

 

The Government is debating whether to follow the example of the US

and

authorise Prozac to treat other " biochemical " disorders, including

obsessive compulsive disorders like bulimia. A decision is expected

this

year. If they give it the green light, sales of the drug are likely

to

soar.

 

Rough justice?

 

Joseph Wesbecker had been taking Prozac when he walked into his

workplace, an Indianapolis printing plant, in September 1989, shot

dead

eight colleagues, wounded 12 and killed himself. Survivors and

relatives

of the dead took Lilly to court in 1994. They claimed that

Wesbecker's

violence was due to Prozac. The jury found that Prozac was not at

fault.

 

 

Two years later, media pressure forced Lilly to admit that it had

reached an out of court settlement with the plaintiffs. In return

for an

undisclosed - and reputedly large - sum the plaintiff's and their

lawyer

agreed not to bring potentially damaging evidence about another

Lilly

drug, Oraflex, into the trial. The story is related in The Power to

Harm: Mind, Medicine and Murder on Trial (Viking, 1996), by British

journalist and writer John Cornwell.

 

In 1985, writes Cornwell, Lilly pleaded guilty to charges brought by

the

US Justice Department for failing to report fatal reactions in

Britain

to Oraflex, an anti-inflammatory drug for arthritis relief. The

company,

whose global sales total $7.3 billion (around 255 billion BF) - $2.4

billion from Prozac alone - was fined $25,000 (around 875,000 BF).

Lilly

had been forced to settle hundreds of civil compensation claims and,

says Cornwell, urgently needed a best-selling drug.

 

The Wesbecker verdict boosted Prozac sales in the US even though, as

Cornwell points out, " Prozac had failed to help the sort of patient

it

was designed for. "

 

 

 

 

WARNING!

When trying to withdraw from many psychiatric drugs, patients can

develop serious and even life-threatening emotional and physical

reactions. In short, it is dangerous not only to start taking

psychiatric drugs but also can be hazardous to stop taking them.

Therefore, withdrawal from psychiatric drugs should be done under

clinical supervision. Principles of drug withdrawal are discussed in

Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why to Stop Taking

Psychiatric

Medications, by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. and David Cohen, Ph.D. Other

information on Prozac and Prozac-like drugs can be found in Talking

Back

to Prozac by Peter R. Breggin, M.D. and Ginger Ross Breggin.

http://www.breggin.com/bulletinprozac5.html

 

JoAnn Guest

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www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Diets