Along with Dr Mann, Dr Healy also testified as an expert in the Paxil trial in Wyoming but on behalf of the plaintiff. He told the jury that all SSRIs can trigger suicidal and violent behavior in some patients. On the stand, he described his own studies that showed that SSRIs could even cause one in four "healthy volunteers" to become agitated, and in some cases suicidal.
Healthy volunteers, he explains, means the subjects were not mentally ill or depressed to begin with.
To support his testimony, Dr Healy used data from the drug company's own clinical trials and presented a summary of a study involving more than 2,000 healthy volunteers in which hundreds of people on Paxil had experienced adverse reactions, ranging from insomnia or anxiety to attempted suicide, that doctors in the study coded as "possibly," "probably" or "definitely" caused by Paxil.
For the record, in the battle of the experts in the Wyoming trial, Mr Vickery and his chosen expert, Dr David Healy, won the day and obtained the first guilty verdict by a jury in a Paxil-related suicide case.
Mr Vickery is expected to be at the FDA's December 13, hearing, as are most well-recognized experts on SSRIs, including Dr Joseph Glenmullen, Dr Ann Blake-Tracy, and Dr Peter Breggin.
A review of all of the studies that led to the ban on SSRI use with children in the UK, by Tim Kendall, deputy director of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Research Unit in London, and colleagues, was discussed in the April 23, 2004, New Scientist journal.
After he learned that there were hidden pediatric studies, Mr Kendall contacted the SSRI makers directly and asked for the unpublished studies and when none of the companies supplied the data, he contacted a government agency and obtained 6 unpublished studies on three SSRIs.
After the researchers added the unpublished pediatric studies to those that were published, the risk benefit balance completely changed. "When we got the unpublished data and put it in with the published data, something happened," Mr Kendal told New Scientist. "Instead of being safe and effective, the risk-benefit reversed."
In fact, the unpublished studies on Zoloft, New Scientist said, "suggested the drug increased suicide-related events such as suicidal thoughts or attempts by 14 times compared with placebo."
An editorial accompanying the study in the journal, Lancet, said the research on SSRI use with children is marked by "confusion, manipulation, and institutional failure."
Analyses of published studies that governments rely on to set regulations, the editorial stated, are "made entirely redundant if results are so easily manipulated by those with potentially massive financial gains."
The review of all the SSRI studies also showed the drugs to be practically useless with children and adults. "This data confirms what we found in adults with mild to moderate depression: SSRIs are no better than placebo," Mr Kendall said, "and there is no point in using something that increases the risk of suicide."
With all that said, the FDA has set up another advisory committee meeting, at great expense to the tax payers, to re-re-re-review exactly what about SSRIs?
Evelyn Pringle evelyn-pringle@sbcglobal.net
(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for OpEd News and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government and corporate America)
I'm a retired psychologist who spent 30+ years in the practice of psychology here in the good ol' USofA; 10 years in community mental health centers and then Thank GOD ( or whoever is up there ); I escaped those insane-asylums- pretending- to-be-treatment- centers-while- reaping-hundreds -of-BILLIONS- of-tax-dollars- over-the- past-40-years and entered private practice in 1978.
Though it only took me about 10 minutes after I left graduate school in Fayetteville, Arkansas back in 1968; degrees in hand , to discover that 90% of mental health science is bogus; it was a few years later that I concluded that about 90% of its activity is destructive, dangerous and unconscionable and carried out by either sickos or sociopaths or idiots or, more likely, all the above.
The entire mental health effort began to be usurped by big pharma back in the 1950s when Miltown began to be universally prescribed as " moma's little helper " and quickly our mothers and grandmothers became addicted. Today, the progression from miltown to valium to tofranil to elevil to triavil to prozac to zoloft to paxil to..... has addicted a huge percentage of our population.. ..how else to explain the elections of idiots and crazies like Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1, ...and culminated by
the colossally inexplicable election of George Dumbya twice!?
The Prozac-Zoloft- Paxil-Devil-made-me-do-it scenario is the only viable answer to that enigma.
I was also present at the earliest dawning of the the most hideous mental health scam yet perpetrated:The biological explanation for all the woes of parenting challenges. An added bonus was also available as the biological explanation led to the gold mine and easy " sales pitch " that the problems of our kids lies not in the stars or poor parenting skills but in the synapses of the children. In fact the movement was birthed at the Child Study Center in Little Rock, Arkansas in the mid-1960s. Back then the condition of ADD to morph into ADHD was labeled MBD: Minimal Brain Dysfunction --- which, I suspect was a far too ominous label to market and thus quickly became the more palatable SLD industry-Specific Learning Disability. The obvious beauty of all this was it took the burden and ,better still, the guilt off the parents so they'd become much more willing to enter and stay with treatment of "their little darlings "; at least until the mental health insurance benefits were exhausted!
And....of course, The drug industry,Big Pharma, was quickly in hot pursuit of the riches accruing from pills to solve the synaptic misfires. Like bandits and desperados in search of a train, they rushedly pursued the scam likkety split!
Since all difficult children ( meaning male behavior mostly ) was now organic; it was only logical that medicine was the treatment of choice. Enter Tegretol! Tegretol is an anti-convulsant used to help control seizures and since the original diagnostic nonsense was called Minimal Brain Dysfunction; a drug related to treatment of actual brain dysfunction was an initial solution dreamed up by the idiots at Big Pharma,albeit administered at a lower level...but the idea suffered a minor glitch ...it didn't work.
NOT TO BE DISCOURAGED :
An unintended consequence of stimulants in children was noted along about this time. Pre-pubescent children exhibited a paradoxical reaction to stimulants in that it seemed to sedate them rather than excite them. Voilla!
" Let's give the antsy-pantsy kids some SPEED.....i. e. RITALIN (an amphetamine derivative ).The added benefit is the stuff is addictive and we can hook the little buggers in primary school and then have lifetime customers. My God it can't get any better than this " the Big Pharma criminals must have gleefully exclaimed!
Now more than thirty years later we are experiencing an epidemic of Crystal Methamphetamine addiction running amuck in the USofA. Duh....suppose there's a connection between decades of state/education sponsored Ritalin abuse and our societal ills of the speed-freak generation?Before parents of the rare child who actually might truly benefit from stimulants begin screaming like gut shot panthers, please note I did occassionally bump into a child with demonstable ADHD......I repeat.....I did OCCASSIONALLY BUMP INTO AN AUTHENTIC CASE and in that rare case all bets were off.
As if the mental health/prescription drug pushers could not have become vile, rest easy ye of little faith. The bastards are now practicing a method called, 'Drug Cocktailing'. The current crop of criminals calling themselves psychiatrists now prescibe multiple psychoactive drugs to individual children, thus annihilating said child's childhood. This latest PROFOUNDLY TOXIC MENTAL HEALTH MOVEMENT and the Bushevik's Teen Screen Movement are but modern abominations which could only be dreamed up by the ilk of a Gonzales, an Ashcroft, a Rumsfeld.... yeah the same Rumsfeld who has become filthy rich peddling his artificial sweeteners uh,.. poisons... such as aspartame( Nutrasweet) to generations of victims.
If one wishes to look for causes of our childrens ills that are organic, how about examining the primary poisons our children ingest....sucrose, aspartame, transfats,Pschoactive Prescription Drugs!
by
Roy Murtishaw (11 articles, 0 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 78 comments)
on Thursday, December 7, 2006 at 1:43:58 PM
