She says, researchers were very excited in the late 1990s to discover that Prozac, for example, increased levels of the neurosteroid called allopregnanolone.
Neurosteroids, Dr Jackson explains, are made in the brain itself and allopregnanolone is a chemical which acts to modulate mood and anxiety and may account for why most mothers forget the intense pain of labor. "Nature," Dr Jackson says, "has created a way to remove the memory of the most intensely painful experience which a woman can encounter during her lifetime."
Some researchers report that it takes about 90 days for the steroid levels to re-equilibrate. "Although all women experience these hormonal changes," Dr Jackson explains, "some may be more sensitive than others to the fluctuations which occur in the immediate post-partum period - a 90 day phase of ‘steroid’ withdrawal."
Giving SSRIs may help relieve this “withdrawal” period by boosting the allopregnanolone artificially, she says, but many women will become addicted to the SSRIs, for a hormonal change that would have ended naturally on its own within 90 days.
Then there is the little matter of prescribing SSRIs to nursing mothers. "No one yet knows," Dr Jackson warns, "because no one has studied the long term consequences of administering SSRIs to infants via breast milk."
"It has never been proven," she notes, "that there is ‘no effect’ of giving infants these drugs during the first months or years of post-uterine existence."
Furthermore, she says, no one understands how the in utero exposure to SSRIs changes the wiring of the newborn's brain.
In regard to the overall scheme of screening all women before, during and after pregnancy and putting them on SSRIs, Dr Jackson says, "in sum, there could not be a more foolhardy public health practice than this one."
A better use for a post-pregnancy screening survey, may be to screen women who were conned into taking SSRIs during pregnancy whose babies died or were born with birth defects, to see how many of those mothers are depressed for reasons that no pill can cure.
A good place to start would be West Virginia, with the mother of twin daughters who were born with heart birth defects, after she took Paxil during pregnancy. Only one infant survived and the other died at 20-months-old.
Another infant with Paxil related heart defects was born to a mother in Omaha, Nebraska, and the baby lived only 24 days after enduring four surgeries in an attempt to save his life.
A screening should also be conducted on the Toledo, Ohio mother who took Paxil and had a baby born with heart defects who lived only 17 days after undergoing several surgeries.
Another infant was born with Paxil related heart birth defects to a mother in Westerville, Ohio, and the baby required two surgeries in the first nine months after birth and will have to undergo more in the future.
A Texas mother on Paxil also gave birth to an infant with heart birth defects who required multiple open-heart surgeries and had to have a pacemaker implanted.
The Los Angeles-based Baum Hedlund law firm has the longest track-record handling SSRI litigation in the country. The firm currently represents families in dozens of SSRI-related birth defect cases, including Paxil, and has seven attorneys assigned specifically to SSRI litigation.
Attorney, Karen Barth Menzies, has been handling SSRI cases for more than a decade involving Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft and now leads the team, along with Baum Hedlund attorney Jennifer Liakos, representing families in Paxil birth defect cases.
