Besides causing suicide, enough evidence now exists to prove that legally prescribed drugs have played a major role in the senseless acts of violence by school-age children all around the country in recent years. Little attention has been given to the FDA’s additional warning that certain behaviors are “known to be associated with these drugs,” including “anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia (severe restlessness), hypomania, and mania,” according to Breggin.
For more than a decade, he said, "I have documented in books and scientific reports how this stimulation or activation profile can lead to out-of-control behavior, including violence."
"From agitation and hostility to impulsivity and mania, the FDA’s litany of antidepressant-induced behaviors is identical to that of PCP, methamphetamine and cocaine—drugs known to cause aggression and violence," he warns.
"One clinical trial showed a rate of 6% manic reactions for depressed children on Prozac," he reported, "None developed mania on a sugar pill."
Bob Whitaker, award winning journalist, author of Mad In America, explained what's happening to people who use of these powerful psychiatric drugs, during an interview in the August 2005 edition of Street Spirit,
"All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks," he said. However, "what you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety over the long term."
And he added, "you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself."
So then, "instead of just dealing with depression, they're dealing with mania or psychotic symptoms," he said.
"They're now said to be bipolar and they're given an antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressant; and, at that point, they're moving down the path to chronic disability," Bob told Street Spirit.
It's brilliant from the capitalist point of view, Whitaker pointed out, "you take a kid, and you turn them into a customer, and hopefully a lifelong customer."
"Unfortunately, the cost is dishonesty in our scientific literature, the corruption of the FDA, and the absolute harm done to children in this country drawn into this system, and an increase of 150,000 newly disabled people every year in the United States for the last 17 years, he said, "That's an incredible record of harm done."
In July 2004, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that during treatment with SSRIs, there was a "significantly higher risk of suicide and suicidal thoughts" during the first nine days of treatment and that children who were first starting treatment were 4 times more likely to think about suicide, and 38 times more likely to commit suicide. It also noted that children as young as five have committed suicide while taking these drugs.
Something apparently happened between then and now because the AMA recently did an abrupt turn around. On June 21, 2005 a MedPage headline read, "AMA Supports Use of SSRIs for Treating Teen Depression."
Experts in the field are outraged. Dr Ann Blake Tracy, Executive Director, International Coalition For Drug Awareness www.drugawareness.org, and Author of Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? reacted strongly, "clearly there is no logical or sane excuse whatsoever for a doctor who professes to care about the well being of his patients to stand behind a group of drugs known to increase suicide by double," she said.
"It took us two decades to get the FDA to even issue what little bit of warning they gave with the black box placement on antidepressants," Dr Tracy explained, "and then because prescribing is down by 10% when it should be down by at least 90%, they are upset enough to make a move like this?"
"Of course," she reasoned, "this would be a necessary move to help push Bush's Teen Screen Program through the school system, which is the most likely reason for this seemingly insane move by the AMA. That is a program that will really bring in the business for them," Dr Tracy said.
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