August 24 DC Protest Against the FDA- What's Everybody Mad About?

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By Evelyn Pringle (about the author) Page 8 of 9 page(s)

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On December 5th 2000, she discovered Jacob's body hanging from the rafter in their attic where he had hung himself with his own belt. He had left a letter on the ladder leading up to our attic thanking his parents for giving him 14 years of a happy life.

"Had I know that this was a potential side effect, suicide," Terri said, "I would have never allowed my son to take the drug Prozac."

And the fact is, the FDA could have warned Terri about the drug, because by 1998, Prozac alone had already accumulated over 40,000 adverse reaction reports, including more than 2,100 deaths, under the FDA's adverse reaction reporting system, more than any other drug in history.

Glenn McIntosh introduces his 12-year-old daughter, Caitlin, with a photo because it is all he has left. Caitlin committed suicide, 8 weeks after being prescribed Paxil and Zoloft.

She was a straight "A" student, a talented musician, artist, and poet, who loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian.

With the onset of puberty, this bright, sensitive girl who had once loved going to school, started having trouble coping, as many kids do. She was also having problems sleeping due to a mild seizure disorder, her father said, "We wanted to help, of course, so we took her to our family physician, who prescribed her Paxil."

Caitlin didn't do well on Paxil, so the doctor took her off it. A week later they saw a psychiatrist and he put her on Zoloft. "She then started having strong suicidal ideations, along with severe agitation known as akathisia and hallucinations, and she was put in the adolescent ward of a mental hospital to "balance her meds," Glenn said.

There things got worse as she was put on other psychotropic drugs to treat the symptoms that Glenn now knows were caused by the SSRIs.

"Let me be very clear about something," he said, "the dramatic and severe symptoms that led to my daughter's suicide manifested only after she started taking antidepressant drugs."

The downward spiral continued until Caitlin hung herself with her shoelaces in the school bathroom. "We were told that antidepressants like Paxil and Zoloft were wonder drugs, that they were safe and effective for children. We were lied to," Glenn said.

"The pharmaceutical companies have known for years that these drugs could cause suicide in some patients. Why didn't we?" he wants to know.

Delnora Duprey is a grandmother who described how it had been over two years since she had seen her grandson Chris play ball, ride a bike, talk on the phone, or run in to say, "Hey, grandma, what's for dinner?"

Chris is a tall, thin boy, quiet and well liked and respectful to everyone, "who loved his family dearly, and had hopes and dreams for a future," Delnora said.

The family's nightmare began when Chris was diagnosed with depression, and "placed on medication that was never tested on children and never meant for their use," she said. He was first put on Paxil, but was switched to Zoloft a short time later.

The doctor increased the dosage to 200 milligrams and within 48 hours, Chris had shot and killed his other grandparents while they slept and burned their house down.

Today Christopher is sitting in prison facing incarceration for life, "a child that does not even know what has happened to him," his grandma said.

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