According to journalist Alison Bass, the paper on which the Times article was based was funded by a $30,000 Pfizer grant. An article [i] by the same author in the British Medical Journal, who had financial links to Wyeth and Pfizer, attributed veterans' suicides to SSRI deficiencies. What?
The fact is the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were a cash cow to Big Pharma with one in six troops on its drugs. A veritable pharmacobattlefield was created with troops marching on SSRIs, benzos like Xanax, anti-seizure drugs, anti-psychotics, pain pills and sleeping pills and receiving more of the same for PTSD. Prescriptions for Seroquel (an anti-psychotic which also has a black box warning) went up 700 percent and the SSRI antidepressant Paxil was the drug of choice during in the Iraq war.
The military press itself reported on the overmedication and likelihood it was correlated with suicide. Military Times observed that the graphs of increased suicides in the military and increased drug prescriptions would fit exactly over each other. No wars before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars lost more troops to suicide than to combat--probably because the wars occurred before SSRIs.
It is often said that the presiding precept in medicine should be "first do no harm." The warning certainly applies to Pharma as it unethically tries to navigate its lean times.
[i] [i]. Robert Gibbons, Sharon-Lise T. Normand, Joel B. Greenhouse, Comment on "Risk of Suicidality in Clinical Trials Of Antidepressants in Adults: Analysis of Proprietary Data Submitted to US Food and Drug Administration," British Medical Journal 339, no. 7723.
(Article changed on July 7, 2014 at 19:48)
(Article changed on July 8, 2014 at 18:12)
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