Hello Dr. Baughman, I am working as a volunteer minister with an Indian Tribe in Alberta. They have a suicide rate of one person per week! I, when I was last at the reservation, asked a few questions and found that psychotopic drugs were pretty rampant in the elementary schools, K-grade 6, and Junior High schools 7-9. No data available about older kids and adults, however I suspect they are in wide use throughout the tribe. The big Alberta psychiatric hospital is about spitting distance from the reservation. [Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
I am looking for documentation on the connection of suicides and these types of drugs [Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Fairly easy to understand terms. I am aware there is a connection on these and am wondering if you have any links that I can checkout to present information to the band leaders? You are doing, by the way, a terrific job. D***** [Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
LILLY COVER UP OF SUICIDE WITH SSRI, DUPLICITY OF PSYCH-PHARM CARTEL David Healy interview of Jonathan Cole (Director, Psychopharmacology Research Centre, NIMH; Chair in Psychiatry, McLean Hospital), December 1994. Excerpted by Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD, 9/13/99 p 258 Healy: What about a group of patients who may get worse on it (Prozac)? Cole: Yes. I'm one of the authors of the suicide paper.I didn't realize it would be quite that famous.p 259Yes, I have seen people, at least a handful, that clearly got more agitated and got weird thoughts and suicidal drive. Tony Rothschild.found three people who had jumped off something while on fluoxetine, who didn't kill themselves, and agreed to take it again. He re-created the same desperate driven quality with fluoxetine. Healy: Is it a form of akathesia" Cole: I think it probably is but whether you get the neuromuscular form or whether it's purely psychic I don't know. One patient.was so distressed by a thought telling her to kill herself over and over again, .I told her to take some Ativan and go to sleep and she did and within 36 hours it had passed. At the end of it she said 'gee, I've been depressed for 21 years, and suicidal a lot but that was ridiculous.' She thought it was clearly different than anything she had ever experienced before which is why I put her case and my name on the paper. Lilly doesn't believe it.Plus about 1-2% of the people on fluoxetine, and none of the people on trazodone, called up and said I've got suicidal ideas that I haven't had before and another 1-2% phoned up and said I've got crazy ideas that I hadn't had before.So I think it's rare and the drug has certainly prevented more suicides than it's cause. I don't thin it's a bad drug, I just think it does funny things every once in a while. p. 260 Cole: I got so pissed about Lilly saying 'don't you agree that all the doctors know that fluoxetine doesn't cause suicide' that I did a survey of everybody in the Mass. Psychiatric Society, who'd answer the telephone about whether they had ever had or thought they'd had a patient who had been made suicidal by fluoxetine, or whether they had heard of anybody, and if they had, did they think they were prescribing less now than they were before. You could make a case that if they had some personal experience with fluoxetine in a patient who they thought got suicidal, they were more likely to warn patient and be a little more gun shy. Healy: Sometimes, ideas just get into popular consciousness and other times they don't. You would have thought that suicidal ideation would have killed of fluoxetine but it hasn't. Cole: But the company probably did exactly the right thing which was to stone wall and the FDA didn't do anything. The company was publishing meta-analyses of everything in the world - 800 patients in 6-week trials with no increase in suicidal ideation. p 261 Cole: The other wave I detect is that cognitive - behavior therapy is rising in competition to drugs.There's now been the three hospital's trial comparing cognitive therapy, interpersonal therapy, tofranil and placebo. Tofranil is better but I keep wondering whether they didn't do something wrong, somewhere. They tried to train social workers to do these therapies and I think there is a problem in skills transfers and because of this I think the non-drug therapies didn't do as well as they might have if they had been done by people who had been trained to do them who thought it was their favorite therapy therapeutic bias of therapist also of patient to be considered.there was a funny business about the psychotherapies doing no better than placebo and then in the last two weeks everybody got better - like they had to p 262 please their therapists.There have been enough other studies of cognitive therapies that I'm prepared to believe it works, whatever the NIMH study shows. If the behavioral therapies were able to be shown to give people increased, inner strength to deal with life in the future, I would be impressed and be inclined to refer patients more often than I am now. On the other hand, behavior therapies are not cheap and not always readily accessible. They end up being more expensive than pills. Pills are not cheap but they tend more often to be paid for by insurances. |
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