Did suicides really go up when black box warnings put on..Nope just another pharma illusion attempt.

[nz11]

A mod asked me to put this here so here it is

I have just finished reading:

 

Bass, Alison. Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial. Algonquin Books, 2008

Great read highly enjoyable, easily readable, not heavy going at all, and very informative i rec it for those who took paxil. Nearly didnt read it though this is how it starts ...."At 16 Tonya was painfully shy....she noticed a commercial on TV.." I couldnt read anymore ....as i knew exactly where this was going.........so skipped the prologue and went straight to ch 1 all ok from there ...

 

There are many good parts of the book I could share but I have decided to just share a 2 page portion that is very meaningful to me. For this reason:

 

When I complained to a psychiatrist that these drugs cause suicide and should be banned, and that it was a miracle I was still alive after what i have had to endure to get off this drug, his response was that when the black box warnings went on the drug, suicides rates actually went up and so perhaps people weren’t getting the help they needed.

 

I wasn’t speechless how could this be...i was not aware of this statistic at the time and so I couldn’t push back regarding this statement but it just didn’t sit right with me, somehow this must be wrong!

 

Here is a piece from Bass’s book on this very subject which caught my eye:

 

[ Despite such extensive coverage, many medical professionals still take money from the pharmaceutical industry – for both research and consulting gigs. While the most respected medical journals insist on the disclosure of these conflicts (in fine print at the end of the article), many other venues do not. Take, for example, the debate over whether black box warnings should be extended to antidepressant usage in young adults. In December 2006, the FDA held an advisory meeting to consider new findings that young adults between 18 and 25 who took Paxil and eight other antidepressants were significantly more likely than those on placebo to report a suicide attempt, just as the research on children and adolescents had shown. At that hearing, opponents of the black box warnings on SSRI cited preliminary results from a study showing what appear to be a correlation between an uptick in national suicide rates among adolescents and a drop in the prescription of SSRIs among this age group. Several psychiatrists pointed to the apparent correlation as proof that the publicity over the SSRIs in the black box warnings had scared physicians from prescribing these drugs. The lack of treatment, the psychiatrist argued, may have prompted more youngsters to kill themselves.

 

However when this finding was published in the September 2007 issue of the American Journal of psychiatry, it was roundly criticised as being erroneous. The number of suicides among adolescents under the age of 19 did indeed climb about 14% (from 1737 to 1,985) between 2003 and 2004, according to statistics from the centres for disease control and prevention. The number of prescriptions for SSRIs among adolescents, however, remained essentially unchanged from 2003 to 2004 (prescription usage didn’t decline until after 2004). Thus the FDA’s black box warnings cannot be blamed for the apparent increase in suicides among adolescents the year before. This discrepancy in the data was not mentioned at the December 2006 FDA hearing. Nor was it disclosed that an SSRI maker (Pfizer) paid  $30,000, the cost of obtaining prescription data for the AJP study, or that two lead authors of the study have financial conflicts of interest: Robert Gibbons served as an expert witness for Wyeth pharmaceuticals (the maker of effexor another SSRI), and Dr J John Mann a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, has been a paid consultant to at least two SSRI makers, GSK and Pfizer.

 

Other psychiatric researchers say that the latest upturn in suicide rates does not mean anything, given the small numbers involved and the tendency of suicide rates to fluctuate from year to year. “People who are specialists in statistics know you have to look at trends over years and years”, said Julie Zito an associate Professor  of pharmacy and psychiatry at the University of Maryland, who has published several articles on the subject. “For instance you will see that the overall trend in suicide rates among children and adults has been going down quite a ways before the SSRI s  arrived on the scene.”

 

In the end the FDA did extend black box warnings on antidepressants to young adults. But it also  added language to the labels warning that “depression and certain other psychiatric disorders are themselves associated with the risk of suicide” the FDA’s Thomas Laughren  now director of the Division of psychiatry Products, said the new language had been added because of the agency’s concerns about the uptick in suicide rates between 2003 and 2004. (National suicide rates for 2005 and beyond had not been released when this book went to press). Both Zito and  Dr Peter Lurie deputy director of the public citizen  health research group, say that including language about untreated depression in the black box cautions on antidepressants undermines the whole point of the warning. The important thing is that the risk of suicidal ideation is higher in the treated group than untreated group in randomised controlled trials, and that’s what the warning should be about, Lurie says “whether or not untreated depression also leads to suicidal ideation is misleading and irrelevant. The FDA should not have put in that kind of language because it is intended to confuse.” ] (p225-227)

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............................................//.....Great Book Highly recommended.....................................................''.........................