Feds Warn on Antidepressants

Federal health advisers considering more stringent warning labels for antidpressants linked to suicidal thoughts among children told the Food and Drug Administration (news – web sites) on Tuesday that they may consider more than just a label change.

Now does anyone really thing labels are going to help anything. It’s sort of like how cigarette companies started labeling packs of cigarettes, talking about how if you’re pregnant you’ll end up with a mutant kid and stuff. Labels really don’t do shit. If someone wants a smoke, they’re going to smoke, they aren’t going to sit there and read the fucking package like it’s a box of cereal. Same with drugs, you can slap all the labels on you want but it’s not going to keep people from taking them. All labels really do is give one more layer of protection to the company producing the substance.

One member of the panel asked the drug agency whether they could require that those prescribing the drugs undergo training to better recognize warning signs.

P. Joan Chesney, chair of the FDA (news – web sites) pediatric advisory committee, said her daughter has taken antidepressants. “I was appalled,” Chesney said, upon learning that psychiatrists were signing prescriptions that had been written by social workers, pharmacists and emergency room doctors.

“The people who are prescribing this on the whole are not psychiatrists,” she said.

Um. Duh. That’s why it’s so easy for people to get ahold of. The people prescribing the medication have NO clue about the side effects or what it’s really doing to people. Personally, I think that if people want the drugs, then they should be willing to spend a few hours a week in a chair talking to a psychiatrist about what’s causing the depression. You’d think that if anyone would ask questions, it might be the chair of the FDA, but I guess not. Goes to show you how out of the loop our government really is.

Data presented to the FDA show that 65 percent of antidepressants taken by children are prescribed by psychiatrists. Independent experts and FDA scientists have said there a definite link between antidepressants and the worsening suicidal fixations of children taking the drugs.

The latest analysis forms the heart of data FDA advisers were considering during the second day of hearings on antidepressants. Even Prozac — shown in earlier studies to be the most benign antidepressant for youth — increases the odds of suicidal thoughts and actions.

On average, antidepressants taken by kids will cause an extra 2 percent to 3 percent to have increased suicidal thoughts, the independent experts, working with Columbia University, found.

Relative risks of suicidal behavior were highest among youths taking Luvox, Effexor and Paxil and lower among youths taking Celexa, Zoloft and Prozac.

I can see what’s coming here. People are going to start chiming in saying that they’re taking Celexa, Zoloft and Prozac, so they’re okay. Erm. Then you’re not reading the data correctly, because it says the chances of suicide are LOWER, but not gone. I’m not saying the drugs don’t help people, but what I’m saying is that the people prescribing them have absolutely no idea of the dosage people can take. It’s a guessing game. They start you at 75mg and work you up to over 1000mg and hope something takes hold. The problem is that you’re body is made to get used to drugs you take on a daily basis, so eventually they just stop working… so you’ll need your dosage raised and eventually you’ll be so strung out, you’ll just be an emotionless shell.

Dr. Robert Temple, director of the FDA’s office of drug evaluation, said the panel could decide the benefits derived from drugs like Prozac are worth the increased risk. Labels could warn doctors and families to watch closest during the most treacherous time: when children first begin therapy.

That’s reassuring. So Dr. Robert Temple is basically saying that it’s okay if we lose a few kids, as long as most of them stay drugged out and don’t kill themself. That’s insane, but not a complete surprise. The bottom line is that doctors are in business to make money. The sales reps that come into their offices every week, with bagels and sandwiches for the office staff are also in business to make money. The sales reps butter up the office staff, while promising trips and cars to doctors who prescribe a lot of their medication. Kids come in, say they’re “depressed” or “not feeling quite right” and the doctor immediately starts whipping out the drugs like it’s Halloween. The kid is happy, the doctor is in Hawaii and the medical staff have full tummies from all the free food the sales rep left them.

The problem is that the kid may not really be happy. In fact they might kill themself because they never really needed to be on that type of medication. Maybe that kid is depressed because they have no friends or are picked on in school. Those pills aren’t going to fix that. Maybe the kid is depressed because someone they know just died. Those pills aren’t going to bring that person back and might, in fact, be causing the person to not feel the pain and emotions that they SHOULD be feeling after the loss of a person. Maybe the kid is depressed because they have self-image issues, which the pills won’t really help with. A talk with a psychiatrist or therapist would be a better way to handle an issue like that. What I’m getting at is that we can’t rely on pills to fix our problems.

My problem isn’t so much with people taking the pills, because I do understand that they help some people. My problem lies in the way they are distributed and at the volume in which people are getting them, without any kind of psychiatric discussions. Doctors who specialize in hearts or lungs or joints are dispensing drugs that affect the brain. They have no clue what the effect is going to be on the person taking the drugs and probably get very little training on the side effects, other than perhaps a brochure left behind by a sales rep.

I just see a generation of zombies walking around and fear that in ten or twenty years when the studies really start coming out about the damage they are doing to the circuitry in people’s brains it’s just going to be a bad scene. If you can’t go a week without a drug, personally, that seems like an addiction to me. And when restrictions are finally put in place on who can get the drugs and people don’t qualify, it’s going to be like crack addicts going for that last grain of coke on the table.