Dr. David Healy of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the Universityof Wales in the UK is hardly a household name in the United States or elsewhereand that is a shame.
Could anti-depressants induce agitation and suicidal tendencies and the state of psycho-pharmacology...
Dr. David Healy of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the Universityof Wales in the UK is hardly a household name in the United States or elsewhereand that is a shame.
One of the world's leading research psycho-pharmacologists, Healy's experttestimony in last year's Paxil civil trial was one of the deciding factors inthe plaintiff's jury victory in that case.
(Wyoming resident Donald Schell, 60, killed his wife, daughter andgranddaughter and then himself with a gun in 1998 after only two days on Paxil.Schell's surviving family members sued Paxil manufacturer UK-basedGlaxo-Smith-Kline(GSK), the world's largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, andwon. The decisive factor in the case was the company's own internal datademonstrating that they knew Paxil could cause agitation and suicidal ideationin research subjects. A month after the June verdict in the case, GSK caved into the British Medicines Control Agency's request to put a suicide warning onPaxil)
The fact that a jury verdict in a civil trial here in the United States hasled to a suicide warning being put on labels for a popular psychiatric drug inanother country has hardly been headline news. Two weeks after the verdict inthe Paxil trial, Houston area mother and convicted murderer Andrea Yates drownedher five children while she was on not one, but two antidepressant drugs withstrong stimulant profiles.
What could have been an opportunity for the mass media to educate the publicabout the dangers of antidepressant drugs, instead has been a non-stop awarenesscampaign for the mental health industry about the need for more psychiatric"treatment." The real story that has been missed in the Yates case isthe fact that it is a story about psychiatric treatment failure. Yates had beengetting psychiatric drugs for her post partum depression for years. She was onhigh doses of two antidepressants drugs at the time she drowned her children butwent ahead and did what these drugs are supposed to prevent anyway.
Meanwhile, Dr. Healy hasn't shied away from linking Prozac, Paxil and theother SSRI's to suicide. He figures at least 250,000 people have attemptedsuicide worldwide because of Prozac alone and that at least 25,000 havesucceeded. He was offered a job at the University of Toronto affiliated Centerfor Addiction and Mental Health(CAMH) in 2000. Healy was making arrangements formoving his family to Toronto when he gave a lecture at the CAMH on November 30,2000 where he reiterated his position on Prozac and suicide. He also made a lotof other statements, backed up by statistical data, that are politicallyunpopular with many of his psychiatric colleagues. Such as the fact thatpsychiatrists have more patients in their care then ever before.
Healy was unceremoniously turned down for the CAMH job.
Speculation has it that Prozac manufacturer Indianapolis-base Eli Lilly mayhave had a hand in Healy's firing. An international controversy has ensued aboutHealy's case and the implications it has for academic freedom in academicmedicine. Healy filed a multi-million dollar breach of contract lawsuit againstthe CAMH and the University of Toronto on September 24 of last year.
A summary of the entire David Healy affair can be read on the web.