PROZAC, SUICIDE AND DR HEALY

Dr David Healy of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Wales in the UK is hardly a household name in the United States and that is a shame. One of the world's leading research psycho-pharmacologists, Healy's expert testimony in last year's Paxil civil trial was one of the deciding factors in the plaintiff's jury victory in that case. Wyoming resident Donald Schell, 60, killed his wife, daughter and granddaughter and then himself with a gun in 1998 after only two days on Paxil. Schell's surviving family members sued Paxil manufacturer UK-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the world's largest pharmaceutical manufacturer, and won.

The decisive factor in the case was the company's own internal data demonstrating that they knew Paxil could cause agitation and suicidal ideation in research subjects. A month after the June verdict in the case, GSK caved in to the British Medicines Control Agency's request to put a suicide warning on Paxil. The fact that a jury verdict in a civil trial here in the United States has led to a suicide warning being put on labels for a popular psychiatric drug in another country has hardly been headline news.

Two weeks after the verdict in the Paxil trials, Houston area mother and convicted murderer Andrea Yates drowned her five children while she was on not one, but two antidepressant drugs with strong stimulant profiles.

What could have been an opportunity for the mass media to educate the public about the dangers of antidepressant drugs, instead has been a non-stop awareness campaign for the mental health industry about the need for my psychiatric 'treatment'.

The real story that has been missed in the Yates case is the fact that it is a story about psychiatric treatment failure. Yates had been getting antidepressant drugs for her post partum depression for years. She was on high doses of two antidepressant drugs at the time she drowned her children but went ahead and did what the drugs are supposed to prevent anyway.

Meanwhile, Dr Healy hasn't shied away from linking Prozac, Paxil and the other SSRIs to suicide. He figures at least 250,000 people have attempted suicide worldwide because of Prozac alone and that at least 25,000 have succeeded.

He was offered a job at the University of Toronto-affiliated Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in 2000. Healy was making arrangements for moving his family to Toronto when he gave a lecture at the CAMH on November 30th, 2000 where he reiterated his position on Prozac and suicide.

He also made a lot of other statements, backed up by statistical data, that are politically unpopular with many of his psychiatric colleagues. Such as the fact that psychiatrists 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-based Eli Lilly may have had a hand in Healy's firing.

An international controversy has ensued about Healy's case and the implications it has for academic freedom in academic medicine. Healy filed a multi-million dollar breach of contract lawsuit against the 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 internet on http:/www.pharmapolitics.com.
Rick Giombetti, 20th March 2002

PHILLIP DAY'S COMMENT: In 1997 in New Jersey, USA, Sam Manzie, 15, attacked and raped 11-year-old Eddie Werner, who had called on the Manzie home selling items door-to-door for the local PTA. Sam strangled Eddie with an electrical cord after the assault, photographing him with the cord still wrapped around his neck. He then threw away his victim's clothes and possessions in a rubbish bin next to the psychiatric facility where he had been receiving regular treatments, including the drug Paxil. His mother reports that Sam had told her: "I wasn't killing that little boy, I was killing [my psychiatrist] because he didn't listen to me."

In my new book, The Mind Game, I include research that clearly demonstrates not only the catastrophic failure of psychiatric drugs, such as Paxil, Prozac and Ritalin, to reverse the underlying causes of the 'mental disorders' they were prescribed to combat, but their now well-known propensity for provoking serious and life-threatening side-effects, most notably psychosis, violence and suicide. Millions of unsuspecting members of the public around the world today are prescribed SSRI or benzodiazapine drugs to combat everything from dyslexia to schizophrenia. As Rick Giombetti's article discusses, the public is now awakening to this highly organised drug threat in its midst, and has begun to take action against the pushers. I applaud CTM's stance for 2003 in assisting my organisation Credence in educating the public about the serious issues surrounding this wanton drug prescribing. I look forward also to seeing an educated and empowered public moving against those corporations whose lies and half-truths about their products have done so much damage to the people who trusted them.