Antidepressants

On September 25, PsychCentral ran an article on this topic. The article was a commentary on a 2013 meta-analysis conducted by Katharine Barnard, PhD, et al of the University of Southamptom, UK. The meta-analysis examined three systemic reviews and 22 studies. RESULTS "There was evidence that antidepressant use is associated with type 2 diabetes. Causality is not established, but rather, the picture is confused, with some antidepressants linked to worsening glucose control, particularly with higher doses and longer duration, others linked with improved control, and yet more with mixed results. The more recent, larger studies, however, suggest a modest effect." ...

Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, President of the APA, has written a guest post, In the Wake of the Navy Yard Shooting: A Way Forward, on EverydayHealth. Everyday Health Inc. is a media company which operates for-profit websites on health and related matters. It’s been confirmed that the Navy Yard shooter had been taking trazadone, an antidepressant of the serotonin antagonist and reuptake inhibitor (SARI) class, and the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs has indicated that it plans to investigate to what extent the drug might have been a causative factor. ...

Earlier this month, the American Journal of Psychiatry published an article by Yen-Po Wang, M.D., et al, titled Short-Term Use of Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Risk of Upper Gastrointestinal Bleeding. [Thanks to Mad in America for the link] The research was conducted in Taiwan. The authors studied the records of 5,377 psychiatric inpatients with gastrointestinal bleeding between 1998 and 2009. Study subjects served as their own controls, i.e. the incidence of bleeding in the period following the antidepressant prescription was compared with the incidence of bleeding during a period when they were not taking antidepressants. ...

Those of us on this side of the psychiatric debate have long maintained that there is a link between the so-called antidepressant drugs and the mass murders that have become an increasingly common feature of American society in recent decades. The call for a formal investigation of this link, however, has been consistently resisted, and instead there has been a well-orchestrated medical campaign clamoring for more mental health services and more active outreach and prevention services. As an example, see Jeffrey Lieberman’s guest post on Everyday Health, In the Wake of the Navy Yard Shooting: A Way Forward. ...

There’s an interesting article on Mad in America dated September 17, 2013. It’s titled Psychiatry & Suicide Prevention: A 30-year Failed Experiment, and was written by Maria Bradshaw. Maria Bradshaw is the founder of CASPER, an organization that rejects the medical model of suicide prevention in favor of a sociological model. Ms. Bradshaw founded CASPER after her son’s antidepressant-induced suicide. Here’s the gist of Ms. Bradshaw article: Roger Mulder, MD, is head of psychiatry at Otago University in New Zealand. For at least the last 15 years, he has supported the notion of psychiatric intervention as a suicide-prevention measure. For instance, here’s something he wrote in 2008 in an article published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica: ...

There’s an article in the current issue of Clinical Toxicology, titled Drug-induced seizures in children and adolescents presenting for emergency care: Current and emerging trends, authored by Y. Finkelstein et al. The authors conducted an observational study, on 37 sites, of all pediatric Emergency Room reports which included a chemical or drug-induced seizure and required a toxicology consultation between April 2010 and March 2012. RESULTS "Antidepressants were the most commonly identified agents ingested…"(42%). ...

There’s an interesting article on Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience. It’s called Learning from Negative Feedback in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder is Attenuated by SSRI Antidepressants. The researchers evaluated learning ability in three groups: medication-naïve individuals who met the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder individuals who met the criteria for MDD and were receiving the SSRI paroxetine (Paxil) "healthy" controls All subjects were given a learning task that allowed the researchers to distinguish learning from positive feedback versus learning from negative feedback The results were: ...

A mass murder occurred yesterday, September 16, at the U.S. Navy Yard in Washington D.C. There are reports of at least 12 dead, and several wounded. Early news stories describe the perpetrator as having “mental issues,” and it is reported that he “…had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems.” It is likely that this “treatment” involved the prescription of psychiatric drugs. And still no government inquiry into the link between psycho-pharmaceutical products, especially SSRI’s, and acts of violence/suicide. ...

There’s an interesting study in the British Medical Journal (August 2013). It’s called Use of antidepressants near delivery and risk of postpartum hemorrhage: cohort study of low income women in the United States, and it was written by Kristin Palmsten et al. The study examined nationwide Medicaid data from 2000-2007, and followed 106,000 pregnant women aged 12-55 who had been given a “diagnosis” of a mood or anxiety disorder. The women were categorized into four mutually exclusive groups on the basis of information obtained from Medicaid’s pharmacy dispensing data. The criterion for categorization was exposure to SRI’s or to Non-SRI’s and the groupings were: ...

Earlier this week (August 21), a 20-year-old gunman entered a school in Atlanta, apparently intending to kill people, but was talked down by a school bookkeeper. As everyone knows, we’ve had a great many incidents of this sort in the past fifteen years, most of which ended more tragically than this one. The reporting of these incidents in the media often mentions the fact that the perpetrators of these murders had a history of “mental health problems.” ...