Predicting more addicting

In the last edition of the Daily Dose, I reported on the untimely and unfortunate death of Daniel Smith, son of infamous gold-digging stripper Playmate Anna Nicole Smith. His death made national news in September and October...

The role his prescription antidepressants played in his death has not yet been pinpointed, but play a role they did. A deadly one, as it turns out. My only hope is that, as time goes on, the details of this higher-profile antidepressant-related death will come to light, and force both physicians and a generation of adolescent and 20-something depression patients to take stock of their health - and the very real risks of SSRI drugs.

But this may be too much to hope for, especially the part about doctors taking more responsibility for the proper administration and oversight of the prescriptions they write. Not that this is any great Earth-shaking revelation. Today's doctors often dole out the drugs without knowing all the possible (or probable) effects, or even caring, it seems.

Such is especially the case for the prescription of antidepressant drugs.

I wonder how many psychiatrists, pediatricians, or garden-variety family practitioners realize that all in the family of SSRI antidepressants carry with them an FDA-stipulated caution that their usage should be accompanied by repeated psychiatric or therapeutic visits during the first three months of any new prescription of these drugs?

This is especially critical during the first few weeks, the period most closely associated with an increase in suicidal inclinations in some patients. In 24 separate studies ratified by the FDA, between 2% (1 in 50) and 4% (1 in 25) children experienced increases in suicidal thoughts, behaviors, or tendencies in the first weeks of SSRI therapy...

If their doctors all know about these guidelines, they don't seem to care. According to a recent AP article, a study of nearly 85,000 antidepressant-takers conducted by Medco Health Solutions, Inc. found that fully 2/3 of these patients (and an even greater ratio of the adults) never got the recommended "therapy" to accompany their SSRI prescriptions.

That means as many as 3,400 of these folks may have grappled with an increase in suicidal thoughts - and more than 2,200 of these likely did it without benefit of any mental health "therapy"!

I wonder how many of them actually committed suicide?

Beyond the fact that most physicians either don't recommend or don't motivate their patients to seek the "psychiatric" monitoring SSRI drugs necessitate, most of them also seem oblivious to the fact that these drugs are addictive, despite the fact that some of them (like Pfizer's Zoloft) claim to be "non-habit-forming." (You'll notice I put the word psychiatric in quotes. That's because you don't need a psychiatrist to determine if you (or your child) is addicted to Paxil. They are the LAST people on earth you should ask. After Freudian psychiatry became the laughing stock of medicine, they were discredited, and drugs for supposed mental illness have been the only things that saved them.)

Anyway, there are plenty of reports from the field that show just how habit forming these drugs can be.

An AP story from earlier this year cited several specific real-world examples of instances in which patients have developed unshakeable addictions to SSRI drugs, with symptoms ranging from nausea, uncontrollable sobbing, and muscle aches to intense sensations of electricity emanating from the back of the head (!) that occur when they try to stop taking the drugs. And indeed, Britain's equivalent to the FDA has issued a warning that all SSRIs may be associated with withdrawal symptoms, especially Paxil and Effexor.

This isn't what the drug business and the drug-addled medical establishment call it, though. They've named these symptoms "antidepressant discontinuation syndrome," according to the AP piece. They also insist that the drugs aren't "technically" addictive...

I don't know how they're measuring this, though. When strange, intense, and sometimes debilitating symptoms ensue when people try to cease their usage of a class of drug, that means they're addictive, even if only psychologically (but the evidence sure does point to a physical addiction).

According to more evidence from Britain, a late 1990s survey revealed that more than 70% of GPs and nearly 30% of psychiatrists had no clue that patients might experience any symptoms at all when discontinuing use of SSRIs. I doubt these numbers have improved much today, even with the FDA's relatively new warnings and guidelines about these drugs...

Another interesting tidbit: Antidepressant use increased around 10% PER YEAR from 2000 until last year, when it slowed a bit. So far in 2006, however, SSRI prescriptions are once again spiking upward.

And to think, I remember when it was a doctor's job to discourage getting hooked on drugs...

Addicted to the truth - and to the telling of it,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.