matthew’s alibi

(Image from thatguy.com)

Prozac was considered something of a wonder drug throughout the 1990’s - prescribed for everything from anxiety and OCD to eating disorders to compulsive shopping - but there is that one pesky side effect - in a tiny percent of cases, it seems to make people suicidal or homicidal. Not a huge deal, since the incidence is relatively small, and with proper monitoring, it can be caught and a different drug can be prescribed.

But the US manufacturers of Prozac wanted a drug that was easy to prescribe for a wide variety of symptoms - one that would require little in the way of follow-up or maintenance - and so they successfully kept the warnings for akathisia off the label. (Some European countries have labeled these side effects since the drug went on the market.)

The story is absolutely compelling. It’s a conspiracy story, to be sure, but like most conspiracies that happen to be true, it came about not because of a secret evil cabal of folks with sinister designs, but because it was in everyone’s interest, financial and otherwise, to keep quiet. The fact that the drug is now being relabeled seems to add a new level of certainty to the already well-documented arguments that Prozac is not quite as safe as we were led to believe. And although clinical trials have always shown the increased tendency for violence among some patients (and a recent study demonstrated that youth on SSRI’s are twice as likely to commit suicide), it’s easy to see why it might not raise eyebrows when a Prozac sufferer goes off the deep end - if the patients were stable and mentally healthy, they wouldn’t need anti-depressants in the first place, goes the conventional wisdom.

The counter culture Bible Adbusters ran with a story on all of this over a year ago, and even devoted a web site to it - prozacspotlight.org, where you can read a lengthy - and totally gripping account of the Lilly Suicides by Richard DeGrandpre. (In a January article in The Nation, he updates readers on the FDA’s re-labeling of another SSRI class drug, Paxil.)

According to the Guardian, last night a panel of FDA advisers agreed 25 to 1 (with one abstention) that SSRIs caused some young people to become suicidal, necessitating every anti-depressant in the SSRI class to carry the strongest possible warning about the youth suicide risk in the US. In the UK, these drugs (excluding Prozac) may not be prescribed for patients under 18 years of age.

The story of Prozac is a cautionary tale about the power of drug companies in the US at the expense of the public interest. It looks like the after more than fifteen years on the market, the scales are finally starting to tip.

Read more: SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society | Prozac must have suicide warning