Tag Archives: antidepressants

A sugared pill

When Daniel Carlat, a psychiatrist in Massachusetts, was flown to New York with his wife by Wyeth, the “training” weekend he attended in a luxury hotel was topped off with a Broadway show. It was early 2001 and he had just agreed to the US pharmaceuticals company’s proposal that he give talks to doctors about its antidepressant Effexor. During the following year, he was regularly paid fees of $750 a time to drive to “lunch and learn” sessions where he would speak for 10 minutes to emphasise the drug’s advantages to fellow doctors, using slides prepared by the company. “It seemed like a win-win,” he recalls. “I was prescribing it, educating doctors and making some money.” But within a few months, he became disillusioned with his co-option as a marketing representative. He was selectively presenting clinical data that put the drug in a positive light to physicians who had been targeted by the company through “data mining” techniques that identified their individual prescription patterns.Dr Carlat has spoken out as part of a growing backlash against such aggressive marketing tactics, which are leading to significant changes in the relationship between doctors and drug companies. But even as pharmaceuticals executives argue that such problems belong to the past and were always exaggerated, they are bracing for both intensifying penalties and calls for further reform.

Antidepressants/Pain Relievers Cause “unprecedented number of emergency room visits & deaths”

Approximately 700,000 visits to the emergency room were linked to drug-related poisoning in 2007, according to a new study published February 28 on the Nationwide Children’s Hospital website. Researchers found that 44 percent of poisonings were caused by prescription medications such antidepressants and opioid pain relievers.

The study found that, on average, 1,900 people per day were sent to the emergency room due to drug overdoses. According to researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the cost associated with these visits totals approximately $1.4 billion per year.

Dangerous doctors slipping through the cracks

It took the discovery of guns and grenades to suspend the license of a psychiatrist who some say should have come under scrutiny years earlier. One night a Crestwood police sergeant doing a routine building check noticed an open door to the office of psychiatrist Joel Carroll. Stepping inside the cluttered office, he discovered roaming cats, a Colt AR-15 assault rifle and other guns, ammunition, military-grade smoke grenades, sex toys, and pornography. “Well, for the lack of better terminology, we considered it a pigsty,” Sgt. Thomas Kaniewski testified about his April 2009 discovery. “It looked in complete disarray. We couldn’t believe that someone could actually conduct business in an office like that because of the conditions it was in.”

After surviving war in Iraq, U.S. troops now being killed by Big Pharma

They survived live fire, explosive devices, terror attacks and grueling desert conditions. But upon returning home to seek treatment for the mental anguish that too often accompanies war, U.S. soldiers are now being killed by the pharmaceutical industry in record numbers.

A recent example is found with the late Senior Airman Anthony Mena, who returned home from Baghdad only to be killed by a toxic cocktail of prescription medications in his apartment in the USA. As the New York Times reports, a toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood

Psychiatric News — Antidepressants/Antismoking Drugs Linked to Violent Behavior

A link between several types of psychotropic medications and violent behavior toward others has been documented in a recent study.

The medications most strongly linked to violent behavior were the smoking-cessation aid varenicline and antidepressants, regardless of class.In a study published in the December 15, 2010, PloS One, the researchers used 2004 to 2009 data from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System. They found that during the study period, 780,169 serious adverse events of one kind or another had been reported for 484 drugs, and that of those serious adverse events, 1,937 had been acts of violence. They defined a violent event as any case report containing one or more of the following items: homicide, physical assault, physical abuse, homicidal ideation, or violence-related symptom, but not more ambiguous descriptions such as crime, aggression, belligerence, or hostility.