The risk of coronary heart disease and a cluster of conditions known as metabolic syndrome increases soon after otherwise healthy, but depressed people are started on psychiatric drugs, putting them at risk for an early death, Canadian researchers are reporting.
Sara Carlin had everything to live for: She was smart, athletic, beautiful and pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor. But on May 6, 2007, that bright future ended abruptly with a piece of electrical wire. The promising 18-year-old had hung herself in her family’s Oakville basement and her grieving parents blame her suicide on the Paxil antidepressant she’d been prescribed more than a year before.
Spend just a few minutes watching prime time television with its endless pageant of commercials for antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds and you start to wonder if USA really means the United States of Affliction. Such “direct to consumer” drug advertising ties into one of the most far-reaching criticisms in revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders…
Antidepressant use could be linked to blindness in older adults, a recent study suggests. Drugs that treat depression known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, caused an increased risk of developing cataracts in patients aged 65 or older, according to a study published in the journal Ophthalmology in June.
Prescription drug cocktails have lead to at least 32 accidental overdoses among Marines and soldiers since 2007, bringing military medical practices for treating physical and psychiatric problems under scrutiny. Most of the troops had been prescribed “drug cocktails,” combinations of drugs including painkillers, sleeping pills, antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, interviews and records show. In all cases, suicide was ruled out.