Guest guest Posted April 1, 2005 Report Share Posted April 1, 2005 The people that try to paint her as misinformed are the very people with the most money to be lost in the end. The medical community might not hvve as many lifetime patients and the drug manufacturers might be forced to work on something that is actually of benefit to someone. I will also say that I have read the information on her web site and I have seen in real life the things she talks about. I have seen the personality changes the mania the psychosis and I will go to my grave believing she is in fact 100% correct. Charlie > http://tinyurl.com/3txqt > > > August 2004 > > Depressed over Prozac > Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News > > Ann knows hundreds of grisly stories: the professor on Prozac who bit > her mother to death; the Stanford graduate on Paxil who stabbed herself in > the kitchen while her parents slept; the mother who bludgeoned her son and > then drank a can of Drano; the 12- year-old girl who strangled herself with > a bungee cord she attached to a plant hanger on the wall. > > Sit with for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in details: > the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation she had > with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a bathtub. > Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she reminds you. > The world according to Ann is a place full of people who were put on > antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things. > > is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug > Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, a home > she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against > antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them. > > She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the British > version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for use in > children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued a > Public Health Advisory about antidepressants - - urging doctors and families > to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs -- and then appointed a > panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts during > clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer > sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a > nationwide class- action suit charging that GlaxoKline " concealed, > suppressed and downplayed " severe withdrawal reactions in people trying to > go off the antidepressant. > > But won't be happy until the drugs are banned altogether. They cause > people to become violently suicidal and homicidal, she argues. They cause > cancer, she says, and heart disease and diabetes and divorce. > > Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call her > misinformed -- and worry that she is hurting the very people she wants to > help. > > Panacea or Pandora? > > In 1991, wrote an 80-page pamphlet called " Prozac: Panacea or > Pandora? " Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book that she > published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in the Salt > Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan didn't > have a foothold. > > Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others > followed: Dr. Breggin's 1995 " Talking Back to Prozac, " Dr. ph > Glenmullen's 2000 " Prozac Backlash, " Dr. Healy's 2004 " Let Them Eat > Prozac. " As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for > antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was > the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective > serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, > including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox. > > According to IMS Health, a market research company for the pharmaceutical > industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 billion, > up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS Web site, > can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in " lifestyle disorders, " > which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, premenstrual > dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness -- a list > that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to complain > that antidepressants are now prescribed " if you bite your nails. " > > started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in 1997. The > coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors in 30 > states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most celebrated > member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the town University School of > Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map the > kind of receptors that regulate mood and health. > > On the case > > Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and attorneys of > people accused of murder, call asking for her help. But also > keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might possibly > be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about a man, > say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work -- as happened in July at a > ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas -- she will immediately get on the phone to > flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been on an > antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes the > assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way is > not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths. > > The day after she heard that Brynn Hartman had shot her husband, comedian > Phil Hartman, and then herself, called up Phil Hartman's brother, > whose number she found on the Internet. had just returned from being > an expert witness at the trial of a Wyoming woman on Paxil who had shot her > husband and later reported that she didn't remember anything about the > murder except standing there with the smoking gun. So told the > Hartmans: " Don't you stop till you find one of these drugs. " Brynn Hartman, > it turned out, had been on Zoloft; drugmaker Pfizer settled an eventual > wrongful death case for an undisclosed amount. > > After reading about Mark Barton, the Atlanta day trader who killed his > family and then drove to work and killed nine more people before also > turning the gun on himself, phoned his mother. It wasn't until six > months later that Atlanta police reported that Prozac had been found in > Barton's car, so was operating on instinct when she urged Barton's > mother to have his body tested for antidepressants. " Not all coroners check > for these drugs, " explains. " It requires a few extra tests, and not > all states will pay for it. That's why you need to get to the families right > away. " > > But things don't always work out the way would hope. In the Atlanta > day trader case, she says, she had his body ready to be shipped to an > independent forensic toxicologist in Oklahoma City, but Barton's mother > changed her mind. Maybe, says, the coroner told Mrs. Barton that > was a Scientologist. > > The Scientology charge still surfaces occasionally, because Scientologists > are famous for their opposition to psychotropic drugs and in fact to > psychiatry in general. ( " Psychiatry is seeking to create a world where man > is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetablelike state so that he can be > controlled, " Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote.) > > Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the National > Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), is sure has Scientology ties. > " She says she's not a Scientologist, but she has the same philosophy, " says > Cottrell. " Of course I don't have the thing on paper, in writing, but I > believe they finance her. " denies any connection to Scientology and > says in fact that Scientologists don't like her because she won't go after > psychiatrists. She says her war against antidepressants has put her $100,000 > in debt (mostly from phone bills and publishing her book). accuses > NAMI of getting money from drug companies. > > Cause and effect > > Emotions run high because, on both sides, there is a belief that lives are > at stake. Mental-health advocates argue that antidepressants have helped > millions of people, and they worry that crusades like 's will convince > the very people who need drugs to go off them. The stories of people who > have committed suicide or crimes while on antidepressants are sad and > regrettable, they agree, but anecdotes aren't scientific proof. > > Deseret Morning News graphic > > Antidepressants > > Requires Adobe Acrobat. > > Did Mark Barton, for example, kill his family and co-workers because he was > on Prozac orwhile he was on Prozac? > > " It's a cause-and-effect issue, " says Dr. Meredith Alden, president of the > Utah Psychiatric Association. " People make assumptions about cause and > effect when there is only an association. " > > Yes, sometimes people on antidepressants kill themselves or act violently, > she says, but that's because " you're already dealing with people who are > prone to violent behavior. " And, she says, " people who are depressed are > going to be at greater risk of hurting themselves. " > > Sometimes, concedes University of Utah psychiatry professor Dr. Tomb, > " some people will briefly feel more suicidal " when they're first put on > antidepressants, but that happens when they first go into psychotherapy, > too, he argues, " or just because they're getting better by tincture of > time. " Tomb, like a lot of people in the field, offers this explanation: A > really depressed person may not have the energy to kill himself; then he > starts taking medication, still feels depressed, but suddenly has enough > energy to follow through with his suicidal thoughts. > > But what about the people who weren't suicidal until they took the drugs, > asks. What about the people who had no history of violence but then > killed their own children? > > FDA weighs in > > The FDA, in its Health Advisory issued in March, asked drug companies to add > stronger warnings to their package inserts, cautioning physicians and > families to " closely monitor " both adults and children for suicidal > thinking, and " certain behaviors that are known to be associated with these > drugs, " including mania and hostility, especially at the beginning of > treatment, or when the doses are increased or decreased. The FDA stopped > short of requiring the companies to issue these warnings, though, and made > it clear that the matter of cause and effect has not been settled yet. > > The FDA appointed a panel of independent experts to review clinical trials > of antidepressant use in children and teens, trying to determine if these > studies report more suicide attempts in patients prescribed the drugs > compared to those given a placebo pill. The review follows allegations that > GlaxoKline failed to report trials that showed an increase in suicide > attempts, as well as those trials that showed that Paxil was no more > effective than a placebo for younger patients. According to the Wall Street > Journal, which obtained a draft of the panel's review last week, the > clinical trials show children and teens on the drugs were indeed more likely > to have thoughts that appeared to be suicidal. > > Earlier this month, Health Canada, the Canadian version of the FDA, issued a > warning that newborns may suffer withdrawal and other possible symptoms > (seizures, constant crying, etc.) when pregnant women take SSRIs during the > third trimester of their pregnancies. > > In June, the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Policy > Research Institute issued a report urging that psychotropic drugs should be > prescribed for children " only when the anticipated benefits outweigh the > risks. " Next month, a congressional committee will hold hearings about the > safety of antidepressants and the FDA's alleged censoring last winter of a > staff member who argued that the drugs are dangerous for young people. > > " From those who have seen the internal company documents, " says , " we > know that there is no distinction in age groups with these suicidal > reactions. These reactions are the same across the board, no matter the > age. " > > Utah cases > > argues that the perpetrators of some of Utah's famous violent crimes > -- Margaret Kastanis, who stabbed herself and her three children in 1991; > Sergei Babarin, who shot five people at the LDS Family History Library in > 1999; Lenny Gall, who killed his mother with an axe in 2001 -- were violent > because they were either on antidepressants or had gone off them too > abruptly. > > Lenny Gall's father, Len, contacted six months ago, before his son's > sentencing hearing. then went through Lenny's medical records, Gall > says, and found that " he had a very significant reaction to Paxil when he > was 16 " and was put on the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa " shortly before " the > murder. " He's never had a shred of violence in him, " Gall says. > > has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases -- most > recently a land case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his best > friend's soda with cyanide -- and has been hired as a consultant in several > civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to implicate > Luvox as the reason why shot students at Columbine High School. > She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about > antidepressants -- how to safely get off them, how to find alternative > methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is suicidal > or manic -- is now in the thousands. > > Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High School, > credits with helping him get off antidepressants, first prescribed for > him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before reading > 's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that he > discovered that odd symptoms -- persistent dreams of gouging his eyes out, > for example -- might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed to be > making him feel normal. Following 's advice, he slowly tapered off > Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. " I still have > my moments of depression, " he says. " But I haven't attempted suicide for > over a year. " > > Ann Blake , according to the International Coalition for Drug Awareness > web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on psychology. > There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree -- > Wythe College, in Cedar City. explains that the Ph.D. was > awarded for " lifetime experience, " specifically for the writing of " Prozac: > Panacea or Pandora? " which she says she has been told is the equivalent of, > or " far beyond, " a dissertation. > > Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors and > incomplete sentences (although says an edited version will be > published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page of > references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of > antidepressants. > > argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is " backwards. " She > maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the metabolism > of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population she says > that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize SSRIs in > the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep behavior > disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, violent > dreams while in a dreamlike state. > > Deconstructing > > " It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors she's > making, " says psychiatrist Tomb about 's book. " She is really taking > license with the scientific method. " Yes, is passionate about the > evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, " but passion has very little place in > the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and truthful. " > The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole story, he > argues. " You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the literature > and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin. " > > But Dr. Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama who was > director of research at two large drug companies and now often testifies as > an expert witness against the drugs, calls " in many ways a visionary. " > She " has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated, " he says. > > " I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. and don't > understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is, " says > Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on Effexor > to treat her migraine headaches. > > In her darkest hours -- when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first became > " a monster " and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, had > withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk -- Tierney called > every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only > called her back. > > " Dr. never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to me at > all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' she > said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped me more > than anyone else. " > > " An unsung hero, " says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who started > an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two years ago. > " None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our lives if > it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann. " > > The beginning > > 's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, she > watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on Prozac. > After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was hunting > down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said " Just Say > No to Prozac. " After that she'd be at the grocery store or church and people > would come up to her and start telling her their stories. > > " There's great power in those stories, " says Texas trial attorney Andy > Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to > antidepressants. " They have a power to persuade and even change the > bureaucratic forces of our country. " > > And that's just what expects to eventually happen. " I think these > drugs are history, " she says. Eventually, the stories told by parents, and > the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies have > suppressed, will add up to public outrage -- and then antidepressants will > be pulled from the market, she predicts. > > " What is sad, " she says, " is that so many have had to die or have their > lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another terrible > mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' " > > E-mail: jarvik@d... > > Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co. > Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted April 1, 2005 Report Share Posted April 1, 2005 The people that try to paint her as misinformed are the very people with the most money to be lost in the end. The medical community might not hvve as many lifetime patients and the drug manufacturers might be forced to work on something that is actually of benefit to someone. I will also say that I have read the information on her web site and I have seen in real life the things she talks about. I have seen the personality changes the mania the psychosis and I will go to my grave believing she is in fact 100% correct. Charlie > http://tinyurl.com/3txqt > > > August 2004 > > Depressed over Prozac > Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News > > Ann knows hundreds of grisly stories: the professor on Prozac who bit > her mother to death; the Stanford graduate on Paxil who stabbed herself in > the kitchen while her parents slept; the mother who bludgeoned her son and > then drank a can of Drano; the 12- year-old girl who strangled herself with > a bungee cord she attached to a plant hanger on the wall. > > Sit with for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in details: > the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation she had > with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a bathtub. > Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she reminds you. > The world according to Ann is a place full of people who were put on > antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things. > > is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug > Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, a home > she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against > antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them. > > She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the British > version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for use in > children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued a > Public Health Advisory about antidepressants - - urging doctors and families > to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs -- and then appointed a > panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts during > clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer > sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a > nationwide class- action suit charging that GlaxoKline " concealed, > suppressed and downplayed " severe withdrawal reactions in people trying to > go off the antidepressant. > > But won't be happy until the drugs are banned altogether. They cause > people to become violently suicidal and homicidal, she argues. They cause > cancer, she says, and heart disease and diabetes and divorce. > > Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call her > misinformed -- and worry that she is hurting the very people she wants to > help. > > Panacea or Pandora? > > In 1991, wrote an 80-page pamphlet called " Prozac: Panacea or > Pandora? " Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book that she > published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in the Salt > Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan didn't > have a foothold. > > Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others > followed: Dr. Breggin's 1995 " Talking Back to Prozac, " Dr. ph > Glenmullen's 2000 " Prozac Backlash, " Dr. Healy's 2004 " Let Them Eat > Prozac. " As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for > antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was > the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective > serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, > including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox. > > According to IMS Health, a market research company for the pharmaceutical > industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 billion, > up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS Web site, > can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in " lifestyle disorders, " > which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, premenstrual > dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness -- a list > that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to complain > that antidepressants are now prescribed " if you bite your nails. " > > started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in 1997. The > coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors in 30 > states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most celebrated > member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the town University School of > Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map the > kind of receptors that regulate mood and health. > > On the case > > Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and attorneys of > people accused of murder, call asking for her help. But also > keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might possibly > be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about a man, > say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work -- as happened in July at a > ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas -- she will immediately get on the phone to > flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been on an > antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes the > assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way is > not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths. > > The day after she heard that Brynn Hartman had shot her husband, comedian > Phil Hartman, and then herself, called up Phil Hartman's brother, > whose number she found on the Internet. had just returned from being > an expert witness at the trial of a Wyoming woman on Paxil who had shot her > husband and later reported that she didn't remember anything about the > murder except standing there with the smoking gun. So told the > Hartmans: " Don't you stop till you find one of these drugs. " Brynn Hartman, > it turned out, had been on Zoloft; drugmaker Pfizer settled an eventual > wrongful death case for an undisclosed amount. > > After reading about Mark Barton, the Atlanta day trader who killed his > family and then drove to work and killed nine more people before also > turning the gun on himself, phoned his mother. It wasn't until six > months later that Atlanta police reported that Prozac had been found in > Barton's car, so was operating on instinct when she urged Barton's > mother to have his body tested for antidepressants. " Not all coroners check > for these drugs, " explains. " It requires a few extra tests, and not > all states will pay for it. That's why you need to get to the families right > away. " > > But things don't always work out the way would hope. In the Atlanta > day trader case, she says, she had his body ready to be shipped to an > independent forensic toxicologist in Oklahoma City, but Barton's mother > changed her mind. Maybe, says, the coroner told Mrs. Barton that > was a Scientologist. > > The Scientology charge still surfaces occasionally, because Scientologists > are famous for their opposition to psychotropic drugs and in fact to > psychiatry in general. ( " Psychiatry is seeking to create a world where man > is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetablelike state so that he can be > controlled, " Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote.) > > Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the National > Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), is sure has Scientology ties. > " She says she's not a Scientologist, but she has the same philosophy, " says > Cottrell. " Of course I don't have the thing on paper, in writing, but I > believe they finance her. " denies any connection to Scientology and > says in fact that Scientologists don't like her because she won't go after > psychiatrists. She says her war against antidepressants has put her $100,000 > in debt (mostly from phone bills and publishing her book). accuses > NAMI of getting money from drug companies. > > Cause and effect > > Emotions run high because, on both sides, there is a belief that lives are > at stake. Mental-health advocates argue that antidepressants have helped > millions of people, and they worry that crusades like 's will convince > the very people who need drugs to go off them. The stories of people who > have committed suicide or crimes while on antidepressants are sad and > regrettable, they agree, but anecdotes aren't scientific proof. > > Deseret Morning News graphic > > Antidepressants > > Requires Adobe Acrobat. > > Did Mark Barton, for example, kill his family and co-workers because he was > on Prozac orwhile he was on Prozac? > > " It's a cause-and-effect issue, " says Dr. Meredith Alden, president of the > Utah Psychiatric Association. " People make assumptions about cause and > effect when there is only an association. " > > Yes, sometimes people on antidepressants kill themselves or act violently, > she says, but that's because " you're already dealing with people who are > prone to violent behavior. " And, she says, " people who are depressed are > going to be at greater risk of hurting themselves. " > > Sometimes, concedes University of Utah psychiatry professor Dr. Tomb, > " some people will briefly feel more suicidal " when they're first put on > antidepressants, but that happens when they first go into psychotherapy, > too, he argues, " or just because they're getting better by tincture of > time. " Tomb, like a lot of people in the field, offers this explanation: A > really depressed person may not have the energy to kill himself; then he > starts taking medication, still feels depressed, but suddenly has enough > energy to follow through with his suicidal thoughts. > > But what about the people who weren't suicidal until they took the drugs, > asks. What about the people who had no history of violence but then > killed their own children? > > FDA weighs in > > The FDA, in its Health Advisory issued in March, asked drug companies to add > stronger warnings to their package inserts, cautioning physicians and > families to " closely monitor " both adults and children for suicidal > thinking, and " certain behaviors that are known to be associated with these > drugs, " including mania and hostility, especially at the beginning of > treatment, or when the doses are increased or decreased. The FDA stopped > short of requiring the companies to issue these warnings, though, and made > it clear that the matter of cause and effect has not been settled yet. > > The FDA appointed a panel of independent experts to review clinical trials > of antidepressant use in children and teens, trying to determine if these > studies report more suicide attempts in patients prescribed the drugs > compared to those given a placebo pill. The review follows allegations that > GlaxoKline failed to report trials that showed an increase in suicide > attempts, as well as those trials that showed that Paxil was no more > effective than a placebo for younger patients. According to the Wall Street > Journal, which obtained a draft of the panel's review last week, the > clinical trials show children and teens on the drugs were indeed more likely > to have thoughts that appeared to be suicidal. > > Earlier this month, Health Canada, the Canadian version of the FDA, issued a > warning that newborns may suffer withdrawal and other possible symptoms > (seizures, constant crying, etc.) when pregnant women take SSRIs during the > third trimester of their pregnancies. > > In June, the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Policy > Research Institute issued a report urging that psychotropic drugs should be > prescribed for children " only when the anticipated benefits outweigh the > risks. " Next month, a congressional committee will hold hearings about the > safety of antidepressants and the FDA's alleged censoring last winter of a > staff member who argued that the drugs are dangerous for young people. > > " From those who have seen the internal company documents, " says , " we > know that there is no distinction in age groups with these suicidal > reactions. These reactions are the same across the board, no matter the > age. " > > Utah cases > > argues that the perpetrators of some of Utah's famous violent crimes > -- Margaret Kastanis, who stabbed herself and her three children in 1991; > Sergei Babarin, who shot five people at the LDS Family History Library in > 1999; Lenny Gall, who killed his mother with an axe in 2001 -- were violent > because they were either on antidepressants or had gone off them too > abruptly. > > Lenny Gall's father, Len, contacted six months ago, before his son's > sentencing hearing. then went through Lenny's medical records, Gall > says, and found that " he had a very significant reaction to Paxil when he > was 16 " and was put on the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa " shortly before " the > murder. " He's never had a shred of violence in him, " Gall says. > > has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases -- most > recently a land case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his best > friend's soda with cyanide -- and has been hired as a consultant in several > civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to implicate > Luvox as the reason why shot students at Columbine High School. > She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about > antidepressants -- how to safely get off them, how to find alternative > methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is suicidal > or manic -- is now in the thousands. > > Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High School, > credits with helping him get off antidepressants, first prescribed for > him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before reading > 's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that he > discovered that odd symptoms -- persistent dreams of gouging his eyes out, > for example -- might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed to be > making him feel normal. Following 's advice, he slowly tapered off > Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. " I still have > my moments of depression, " he says. " But I haven't attempted suicide for > over a year. " > > Ann Blake , according to the International Coalition for Drug Awareness > web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on psychology. > There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree -- > Wythe College, in Cedar City. explains that the Ph.D. was > awarded for " lifetime experience, " specifically for the writing of " Prozac: > Panacea or Pandora? " which she says she has been told is the equivalent of, > or " far beyond, " a dissertation. > > Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors and > incomplete sentences (although says an edited version will be > published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page of > references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of > antidepressants. > > argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is " backwards. " She > maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the metabolism > of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population she says > that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize SSRIs in > the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep behavior > disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, violent > dreams while in a dreamlike state. > > Deconstructing > > " It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors she's > making, " says psychiatrist Tomb about 's book. " She is really taking > license with the scientific method. " Yes, is passionate about the > evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, " but passion has very little place in > the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and truthful. " > The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole story, he > argues. " You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the literature > and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin. " > > But Dr. Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama who was > director of research at two large drug companies and now often testifies as > an expert witness against the drugs, calls " in many ways a visionary. " > She " has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated, " he says. > > " I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. and don't > understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is, " says > Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on Effexor > to treat her migraine headaches. > > In her darkest hours -- when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first became > " a monster " and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, had > withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk -- Tierney called > every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only > called her back. > > " Dr. never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to me at > all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' she > said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped me more > than anyone else. " > > " An unsung hero, " says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who started > an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two years ago. > " None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our lives if > it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann. " > > The beginning > > 's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, she > watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on Prozac. > After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was hunting > down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said " Just Say > No to Prozac. " After that she'd be at the grocery store or church and people > would come up to her and start telling her their stories. > > " There's great power in those stories, " says Texas trial attorney Andy > Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to > antidepressants. " They have a power to persuade and even change the > bureaucratic forces of our country. " > > And that's just what expects to eventually happen. " I think these > drugs are history, " she says. Eventually, the stories told by parents, and > the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies have > suppressed, will add up to public outrage -- and then antidepressants will > be pulled from the market, she predicts. > > " What is sad, " she says, " is that so many have had to die or have their > lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another terrible > mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' " > > E-mail: jarvik@d... > > Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co. > Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted April 1, 2005 Report Share Posted April 1, 2005 Ann is awesome and I love her work. She was years ahead with her observations and she deserves credit for all her hard work. A true freedom fighter. I laugh at the Scientology angle. Ann is a Mormon like the couple I talked to today that I helped get out of a CPS drugged-children situation working for CCHR. Best, Jim http://tinyurl.com/3txqt August 2004 Depressed over Prozac Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News Ann knows hundreds of grisly stories: the professor on Prozac who bit her mother to death; the Stanford graduate on Paxil who stabbed herself in the kitchen while her parents slept; the mother who bludgeoned her son and then drank a can of Drano; the 12- year-old girl who strangled herself with a bungee cord she attached to a plant hanger on the wall. Sit with for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in details: the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation she had with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a bathtub. Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she reminds you. The world according to Ann is a place full of people who were put on antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things. is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, a home she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them. She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the British version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for use in children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued a Public Health Advisory about antidepressants - - urging doctors and families to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs -- and then appointed a panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts during clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a nationwide class- action suit charging that GlaxoKline " concealed, suppressed and downplayed " severe withdrawal reactions in people trying to go off the antidepressant. But won't be happy until the drugs are banned altogether. They cause people to become violently suicidal and homicidal, she argues. They cause cancer, she says, and heart disease and diabetes and divorce. Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call her misinformed -- and worry that she is hurting the very people she wants to help. Panacea or Pandora? In 1991, wrote an 80-page pamphlet called " Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? " Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book that she published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in the Salt Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan didn't have a foothold. Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others followed: Dr. Breggin's 1995 " Talking Back to Prozac, " Dr. ph Glenmullen's 2000 " Prozac Backlash, " Dr. Healy's 2004 " Let Them Eat Prozac. " As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox. According to IMS Health, a market research company for the pharmaceutical industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 billion, up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS Web site, can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in " lifestyle disorders, " which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness -- a list that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to complain that antidepressants are now prescribed " if you bite your nails. " started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in 1997. The coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors in 30 states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most celebrated member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the town University School of Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map the kind of receptors that regulate mood and health. On the case Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and attorneys of people accused of murder, call asking for her help. But also keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might possibly be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about a man, say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work -- as happened in July at a ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas -- she will immediately get on the phone to flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been on an antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes the assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way is not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths. The day after she heard that Brynn Hartman had shot her husband, comedian Phil Hartman, and then herself, called up Phil Hartman's brother, whose number she found on the Internet. had just returned from being an expert witness at the trial of a Wyoming woman on Paxil who had shot her husband and later reported that she didn't remember anything about the murder except standing there with the smoking gun. So told the Hartmans: " Don't you stop till you find one of these drugs. " Brynn Hartman, it turned out, had been on Zoloft; drugmaker Pfizer settled an eventual wrongful death case for an undisclosed amount. After reading about Mark Barton, the Atlanta day trader who killed his family and then drove to work and killed nine more people before also turning the gun on himself, phoned his mother. It wasn't until six months later that Atlanta police reported that Prozac had been found in Barton's car, so was operating on instinct when she urged Barton's mother to have his body tested for antidepressants. " Not all coroners check for these drugs, " explains. " It requires a few extra tests, and not all states will pay for it. That's why you need to get to the families right away. " But things don't always work out the way would hope. In the Atlanta day trader case, she says, she had his body ready to be shipped to an independent forensic toxicologist in Oklahoma City, but Barton's mother changed her mind. Maybe, says, the coroner told Mrs. Barton that was a Scientologist. The Scientology charge still surfaces occasionally, because Scientologists are famous for their opposition to psychotropic drugs and in fact to psychiatry in general. ( " Psychiatry is seeking to create a world where man is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetablelike state so that he can be controlled, " Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote.) Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), is sure has Scientology ties. " She says she's not a Scientologist, but she has the same philosophy, " says Cottrell. " Of course I don't have the thing on paper, in writing, but I believe they finance her. " denies any connection to Scientology and says in fact that Scientologists don't like her because she won't go after psychiatrists. She says her war against antidepressants has put her $100,000 in debt (mostly from phone bills and publishing her book). accuses NAMI of getting money from drug companies. Cause and effect Emotions run high because, on both sides, there is a belief that lives are at stake. Mental-health advocates argue that antidepressants have helped millions of people, and they worry that crusades like 's will convince the very people who need drugs to go off them. The stories of people who have committed suicide or crimes while on antidepressants are sad and regrettable, they agree, but anecdotes aren't scientific proof. Deseret Morning News graphic Antidepressants Requires Adobe Acrobat. Did Mark Barton, for example, kill his family and co-workers because he was on Prozac orwhile he was on Prozac? " It's a cause-and-effect issue, " says Dr. Meredith Alden, president of the Utah Psychiatric Association. " People make assumptions about cause and effect when there is only an association. " Yes, sometimes people on antidepressants kill themselves or act violently, she says, but that's because " you're already dealing with people who are prone to violent behavior. " And, she says, " people who are depressed are going to be at greater risk of hurting themselves. " Sometimes, concedes University of Utah psychiatry professor Dr. Tomb, " some people will briefly feel more suicidal " when they're first put on antidepressants, but that happens when they first go into psychotherapy, too, he argues, " or just because they're getting better by tincture of time. " Tomb, like a lot of people in the field, offers this explanation: A really depressed person may not have the energy to kill himself; then he starts taking medication, still feels depressed, but suddenly has enough energy to follow through with his suicidal thoughts. But what about the people who weren't suicidal until they took the drugs, asks. What about the people who had no history of violence but then killed their own children? FDA weighs in The FDA, in its Health Advisory issued in March, asked drug companies to add stronger warnings to their package inserts, cautioning physicians and families to " closely monitor " both adults and children for suicidal thinking, and " certain behaviors that are known to be associated with these drugs, " including mania and hostility, especially at the beginning of treatment, or when the doses are increased or decreased. The FDA stopped short of requiring the companies to issue these warnings, though, and made it clear that the matter of cause and effect has not been settled yet. The FDA appointed a panel of independent experts to review clinical trials of antidepressant use in children and teens, trying to determine if these studies report more suicide attempts in patients prescribed the drugs compared to those given a placebo pill. The review follows allegations that GlaxoKline failed to report trials that showed an increase in suicide attempts, as well as those trials that showed that Paxil was no more effective than a placebo for younger patients. According to the Wall Street Journal, which obtained a draft of the panel's review last week, the clinical trials show children and teens on the drugs were indeed more likely to have thoughts that appeared to be suicidal. Earlier this month, Health Canada, the Canadian version of the FDA, issued a warning that newborns may suffer withdrawal and other possible symptoms (seizures, constant crying, etc.) when pregnant women take SSRIs during the third trimester of their pregnancies. In June, the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Policy Research Institute issued a report urging that psychotropic drugs should be prescribed for children " only when the anticipated benefits outweigh the risks. " Next month, a congressional committee will hold hearings about the safety of antidepressants and the FDA's alleged censoring last winter of a staff member who argued that the drugs are dangerous for young people. " From those who have seen the internal company documents, " says , " we know that there is no distinction in age groups with these suicidal reactions. These reactions are the same across the board, no matter the age. " Utah cases argues that the perpetrators of some of Utah's famous violent crimes -- Margaret Kastanis, who stabbed herself and her three children in 1991; Sergei Babarin, who shot five people at the LDS Family History Library in 1999; Lenny Gall, who killed his mother with an axe in 2001 -- were violent because they were either on antidepressants or had gone off them too abruptly. Lenny Gall's father, Len, contacted six months ago, before his son's sentencing hearing. then went through Lenny's medical records, Gall says, and found that " he had a very significant reaction to Paxil when he was 16 " and was put on the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa " shortly before " the murder. " He's never had a shred of violence in him, " Gall says. has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases -- most recently a land case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his best friend's soda with cyanide -- and has been hired as a consultant in several civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to implicate Luvox as the reason why shot students at Columbine High School. She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about antidepressants -- how to safely get off them, how to find alternative methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is suicidal or manic -- is now in the thousands. Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High School, credits with helping him get off antidepressants, first prescribed for him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before reading 's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that he discovered that odd symptoms -- persistent dreams of gouging his eyes out, for example -- might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed to be making him feel normal. Following 's advice, he slowly tapered off Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. " I still have my moments of depression, " he says. " But I haven't attempted suicide for over a year. " Ann Blake , according to the International Coalition for Drug Awareness web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on psychology. There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree -- Wythe College, in Cedar City. explains that the Ph.D. was awarded for " lifetime experience, " specifically for the writing of " Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? " which she says she has been told is the equivalent of, or " far beyond, " a dissertation. Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors and incomplete sentences (although says an edited version will be published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page of references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of antidepressants. argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is " backwards. " She maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the metabolism of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population she says that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize SSRIs in the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, violent dreams while in a dreamlike state. Deconstructing " It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors she's making, " says psychiatrist Tomb about 's book. " She is really taking license with the scientific method. " Yes, is passionate about the evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, " but passion has very little place in the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and truthful. " The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole story, he argues. " You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the literature and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin. " But Dr. Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama who was director of research at two large drug companies and now often testifies as an expert witness against the drugs, calls " in many ways a visionary. " She " has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated, " he says. " I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. and don't understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is, " says Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on Effexor to treat her migraine headaches. In her darkest hours -- when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first became " a monster " and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, had withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk -- Tierney called every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only called her back. " Dr. never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to me at all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' she said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped me more than anyone else. " " An unsung hero, " says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who started an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two years ago. " None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our lives if it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann. " The beginning 's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, she watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on Prozac. After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was hunting down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said " Just Say No to Prozac. " After that she'd be at the grocery store or church and people would come up to her and start telling her their stories. " There's great power in those stories, " says Texas trial attorney Andy Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to antidepressants. " They have a power to persuade and even change the bureaucratic forces of our country. " And that's just what expects to eventually happen. " I think these drugs are history, " she says. Eventually, the stories told by parents, and the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies have suppressed, will add up to public outrage -- and then antidepressants will be pulled from the market, she predicts. " What is sad, " she says, " is that so many have had to die or have their lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another terrible mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' " E-mail: jarvik@... Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted April 1, 2005 Report Share Posted April 1, 2005 Ann is awesome and I love her work. She was years ahead with her observations and she deserves credit for all her hard work. A true freedom fighter. I laugh at the Scientology angle. Ann is a Mormon like the couple I talked to today that I helped get out of a CPS drugged-children situation working for CCHR. Best, Jim http://tinyurl.com/3txqt August 2004 Depressed over Prozac Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News Ann knows hundreds of grisly stories: the professor on Prozac who bit her mother to death; the Stanford graduate on Paxil who stabbed herself in the kitchen while her parents slept; the mother who bludgeoned her son and then drank a can of Drano; the 12- year-old girl who strangled herself with a bungee cord she attached to a plant hanger on the wall. Sit with for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in details: the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation she had with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a bathtub. Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she reminds you. The world according to Ann is a place full of people who were put on antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things. is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, a home she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them. She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the British version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for use in children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued a Public Health Advisory about antidepressants - - urging doctors and families to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs -- and then appointed a panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts during clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a nationwide class- action suit charging that GlaxoKline " concealed, suppressed and downplayed " severe withdrawal reactions in people trying to go off the antidepressant. But won't be happy until the drugs are banned altogether. They cause people to become violently suicidal and homicidal, she argues. They cause cancer, she says, and heart disease and diabetes and divorce. Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call her misinformed -- and worry that she is hurting the very people she wants to help. Panacea or Pandora? In 1991, wrote an 80-page pamphlet called " Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? " Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book that she published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in the Salt Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan didn't have a foothold. Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others followed: Dr. Breggin's 1995 " Talking Back to Prozac, " Dr. ph Glenmullen's 2000 " Prozac Backlash, " Dr. Healy's 2004 " Let Them Eat Prozac. " As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox. According to IMS Health, a market research company for the pharmaceutical industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 billion, up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS Web site, can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in " lifestyle disorders, " which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness -- a list that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to complain that antidepressants are now prescribed " if you bite your nails. " started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in 1997. The coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors in 30 states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most celebrated member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the town University School of Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map the kind of receptors that regulate mood and health. On the case Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and attorneys of people accused of murder, call asking for her help. But also keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might possibly be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about a man, say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work -- as happened in July at a ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas -- she will immediately get on the phone to flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been on an antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes the assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way is not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths. The day after she heard that Brynn Hartman had shot her husband, comedian Phil Hartman, and then herself, called up Phil Hartman's brother, whose number she found on the Internet. had just returned from being an expert witness at the trial of a Wyoming woman on Paxil who had shot her husband and later reported that she didn't remember anything about the murder except standing there with the smoking gun. So told the Hartmans: " Don't you stop till you find one of these drugs. " Brynn Hartman, it turned out, had been on Zoloft; drugmaker Pfizer settled an eventual wrongful death case for an undisclosed amount. After reading about Mark Barton, the Atlanta day trader who killed his family and then drove to work and killed nine more people before also turning the gun on himself, phoned his mother. It wasn't until six months later that Atlanta police reported that Prozac had been found in Barton's car, so was operating on instinct when she urged Barton's mother to have his body tested for antidepressants. " Not all coroners check for these drugs, " explains. " It requires a few extra tests, and not all states will pay for it. That's why you need to get to the families right away. " But things don't always work out the way would hope. In the Atlanta day trader case, she says, she had his body ready to be shipped to an independent forensic toxicologist in Oklahoma City, but Barton's mother changed her mind. Maybe, says, the coroner told Mrs. Barton that was a Scientologist. The Scientology charge still surfaces occasionally, because Scientologists are famous for their opposition to psychotropic drugs and in fact to psychiatry in general. ( " Psychiatry is seeking to create a world where man is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetablelike state so that he can be controlled, " Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote.) Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), is sure has Scientology ties. " She says she's not a Scientologist, but she has the same philosophy, " says Cottrell. " Of course I don't have the thing on paper, in writing, but I believe they finance her. " denies any connection to Scientology and says in fact that Scientologists don't like her because she won't go after psychiatrists. She says her war against antidepressants has put her $100,000 in debt (mostly from phone bills and publishing her book). accuses NAMI of getting money from drug companies. Cause and effect Emotions run high because, on both sides, there is a belief that lives are at stake. Mental-health advocates argue that antidepressants have helped millions of people, and they worry that crusades like 's will convince the very people who need drugs to go off them. The stories of people who have committed suicide or crimes while on antidepressants are sad and regrettable, they agree, but anecdotes aren't scientific proof. Deseret Morning News graphic Antidepressants Requires Adobe Acrobat. Did Mark Barton, for example, kill his family and co-workers because he was on Prozac orwhile he was on Prozac? " It's a cause-and-effect issue, " says Dr. Meredith Alden, president of the Utah Psychiatric Association. " People make assumptions about cause and effect when there is only an association. " Yes, sometimes people on antidepressants kill themselves or act violently, she says, but that's because " you're already dealing with people who are prone to violent behavior. " And, she says, " people who are depressed are going to be at greater risk of hurting themselves. " Sometimes, concedes University of Utah psychiatry professor Dr. Tomb, " some people will briefly feel more suicidal " when they're first put on antidepressants, but that happens when they first go into psychotherapy, too, he argues, " or just because they're getting better by tincture of time. " Tomb, like a lot of people in the field, offers this explanation: A really depressed person may not have the energy to kill himself; then he starts taking medication, still feels depressed, but suddenly has enough energy to follow through with his suicidal thoughts. But what about the people who weren't suicidal until they took the drugs, asks. What about the people who had no history of violence but then killed their own children? FDA weighs in The FDA, in its Health Advisory issued in March, asked drug companies to add stronger warnings to their package inserts, cautioning physicians and families to " closely monitor " both adults and children for suicidal thinking, and " certain behaviors that are known to be associated with these drugs, " including mania and hostility, especially at the beginning of treatment, or when the doses are increased or decreased. The FDA stopped short of requiring the companies to issue these warnings, though, and made it clear that the matter of cause and effect has not been settled yet. The FDA appointed a panel of independent experts to review clinical trials of antidepressant use in children and teens, trying to determine if these studies report more suicide attempts in patients prescribed the drugs compared to those given a placebo pill. The review follows allegations that GlaxoKline failed to report trials that showed an increase in suicide attempts, as well as those trials that showed that Paxil was no more effective than a placebo for younger patients. According to the Wall Street Journal, which obtained a draft of the panel's review last week, the clinical trials show children and teens on the drugs were indeed more likely to have thoughts that appeared to be suicidal. Earlier this month, Health Canada, the Canadian version of the FDA, issued a warning that newborns may suffer withdrawal and other possible symptoms (seizures, constant crying, etc.) when pregnant women take SSRIs during the third trimester of their pregnancies. In June, the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Policy Research Institute issued a report urging that psychotropic drugs should be prescribed for children " only when the anticipated benefits outweigh the risks. " Next month, a congressional committee will hold hearings about the safety of antidepressants and the FDA's alleged censoring last winter of a staff member who argued that the drugs are dangerous for young people. " From those who have seen the internal company documents, " says , " we know that there is no distinction in age groups with these suicidal reactions. These reactions are the same across the board, no matter the age. " Utah cases argues that the perpetrators of some of Utah's famous violent crimes -- Margaret Kastanis, who stabbed herself and her three children in 1991; Sergei Babarin, who shot five people at the LDS Family History Library in 1999; Lenny Gall, who killed his mother with an axe in 2001 -- were violent because they were either on antidepressants or had gone off them too abruptly. Lenny Gall's father, Len, contacted six months ago, before his son's sentencing hearing. then went through Lenny's medical records, Gall says, and found that " he had a very significant reaction to Paxil when he was 16 " and was put on the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa " shortly before " the murder. " He's never had a shred of violence in him, " Gall says. has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases -- most recently a land case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his best friend's soda with cyanide -- and has been hired as a consultant in several civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to implicate Luvox as the reason why shot students at Columbine High School. She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about antidepressants -- how to safely get off them, how to find alternative methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is suicidal or manic -- is now in the thousands. Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High School, credits with helping him get off antidepressants, first prescribed for him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before reading 's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that he discovered that odd symptoms -- persistent dreams of gouging his eyes out, for example -- might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed to be making him feel normal. Following 's advice, he slowly tapered off Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. " I still have my moments of depression, " he says. " But I haven't attempted suicide for over a year. " Ann Blake , according to the International Coalition for Drug Awareness web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on psychology. There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree -- Wythe College, in Cedar City. explains that the Ph.D. was awarded for " lifetime experience, " specifically for the writing of " Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? " which she says she has been told is the equivalent of, or " far beyond, " a dissertation. Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors and incomplete sentences (although says an edited version will be published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page of references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of antidepressants. argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is " backwards. " She maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the metabolism of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population she says that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize SSRIs in the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, violent dreams while in a dreamlike state. Deconstructing " It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors she's making, " says psychiatrist Tomb about 's book. " She is really taking license with the scientific method. " Yes, is passionate about the evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, " but passion has very little place in the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and truthful. " The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole story, he argues. " You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the literature and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin. " But Dr. Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama who was director of research at two large drug companies and now often testifies as an expert witness against the drugs, calls " in many ways a visionary. " She " has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated, " he says. " I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. and don't understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is, " says Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on Effexor to treat her migraine headaches. In her darkest hours -- when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first became " a monster " and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, had withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk -- Tierney called every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only called her back. " Dr. never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to me at all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' she said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped me more than anyone else. " " An unsung hero, " says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who started an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two years ago. " None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our lives if it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann. " The beginning 's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, she watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on Prozac. After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was hunting down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said " Just Say No to Prozac. " After that she'd be at the grocery store or church and people would come up to her and start telling her their stories. " There's great power in those stories, " says Texas trial attorney Andy Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to antidepressants. " They have a power to persuade and even change the bureaucratic forces of our country. " And that's just what expects to eventually happen. " I think these drugs are history, " she says. Eventually, the stories told by parents, and the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies have suppressed, will add up to public outrage -- and then antidepressants will be pulled from the market, she predicts. " What is sad, " she says, " is that so many have had to die or have their lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another terrible mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' " E-mail: jarvik@... Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted April 1, 2005 Report Share Posted April 1, 2005 Ann is awesome and I love her work. She was years ahead with her observations and she deserves credit for all her hard work. A true freedom fighter. I laugh at the Scientology angle. Ann is a Mormon like the couple I talked to today that I helped get out of a CPS drugged-children situation working for CCHR. Best, Jim http://tinyurl.com/3txqt August 2004 Depressed over Prozac Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News Ann knows hundreds of grisly stories: the professor on Prozac who bit her mother to death; the Stanford graduate on Paxil who stabbed herself in the kitchen while her parents slept; the mother who bludgeoned her son and then drank a can of Drano; the 12- year-old girl who strangled herself with a bungee cord she attached to a plant hanger on the wall. Sit with for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in details: the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation she had with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a bathtub. Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she reminds you. The world according to Ann is a place full of people who were put on antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things. is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, a home she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them. She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the British version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for use in children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued a Public Health Advisory about antidepressants - - urging doctors and families to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs -- and then appointed a panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts during clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a nationwide class- action suit charging that GlaxoKline " concealed, suppressed and downplayed " severe withdrawal reactions in people trying to go off the antidepressant. But won't be happy until the drugs are banned altogether. They cause people to become violently suicidal and homicidal, she argues. They cause cancer, she says, and heart disease and diabetes and divorce. Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call her misinformed -- and worry that she is hurting the very people she wants to help. Panacea or Pandora? In 1991, wrote an 80-page pamphlet called " Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? " Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book that she published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in the Salt Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan didn't have a foothold. Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others followed: Dr. Breggin's 1995 " Talking Back to Prozac, " Dr. ph Glenmullen's 2000 " Prozac Backlash, " Dr. Healy's 2004 " Let Them Eat Prozac. " As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox. According to IMS Health, a market research company for the pharmaceutical industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 billion, up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS Web site, can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in " lifestyle disorders, " which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness -- a list that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to complain that antidepressants are now prescribed " if you bite your nails. " started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in 1997. The coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors in 30 states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most celebrated member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the town University School of Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map the kind of receptors that regulate mood and health. On the case Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and attorneys of people accused of murder, call asking for her help. But also keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might possibly be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about a man, say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work -- as happened in July at a ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas -- she will immediately get on the phone to flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been on an antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes the assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way is not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths. The day after she heard that Brynn Hartman had shot her husband, comedian Phil Hartman, and then herself, called up Phil Hartman's brother, whose number she found on the Internet. had just returned from being an expert witness at the trial of a Wyoming woman on Paxil who had shot her husband and later reported that she didn't remember anything about the murder except standing there with the smoking gun. So told the Hartmans: " Don't you stop till you find one of these drugs. " Brynn Hartman, it turned out, had been on Zoloft; drugmaker Pfizer settled an eventual wrongful death case for an undisclosed amount. After reading about Mark Barton, the Atlanta day trader who killed his family and then drove to work and killed nine more people before also turning the gun on himself, phoned his mother. It wasn't until six months later that Atlanta police reported that Prozac had been found in Barton's car, so was operating on instinct when she urged Barton's mother to have his body tested for antidepressants. " Not all coroners check for these drugs, " explains. " It requires a few extra tests, and not all states will pay for it. That's why you need to get to the families right away. " But things don't always work out the way would hope. In the Atlanta day trader case, she says, she had his body ready to be shipped to an independent forensic toxicologist in Oklahoma City, but Barton's mother changed her mind. Maybe, says, the coroner told Mrs. Barton that was a Scientologist. The Scientology charge still surfaces occasionally, because Scientologists are famous for their opposition to psychotropic drugs and in fact to psychiatry in general. ( " Psychiatry is seeking to create a world where man is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetablelike state so that he can be controlled, " Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote.) Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), is sure has Scientology ties. " She says she's not a Scientologist, but she has the same philosophy, " says Cottrell. " Of course I don't have the thing on paper, in writing, but I believe they finance her. " denies any connection to Scientology and says in fact that Scientologists don't like her because she won't go after psychiatrists. She says her war against antidepressants has put her $100,000 in debt (mostly from phone bills and publishing her book). accuses NAMI of getting money from drug companies. Cause and effect Emotions run high because, on both sides, there is a belief that lives are at stake. Mental-health advocates argue that antidepressants have helped millions of people, and they worry that crusades like 's will convince the very people who need drugs to go off them. The stories of people who have committed suicide or crimes while on antidepressants are sad and regrettable, they agree, but anecdotes aren't scientific proof. Deseret Morning News graphic Antidepressants Requires Adobe Acrobat. Did Mark Barton, for example, kill his family and co-workers because he was on Prozac orwhile he was on Prozac? " It's a cause-and-effect issue, " says Dr. Meredith Alden, president of the Utah Psychiatric Association. " People make assumptions about cause and effect when there is only an association. " Yes, sometimes people on antidepressants kill themselves or act violently, she says, but that's because " you're already dealing with people who are prone to violent behavior. " And, she says, " people who are depressed are going to be at greater risk of hurting themselves. " Sometimes, concedes University of Utah psychiatry professor Dr. Tomb, " some people will briefly feel more suicidal " when they're first put on antidepressants, but that happens when they first go into psychotherapy, too, he argues, " or just because they're getting better by tincture of time. " Tomb, like a lot of people in the field, offers this explanation: A really depressed person may not have the energy to kill himself; then he starts taking medication, still feels depressed, but suddenly has enough energy to follow through with his suicidal thoughts. But what about the people who weren't suicidal until they took the drugs, asks. What about the people who had no history of violence but then killed their own children? FDA weighs in The FDA, in its Health Advisory issued in March, asked drug companies to add stronger warnings to their package inserts, cautioning physicians and families to " closely monitor " both adults and children for suicidal thinking, and " certain behaviors that are known to be associated with these drugs, " including mania and hostility, especially at the beginning of treatment, or when the doses are increased or decreased. The FDA stopped short of requiring the companies to issue these warnings, though, and made it clear that the matter of cause and effect has not been settled yet. The FDA appointed a panel of independent experts to review clinical trials of antidepressant use in children and teens, trying to determine if these studies report more suicide attempts in patients prescribed the drugs compared to those given a placebo pill. The review follows allegations that GlaxoKline failed to report trials that showed an increase in suicide attempts, as well as those trials that showed that Paxil was no more effective than a placebo for younger patients. According to the Wall Street Journal, which obtained a draft of the panel's review last week, the clinical trials show children and teens on the drugs were indeed more likely to have thoughts that appeared to be suicidal. Earlier this month, Health Canada, the Canadian version of the FDA, issued a warning that newborns may suffer withdrawal and other possible symptoms (seizures, constant crying, etc.) when pregnant women take SSRIs during the third trimester of their pregnancies. In June, the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Policy Research Institute issued a report urging that psychotropic drugs should be prescribed for children " only when the anticipated benefits outweigh the risks. " Next month, a congressional committee will hold hearings about the safety of antidepressants and the FDA's alleged censoring last winter of a staff member who argued that the drugs are dangerous for young people. " From those who have seen the internal company documents, " says , " we know that there is no distinction in age groups with these suicidal reactions. These reactions are the same across the board, no matter the age. " Utah cases argues that the perpetrators of some of Utah's famous violent crimes -- Margaret Kastanis, who stabbed herself and her three children in 1991; Sergei Babarin, who shot five people at the LDS Family History Library in 1999; Lenny Gall, who killed his mother with an axe in 2001 -- were violent because they were either on antidepressants or had gone off them too abruptly. Lenny Gall's father, Len, contacted six months ago, before his son's sentencing hearing. then went through Lenny's medical records, Gall says, and found that " he had a very significant reaction to Paxil when he was 16 " and was put on the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa " shortly before " the murder. " He's never had a shred of violence in him, " Gall says. has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases -- most recently a land case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his best friend's soda with cyanide -- and has been hired as a consultant in several civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to implicate Luvox as the reason why shot students at Columbine High School. She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about antidepressants -- how to safely get off them, how to find alternative methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is suicidal or manic -- is now in the thousands. Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High School, credits with helping him get off antidepressants, first prescribed for him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before reading 's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that he discovered that odd symptoms -- persistent dreams of gouging his eyes out, for example -- might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed to be making him feel normal. Following 's advice, he slowly tapered off Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. " I still have my moments of depression, " he says. " But I haven't attempted suicide for over a year. " Ann Blake , according to the International Coalition for Drug Awareness web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on psychology. There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree -- Wythe College, in Cedar City. explains that the Ph.D. was awarded for " lifetime experience, " specifically for the writing of " Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? " which she says she has been told is the equivalent of, or " far beyond, " a dissertation. Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors and incomplete sentences (although says an edited version will be published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page of references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of antidepressants. argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is " backwards. " She maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the metabolism of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population she says that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize SSRIs in the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, violent dreams while in a dreamlike state. Deconstructing " It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors she's making, " says psychiatrist Tomb about 's book. " She is really taking license with the scientific method. " Yes, is passionate about the evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, " but passion has very little place in the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and truthful. " The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole story, he argues. " You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the literature and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin. " But Dr. Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama who was director of research at two large drug companies and now often testifies as an expert witness against the drugs, calls " in many ways a visionary. " She " has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated, " he says. " I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. and don't understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is, " says Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on Effexor to treat her migraine headaches. In her darkest hours -- when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first became " a monster " and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, had withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk -- Tierney called every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only called her back. " Dr. never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to me at all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' she said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped me more than anyone else. " " An unsung hero, " says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who started an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two years ago. " None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our lives if it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann. " The beginning 's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, she watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on Prozac. After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was hunting down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said " Just Say No to Prozac. " After that she'd be at the grocery store or church and people would come up to her and start telling her their stories. " There's great power in those stories, " says Texas trial attorney Andy Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to antidepressants. " They have a power to persuade and even change the bureaucratic forces of our country. " And that's just what expects to eventually happen. " I think these drugs are history, " she says. Eventually, the stories told by parents, and the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies have suppressed, will add up to public outrage -- and then antidepressants will be pulled from the market, she predicts. " What is sad, " she says, " is that so many have had to die or have their lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another terrible mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' " E-mail: jarvik@... Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted April 1, 2005 Report Share Posted April 1, 2005 Ann is awesome and I love her work. She was years ahead with her observations and she deserves credit for all her hard work. A true freedom fighter. I laugh at the Scientology angle. Ann is a Mormon like the couple I talked to today that I helped get out of a CPS drugged-children situation working for CCHR. Best, Jim http://tinyurl.com/3txqt August 2004 Depressed over Prozac Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News Ann knows hundreds of grisly stories: the professor on Prozac who bit her mother to death; the Stanford graduate on Paxil who stabbed herself in the kitchen while her parents slept; the mother who bludgeoned her son and then drank a can of Drano; the 12- year-old girl who strangled herself with a bungee cord she attached to a plant hanger on the wall. Sit with for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in details: the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation she had with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a bathtub. Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she reminds you. The world according to Ann is a place full of people who were put on antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things. is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, a home she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them. She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the British version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for use in children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued a Public Health Advisory about antidepressants - - urging doctors and families to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs -- and then appointed a panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts during clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a nationwide class- action suit charging that GlaxoKline " concealed, suppressed and downplayed " severe withdrawal reactions in people trying to go off the antidepressant. But won't be happy until the drugs are banned altogether. They cause people to become violently suicidal and homicidal, she argues. They cause cancer, she says, and heart disease and diabetes and divorce. Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call her misinformed -- and worry that she is hurting the very people she wants to help. Panacea or Pandora? In 1991, wrote an 80-page pamphlet called " Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? " Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book that she published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in the Salt Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan didn't have a foothold. Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others followed: Dr. Breggin's 1995 " Talking Back to Prozac, " Dr. ph Glenmullen's 2000 " Prozac Backlash, " Dr. Healy's 2004 " Let Them Eat Prozac. " As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox. According to IMS Health, a market research company for the pharmaceutical industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 billion, up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS Web site, can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in " lifestyle disorders, " which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness -- a list that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to complain that antidepressants are now prescribed " if you bite your nails. " started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in 1997. The coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors in 30 states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most celebrated member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the town University School of Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map the kind of receptors that regulate mood and health. On the case Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and attorneys of people accused of murder, call asking for her help. But also keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might possibly be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about a man, say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work -- as happened in July at a ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas -- she will immediately get on the phone to flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been on an antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes the assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way is not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths. The day after she heard that Brynn Hartman had shot her husband, comedian Phil Hartman, and then herself, called up Phil Hartman's brother, whose number she found on the Internet. had just returned from being an expert witness at the trial of a Wyoming woman on Paxil who had shot her husband and later reported that she didn't remember anything about the murder except standing there with the smoking gun. So told the Hartmans: " Don't you stop till you find one of these drugs. " Brynn Hartman, it turned out, had been on Zoloft; drugmaker Pfizer settled an eventual wrongful death case for an undisclosed amount. After reading about Mark Barton, the Atlanta day trader who killed his family and then drove to work and killed nine more people before also turning the gun on himself, phoned his mother. It wasn't until six months later that Atlanta police reported that Prozac had been found in Barton's car, so was operating on instinct when she urged Barton's mother to have his body tested for antidepressants. " Not all coroners check for these drugs, " explains. " It requires a few extra tests, and not all states will pay for it. That's why you need to get to the families right away. " But things don't always work out the way would hope. In the Atlanta day trader case, she says, she had his body ready to be shipped to an independent forensic toxicologist in Oklahoma City, but Barton's mother changed her mind. Maybe, says, the coroner told Mrs. Barton that was a Scientologist. The Scientology charge still surfaces occasionally, because Scientologists are famous for their opposition to psychotropic drugs and in fact to psychiatry in general. ( " Psychiatry is seeking to create a world where man is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetablelike state so that he can be controlled, " Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote.) Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), is sure has Scientology ties. " She says she's not a Scientologist, but she has the same philosophy, " says Cottrell. " Of course I don't have the thing on paper, in writing, but I believe they finance her. " denies any connection to Scientology and says in fact that Scientologists don't like her because she won't go after psychiatrists. She says her war against antidepressants has put her $100,000 in debt (mostly from phone bills and publishing her book). accuses NAMI of getting money from drug companies. Cause and effect Emotions run high because, on both sides, there is a belief that lives are at stake. Mental-health advocates argue that antidepressants have helped millions of people, and they worry that crusades like 's will convince the very people who need drugs to go off them. The stories of people who have committed suicide or crimes while on antidepressants are sad and regrettable, they agree, but anecdotes aren't scientific proof. Deseret Morning News graphic Antidepressants Requires Adobe Acrobat. Did Mark Barton, for example, kill his family and co-workers because he was on Prozac orwhile he was on Prozac? " It's a cause-and-effect issue, " says Dr. Meredith Alden, president of the Utah Psychiatric Association. " People make assumptions about cause and effect when there is only an association. " Yes, sometimes people on antidepressants kill themselves or act violently, she says, but that's because " you're already dealing with people who are prone to violent behavior. " And, she says, " people who are depressed are going to be at greater risk of hurting themselves. " Sometimes, concedes University of Utah psychiatry professor Dr. Tomb, " some people will briefly feel more suicidal " when they're first put on antidepressants, but that happens when they first go into psychotherapy, too, he argues, " or just because they're getting better by tincture of time. " Tomb, like a lot of people in the field, offers this explanation: A really depressed person may not have the energy to kill himself; then he starts taking medication, still feels depressed, but suddenly has enough energy to follow through with his suicidal thoughts. But what about the people who weren't suicidal until they took the drugs, asks. What about the people who had no history of violence but then killed their own children? FDA weighs in The FDA, in its Health Advisory issued in March, asked drug companies to add stronger warnings to their package inserts, cautioning physicians and families to " closely monitor " both adults and children for suicidal thinking, and " certain behaviors that are known to be associated with these drugs, " including mania and hostility, especially at the beginning of treatment, or when the doses are increased or decreased. The FDA stopped short of requiring the companies to issue these warnings, though, and made it clear that the matter of cause and effect has not been settled yet. The FDA appointed a panel of independent experts to review clinical trials of antidepressant use in children and teens, trying to determine if these studies report more suicide attempts in patients prescribed the drugs compared to those given a placebo pill. The review follows allegations that GlaxoKline failed to report trials that showed an increase in suicide attempts, as well as those trials that showed that Paxil was no more effective than a placebo for younger patients. According to the Wall Street Journal, which obtained a draft of the panel's review last week, the clinical trials show children and teens on the drugs were indeed more likely to have thoughts that appeared to be suicidal. Earlier this month, Health Canada, the Canadian version of the FDA, issued a warning that newborns may suffer withdrawal and other possible symptoms (seizures, constant crying, etc.) when pregnant women take SSRIs during the third trimester of their pregnancies. In June, the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Policy Research Institute issued a report urging that psychotropic drugs should be prescribed for children " only when the anticipated benefits outweigh the risks. " Next month, a congressional committee will hold hearings about the safety of antidepressants and the FDA's alleged censoring last winter of a staff member who argued that the drugs are dangerous for young people. " From those who have seen the internal company documents, " says , " we know that there is no distinction in age groups with these suicidal reactions. These reactions are the same across the board, no matter the age. " Utah cases argues that the perpetrators of some of Utah's famous violent crimes -- Margaret Kastanis, who stabbed herself and her three children in 1991; Sergei Babarin, who shot five people at the LDS Family History Library in 1999; Lenny Gall, who killed his mother with an axe in 2001 -- were violent because they were either on antidepressants or had gone off them too abruptly. Lenny Gall's father, Len, contacted six months ago, before his son's sentencing hearing. then went through Lenny's medical records, Gall says, and found that " he had a very significant reaction to Paxil when he was 16 " and was put on the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa " shortly before " the murder. " He's never had a shred of violence in him, " Gall says. has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases -- most recently a land case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his best friend's soda with cyanide -- and has been hired as a consultant in several civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to implicate Luvox as the reason why shot students at Columbine High School. She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about antidepressants -- how to safely get off them, how to find alternative methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is suicidal or manic -- is now in the thousands. Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High School, credits with helping him get off antidepressants, first prescribed for him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before reading 's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that he discovered that odd symptoms -- persistent dreams of gouging his eyes out, for example -- might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed to be making him feel normal. Following 's advice, he slowly tapered off Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. " I still have my moments of depression, " he says. " But I haven't attempted suicide for over a year. " Ann Blake , according to the International Coalition for Drug Awareness web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on psychology. There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree -- Wythe College, in Cedar City. explains that the Ph.D. was awarded for " lifetime experience, " specifically for the writing of " Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? " which she says she has been told is the equivalent of, or " far beyond, " a dissertation. Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors and incomplete sentences (although says an edited version will be published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page of references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of antidepressants. argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is " backwards. " She maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the metabolism of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population she says that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize SSRIs in the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, violent dreams while in a dreamlike state. Deconstructing " It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors she's making, " says psychiatrist Tomb about 's book. " She is really taking license with the scientific method. " Yes, is passionate about the evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, " but passion has very little place in the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and truthful. " The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole story, he argues. " You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the literature and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin. " But Dr. Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama who was director of research at two large drug companies and now often testifies as an expert witness against the drugs, calls " in many ways a visionary. " She " has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated, " he says. " I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. and don't understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is, " says Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on Effexor to treat her migraine headaches. In her darkest hours -- when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first became " a monster " and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, had withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk -- Tierney called every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only called her back. " Dr. never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to me at all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' she said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped me more than anyone else. " " An unsung hero, " says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who started an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two years ago. " None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our lives if it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann. " The beginning 's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, she watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on Prozac. After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was hunting down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said " Just Say No to Prozac. " After that she'd be at the grocery store or church and people would come up to her and start telling her their stories. " There's great power in those stories, " says Texas trial attorney Andy Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to antidepressants. " They have a power to persuade and even change the bureaucratic forces of our country. " And that's just what expects to eventually happen. " I think these drugs are history, " she says. Eventually, the stories told by parents, and the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies have suppressed, will add up to public outrage -- and then antidepressants will be pulled from the market, she predicts. " What is sad, " she says, " is that so many have had to die or have their lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another terrible mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' " E-mail: jarvik@... Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted April 2, 2005 Report Share Posted April 2, 2005 the professor on Prozac who bit her mother to death; Can you imagine????? This is insane. Any drug that would do this should be yanked immediately! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted April 2, 2005 Report Share Posted April 2, 2005 I don't laugh at the Scientology charge. I have run into it twice. On the CABF (Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation) boards, there were hints from the moderators that my antidepressant views should be ignored because I must have been a Scientologist. One person who wasn't a moderator but was an " insider " came right out and said it. On the Court TV forum during the Pittman trial, there was a drive by posting by someone who posted just that once that the drugawareness.org site was a " Scientologist front " site. The people who were viciously out to hang and who didn't like to hear anything about antidepressants because, in their opinion, it was a defense designed only for the family to make money in a civil suit against the Pfizer, quickly latched on to the Scientology label for a few of us, including me. I had to point out the conflict between the Scientologist's total anti psychiatry position and the fact that drugsawareness.org has copies of, links to, and refereces about articles by psychiatrists and published in psychiatric journals before I got them to shut up. Even so, someone else would do it a few days later. Each time I debunked the alleged connection between drugawareness.org and the Scientologists I said that it was a means of discrediting people who were saying what the drug companies didn't want people to think about. I strongly suspect that the drug companies encourage if not started these allegations. Doctors who spoke out against SSRIs were (are?) labelled " quacks " while lay people were (are) labelled " Scientologists " . It is a means of discrediting so that the information the person is delivering can be dismissed. I hadn't seen it for about two years then all of a sudden during the Pittman trial it surfaced again. BTW, I am sure that drive by posting on the Court TV board was pre written and a copy and pasted to the forum. I honestly believe that during the Pittman trial the drug companies had an enployee searching for forums where there were positive posts about. drugawareness.com and, when he found one, posted the " Scientologist " allegation. But maybe I'm just too cynical but I don't believe the Scientologist should ever be taken lightly. > Ann is awesome and I love her work. She was years ahead with her > observations and she deserves credit for all her hard work. A true freedom > fighter. > > I laugh at the Scientology angle. Ann is a Mormon like the couple I > talked to today that I helped get out of a CPS drugged-children situation > working for CCHR. > > > Best, > > Jim > > http://tinyurl.com/3txqt > > > August 2004 > > Depressed over Prozac > Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News > > Ann knows hundreds of grisly stories: the professor on Prozac who bit > her mother to death; the Stanford graduate on Paxil who stabbed herself in > the kitchen while her parents slept; the mother who bludgeoned her son and > then drank a can of Drano; the 12- year-old girl who strangled herself with > a bungee cord she attached to a plant hanger on the wall. > > Sit with for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in details: > the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation she had > with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a bathtub. > Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she reminds you. > The world according to Ann is a place full of people who were put on > antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things. > > is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug > Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, a home > she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against > antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them. > > She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the British > version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for use in > children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued a > Public Health Advisory about antidepressants - - urging doctors and families > to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs -- and then appointed a > panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts during > clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer > sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a > nationwide class- action suit charging that GlaxoKline " concealed, > suppressed and downplayed " severe withdrawal reactions in people trying to > go off the antidepressant. > > But won't be happy until the drugs are banned altogether. They cause > people to become violently suicidal and homicidal, she argues. They cause > cancer, she says, and heart disease and diabetes and divorce. > > Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call her > misinformed -- and worry that she is hurting the very people she wants to > help. > > Panacea or Pandora? > > In 1991, wrote an 80-page pamphlet called " Prozac: Panacea or > Pandora? " Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book that she > published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in the Salt > Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan didn't > have a foothold. > > Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others > followed: Dr. Breggin's 1995 " Talking Back to Prozac, " Dr. ph > Glenmullen's 2000 " Prozac Backlash, " Dr. Healy's 2004 " Let Them Eat > Prozac. " As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for > antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was > the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective > serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, > including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox. > > According to IMS Health, a market research company for the pharmaceutical > industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 billion, > up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS Web site, > can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in " lifestyle disorders, " > which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, premenstrual > dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness -- a list > that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to complain > that antidepressants are now prescribed " if you bite your nails. " > > started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in 1997. The > coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors in 30 > states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most celebrated > member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the town University School of > Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map the > kind of receptors that regulate mood and health. > > On the case > > Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and attorneys of > people accused of murder, call asking for her help. But also > keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might possibly > be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about a man, > say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work -- as happened in July at a > ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas -- she will immediately get on the phone to > flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been on an > antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes the > assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way is > not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths. > > The day after she heard that Brynn Hartman had shot her husband, comedian > Phil Hartman, and then herself, called up Phil Hartman's brother, > whose number she found on the Internet. had just returned from being > an expert witness at the trial of a Wyoming woman on Paxil who had shot her > husband and later reported that she didn't remember anything about the > murder except standing there with the smoking gun. So told the > Hartmans: " Don't you stop till you find one of these drugs. " Brynn Hartman, > it turned out, had been on Zoloft; drugmaker Pfizer settled an eventual > wrongful death case for an undisclosed amount. > > After reading about Mark Barton, the Atlanta day trader who killed his > family and then drove to work and killed nine more people before also > turning the gun on himself, phoned his mother. It wasn't until six > months later that Atlanta police reported that Prozac had been found in > Barton's car, so was operating on instinct when she urged Barton's > mother to have his body tested for antidepressants. " Not all coroners check > for these drugs, " explains. " It requires a few extra tests, and not > all states will pay for it. That's why you need to get to the families right > away. " > > But things don't always work out the way would hope. In the Atlanta > day trader case, she says, she had his body ready to be shipped to an > independent forensic toxicologist in Oklahoma City, but Barton's mother > changed her mind. Maybe, says, the coroner told Mrs. Barton that > was a Scientologist. > > The Scientology charge still surfaces occasionally, because Scientologists > are famous for their opposition to psychotropic drugs and in fact to > psychiatry in general. ( " Psychiatry is seeking to create a world where man > is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetablelike state so that he can be > controlled, " Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote.) > > Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the National > Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), is sure has Scientology ties. > " She says she's not a Scientologist, but she has the same philosophy, " says > Cottrell. " Of course I don't have the thing on paper, in writing, but I > believe they finance her. " denies any connection to Scientology and > says in fact that Scientologists don't like her because she won't go after > psychiatrists. She says her war against antidepressants has put her $100,000 > in debt (mostly from phone bills and publishing her book). accuses > NAMI of getting money from drug companies. > > Cause and effect > > Emotions run high because, on both sides, there is a belief that lives are > at stake. Mental-health advocates argue that antidepressants have helped > millions of people, and they worry that crusades like 's will convince > the very people who need drugs to go off them. The stories of people who > have committed suicide or crimes while on antidepressants are sad and > regrettable, they agree, but anecdotes aren't scientific proof. > > Deseret Morning News graphic > > Antidepressants > > Requires Adobe Acrobat. > > Did Mark Barton, for example, kill his family and co-workers because he was > on Prozac orwhile he was on Prozac? > > " It's a cause-and-effect issue, " says Dr. Meredith Alden, president of the > Utah Psychiatric Association. " People make assumptions about cause and > effect when there is only an association. " > > Yes, sometimes people on antidepressants kill themselves or act violently, > she says, but that's because " you're already dealing with people who are > prone to violent behavior. " And, she says, " people who are depressed are > going to be at greater risk of hurting themselves. " > > Sometimes, concedes University of Utah psychiatry professor Dr. Tomb, > " some people will briefly feel more suicidal " when they're first put on > antidepressants, but that happens when they first go into psychotherapy, > too, he argues, " or just because they're getting better by tincture of > time. " Tomb, like a lot of people in the field, offers this explanation: A > really depressed person may not have the energy to kill himself; then he > starts taking medication, still feels depressed, but suddenly has enough > energy to follow through with his suicidal thoughts. > > But what about the people who weren't suicidal until they took the drugs, > asks. What about the people who had no history of violence but then > killed their own children? > > FDA weighs in > > The FDA, in its Health Advisory issued in March, asked drug companies to add > stronger warnings to their package inserts, cautioning physicians and > families to " closely monitor " both adults and children for suicidal > thinking, and " certain behaviors that are known to be associated with these > drugs, " including mania and hostility, especially at the beginning of > treatment, or when the doses are increased or decreased. The FDA stopped > short of requiring the companies to issue these warnings, though, and made > it clear that the matter of cause and effect has not been settled yet. > > The FDA appointed a panel of independent experts to review clinical trials > of antidepressant use in children and teens, trying to determine if these > studies report more suicide attempts in patients prescribed the drugs > compared to those given a placebo pill. The review follows allegations that > GlaxoKline failed to report trials that showed an increase in suicide > attempts, as well as those trials that showed that Paxil was no more > effective than a placebo for younger patients. According to the Wall Street > Journal, which obtained a draft of the panel's review last week, the > clinical trials show children and teens on the drugs were indeed more likely > to have thoughts that appeared to be suicidal. > > Earlier this month, Health Canada, the Canadian version of the FDA, issued a > warning that newborns may suffer withdrawal and other possible symptoms > (seizures, constant crying, etc.) when pregnant women take SSRIs during the > third trimester of their pregnancies. > > In June, the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Policy > Research Institute issued a report urging that psychotropic drugs should be > prescribed for children " only when the anticipated benefits outweigh the > risks. " Next month, a congressional committee will hold hearings about the > safety of antidepressants and the FDA's alleged censoring last winter of a > staff member who argued that the drugs are dangerous for young people. > > " From those who have seen the internal company documents, " says , " we > know that there is no distinction in age groups with these suicidal > reactions. These reactions are the same across the board, no matter the > age. " > > Utah cases > > argues that the perpetrators of some of Utah's famous violent crimes > -- Margaret Kastanis, who stabbed herself and her three children in 1991; > Sergei Babarin, who shot five people at the LDS Family History Library in > 1999; Lenny Gall, who killed his mother with an axe in 2001 -- were violent > because they were either on antidepressants or had gone off them too > abruptly. > > Lenny Gall's father, Len, contacted six months ago, before his son's > sentencing hearing. then went through Lenny's medical records, Gall > says, and found that " he had a very significant reaction to Paxil when he > was 16 " and was put on the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa " shortly before " the > murder. " He's never had a shred of violence in him, " Gall says. > > has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases -- most > recently a land case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his best > friend's soda with cyanide -- and has been hired as a consultant in several > civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to implicate > Luvox as the reason why shot students at Columbine High School. > She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about > antidepressants -- how to safely get off them, how to find alternative > methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is suicidal > or manic -- is now in the thousands. > > Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High School, > credits with helping him get off antidepressants, first prescribed for > him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before reading > 's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that he > discovered that odd symptoms -- persistent dreams of gouging his eyes out, > for example -- might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed to be > making him feel normal. Following 's advice, he slowly tapered off > Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. " I still have > my moments of depression, " he says. " But I haven't attempted suicide for > over a year. " > > Ann Blake , according to the International Coalition for Drug Awareness > web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on psychology. > There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree -- > Wythe College, in Cedar City. explains that the Ph.D. was > awarded for " lifetime experience, " specifically for the writing of " Prozac: > Panacea or Pandora? " which she says she has been told is the equivalent of, > or " far beyond, " a dissertation. > > Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors and > incomplete sentences (although says an edited version will be > published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page of > references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of > antidepressants. > > argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is " backwards. " She > maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the metabolism > of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population she says > that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize SSRIs in > the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep behavior > disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, violent > dreams while in a dreamlike state. > > Deconstructing > > " It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors she's > making, " says psychiatrist Tomb about 's book. " She is really taking > license with the scientific method. " Yes, is passionate about the > evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, " but passion has very little place in > the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and truthful. " > The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole story, he > argues. " You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the literature > and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin. " > > But Dr. Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama who was > director of research at two large drug companies and now often testifies as > an expert witness against the drugs, calls " in many ways a visionary. " > She " has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated, " he says. > > " I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. and don't > understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is, " says > Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on Effexor > to treat her migraine headaches. > > In her darkest hours -- when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first became > " a monster " and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, had > withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk -- Tierney called > every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only > called her back. > > " Dr. never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to me at > all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' she > said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped me more > than anyone else. " > > " An unsung hero, " says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who started > an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two years ago. > " None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our lives if > it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann. " > > The beginning > > 's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, she > watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on Prozac. > After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was hunting > down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said " Just Say > No to Prozac. " After that she'd be at the grocery store or church and people > would come up to her and start telling her their stories. > > " There's great power in those stories, " says Texas trial attorney Andy > Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to > antidepressants. " They have a power to persuade and even change the > bureaucratic forces of our country. " > > And that's just what expects to eventually happen. " I think these > drugs are history, " she says. Eventually, the stories told by parents, and > the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies have > suppressed, will add up to public outrage -- and then antidepressants will > be pulled from the market, she predicts. > > " What is sad, " she says, " is that so many have had to die or have their > lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another terrible > mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' " > > E-mail: jarvik@d... > > Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co. > Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved. > > > > > > > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted April 2, 2005 Report Share Posted April 2, 2005 I have never been called a scientologist but I was an assistant manager in a mental illness group and was Kicked out because I posted the truth. A young lady was on Paxil and having trouble, their solution was to go to her DR and have him increase the medication. I had tried to be politically correct while informing them of the truth but that was the last straw and I was very plain about the dangers of these drugs and the rest as they say is history. Charlie > > Ann is awesome and I love her work. She was years ahead with > her > > observations and she deserves credit for all her hard work. A true > freedom > > fighter. > > > > I laugh at the Scientology angle. Ann is a Mormon like the > couple I > > talked to today that I helped get out of a CPS drugged-children > situation > > working for CCHR. > > > > > > Best, > > > > Jim > > > > http://tinyurl.com/3txqt > > > > > > August 2004 > > > > Depressed over Prozac > > Elaine Jarvik Deseret Morning News > > > > Ann knows hundreds of grisly stories: the professor on Prozac > who bit > > her mother to death; the Stanford graduate on Paxil who stabbed > herself in > > the kitchen while her parents slept; the mother who bludgeoned her > son and > > then drank a can of Drano; the 12- year-old girl who strangled > herself with > > a bungee cord she attached to a plant hanger on the wall. > > > > Sit with for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in > details: > > the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation > she had > > with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a > bathtub. > > Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she > reminds you. > > The world according to Ann is a place full of people who were > put on > > antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things. > > > > is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug > > Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, > a home > > she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against > > antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them. > > > > She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the > British > > version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for > use in > > children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued > a > > Public Health Advisory about antidepressants - - urging doctors and > families > > to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs -- and then > appointed a > > panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts > during > > clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot > Spitzer > > sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a > > nationwide class- action suit charging that GlaxoKline > " concealed, > > suppressed and downplayed " severe withdrawal reactions in people > trying to > > go off the antidepressant. > > > > But won't be happy until the drugs are banned altogether. They > cause > > people to become violently suicidal and homicidal, she argues. They > cause > > cancer, she says, and heart disease and diabetes and divorce. > > > > Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call > her > > misinformed -- and worry that she is hurting the very people she > wants to > > help. > > > > Panacea or Pandora? > > > > In 1991, wrote an 80-page pamphlet called " Prozac: Panacea or > > Pandora? " Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book > that she > > published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in > the Salt > > Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan > didn't > > have a foothold. > > > > Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but > others > > followed: Dr. Breggin's 1995 " Talking Back to Prozac, " Dr. > ph > > Glenmullen's 2000 " Prozac Backlash, " Dr. Healy's 2004 " Let > Them Eat > > Prozac. " As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for > > antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because > Prozac was > > the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective > > serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, > > including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox. > > > > According to IMS Health, a market research company for the > pharmaceutical > > industry, sales of antidepressants worldwide in 2003 reached $19.5 > billion, > > up 10 percent from 2002. Some of this growth, according to the IMS > Web site, > > can be attributed to the use of antidepressants in " lifestyle > disorders, " > > which now include or could feasibly include, according to IMS, > premenstrual > > dysphoric disorder, smoking cessation, weight loss and shyness -- a > list > > that causes some people, like Jim Harper of prozactruth.com, to > complain > > that antidepressants are now prescribed " if you bite your nails. " > > > > started the International Coalition for Drug Awareness in > 1997. The > > coalition has a Web site, www.drugawareness.org, volunteer directors > in 30 > > states and board members in Bulgaria and Singapore. The most > celebrated > > member of her board is Dr. Candace Pert, the town University > School of > > Medicine neuroscientist who a generation ago helped discover and map > the > > kind of receptors that regulate mood and health. > > > > On the case > > > > Distraught parents of suicidal teens, and the relatives and > attorneys of > > people accused of murder, call asking for her help. But > also > > keeps her antennae up for stories about violent deaths that might > possibly > > be linked to antidepressants. If she reads a newspaper account about > a man, > > say, who has gone on a shooting rampage at work -- as happened in > July at a > > ConAgra Foods plant in Kansas -- she will immediately get on the > phone to > > flesh out the details, trying to find out if the assailant had been > on an > > antidepressant. Occasionally the victims are famous, and sometimes > the > > assailants become famous for their horrific crimes, but either way > is > > not afraid to insert herself into their lives or their deaths. > > > > The day after she heard that Brynn Hartman had shot her husband, > comedian > > Phil Hartman, and then herself, called up Phil Hartman's > brother, > > whose number she found on the Internet. had just returned from > being > > an expert witness at the trial of a Wyoming woman on Paxil who had > shot her > > husband and later reported that she didn't remember anything about > the > > murder except standing there with the smoking gun. So told the > > Hartmans: " Don't you stop till you find one of these drugs. " Brynn > Hartman, > > it turned out, had been on Zoloft; drugmaker Pfizer settled an > eventual > > wrongful death case for an undisclosed amount. > > > > After reading about Mark Barton, the Atlanta day trader who killed > his > > family and then drove to work and killed nine more people before > also > > turning the gun on himself, phoned his mother. It wasn't until > six > > months later that Atlanta police reported that Prozac had been found > in > > Barton's car, so was operating on instinct when she urged > Barton's > > mother to have his body tested for antidepressants. " Not all > coroners check > > for these drugs, " explains. " It requires a few extra tests, > and not > > all states will pay for it. That's why you need to get to the > families right > > away. " > > > > But things don't always work out the way would hope. In the > Atlanta > > day trader case, she says, she had his body ready to be shipped to > an > > independent forensic toxicologist in Oklahoma City, but Barton's > mother > > changed her mind. Maybe, says, the coroner told Mrs. Barton > that > > was a Scientologist. > > > > The Scientology charge still surfaces occasionally, because > Scientologists > > are famous for their opposition to psychotropic drugs and in fact to > > psychiatry in general. ( " Psychiatry is seeking to create a world > where man > > is reduced to a robotized or drugged, vegetablelike state so that he > can be > > controlled, " Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard once > wrote.) > > > > Vicki Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the > National > > Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), is sure has Scientology > ties. > > " She says she's not a Scientologist, but she has the same > philosophy, " says > > Cottrell. " Of course I don't have the thing on paper, in writing, > but I > > believe they finance her. " denies any connection to > Scientology and > > says in fact that Scientologists don't like her because she won't go > after > > psychiatrists. She says her war against antidepressants has put her > $100,000 > > in debt (mostly from phone bills and publishing her book). > accuses > > NAMI of getting money from drug companies. > > > > Cause and effect > > > > Emotions run high because, on both sides, there is a belief that > lives are > > at stake. Mental-health advocates argue that antidepressants have > helped > > millions of people, and they worry that crusades like 's will > convince > > the very people who need drugs to go off them. The stories of people > who > > have committed suicide or crimes while on antidepressants are sad > and > > regrettable, they agree, but anecdotes aren't scientific proof. > > > > Deseret Morning News graphic > > > > Antidepressants > > > > Requires Adobe Acrobat. > > > > Did Mark Barton, for example, kill his family and co-workers because > he was > > on Prozac orwhile he was on Prozac? > > > > " It's a cause-and-effect issue, " says Dr. Meredith Alden, president > of the > > Utah Psychiatric Association. " People make assumptions about cause > and > > effect when there is only an association. " > > > > Yes, sometimes people on antidepressants kill themselves or act > violently, > > she says, but that's because " you're already dealing with people who > are > > prone to violent behavior. " And, she says, " people who are depressed > are > > going to be at greater risk of hurting themselves. " > > > > Sometimes, concedes University of Utah psychiatry professor Dr. > Tomb, > > " some people will briefly feel more suicidal " when they're first put > on > > antidepressants, but that happens when they first go into > psychotherapy, > > too, he argues, " or just because they're getting better by tincture > of > > time. " Tomb, like a lot of people in the field, offers this > explanation: A > > really depressed person may not have the energy to kill himself; > then he > > starts taking medication, still feels depressed, but suddenly has > enough > > energy to follow through with his suicidal thoughts. > > > > But what about the people who weren't suicidal until they took the > drugs, > > asks. What about the people who had no history of violence but > then > > killed their own children? > > > > FDA weighs in > > > > The FDA, in its Health Advisory issued in March, asked drug > companies to add > > stronger warnings to their package inserts, cautioning physicians > and > > families to " closely monitor " both adults and children for suicidal > > thinking, and " certain behaviors that are known to be associated > with these > > drugs, " including mania and hostility, especially at the beginning > of > > treatment, or when the doses are increased or decreased. The FDA > stopped > > short of requiring the companies to issue these warnings, though, > and made > > it clear that the matter of cause and effect has not been settled > yet. > > > > The FDA appointed a panel of independent experts to review clinical > trials > > of antidepressant use in children and teens, trying to determine if > these > > studies report more suicide attempts in patients prescribed the > drugs > > compared to those given a placebo pill. The review follows > allegations that > > GlaxoKline failed to report trials that showed an increase in > suicide > > attempts, as well as those trials that showed that Paxil was no more > > effective than a placebo for younger patients. According to the Wall > Street > > Journal, which obtained a draft of the panel's review last week, the > > clinical trials show children and teens on the drugs were indeed > more likely > > to have thoughts that appeared to be suicidal. > > > > Earlier this month, Health Canada, the Canadian version of the FDA, > issued a > > warning that newborns may suffer withdrawal and other possible > symptoms > > (seizures, constant crying, etc.) when pregnant women take SSRIs > during the > > third trimester of their pregnancies. > > > > In June, the National Association for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Policy > > Research Institute issued a report urging that psychotropic drugs > should be > > prescribed for children " only when the anticipated benefits outweigh > the > > risks. " Next month, a congressional committee will hold hearings > about the > > safety of antidepressants and the FDA's alleged censoring last > winter of a > > staff member who argued that the drugs are dangerous for young > people. > > > > " From those who have seen the internal company documents, " says > , " we > > know that there is no distinction in age groups with these suicidal > > reactions. These reactions are the same across the board, no matter > the > > age. " > > > > Utah cases > > > > argues that the perpetrators of some of Utah's famous violent > crimes > > -- Margaret Kastanis, who stabbed herself and her three children in > 1991; > > Sergei Babarin, who shot five people at the LDS Family History > Library in > > 1999; Lenny Gall, who killed his mother with an axe in 2001 -- were > violent > > because they were either on antidepressants or had gone off them too > > abruptly. > > > > Lenny Gall's father, Len, contacted six months ago, before his > son's > > sentencing hearing. then went through Lenny's medical records, > Gall > > says, and found that " he had a very significant reaction to Paxil > when he > > was 16 " and was put on the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa " shortly > before " the > > murder. " He's never had a shred of violence in him, " Gall says. > > > > has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases -- > most > > recently a land case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his > best > > friend's soda with cyanide -- and has been hired as a consultant in > several > > civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to > implicate > > Luvox as the reason why shot students at Columbine High > School. > > She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about > > antidepressants -- how to safely get off them, how to find > alternative > > methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is > suicidal > > or manic -- is now in the thousands. > > > > Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High > School, > > credits with helping him get off antidepressants, first > prescribed for > > him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before > reading > > 's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that > he > > discovered that odd symptoms -- persistent dreams of gouging his > eyes out, > > for example -- might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed > to be > > making him feel normal. Following 's advice, he slowly tapered > off > > Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. " I > still have > > my moments of depression, " he says. " But I haven't attempted suicide > for > > over a year. " > > > > Ann Blake , according to the International Coalition for Drug > Awareness > > web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on > psychology. > > There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree > -- > > Wythe College, in Cedar City. explains that the Ph.D. > was > > awarded for " lifetime experience, " specifically for the writing of > " Prozac: > > Panacea or Pandora? " which she says she has been told is the > equivalent of, > > or " far beyond, " a dissertation. > > > > Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors > and > > incomplete sentences (although says an edited version will be > > published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page > of > > references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of > > antidepressants. > > > > argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is " backwards. " She > > maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the > metabolism > > of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population > she says > > that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize > SSRIs in > > the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep > behavior > > disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, > violent > > dreams while in a dreamlike state. > > > > Deconstructing > > > > " It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors > she's > > making, " says psychiatrist Tomb about 's book. " She is really > taking > > license with the scientific method. " Yes, is passionate about > the > > evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, " but passion has very little > place in > > the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and > truthful. " > > The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole > story, he > > argues. " You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the > literature > > and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin. " > > > > But Dr. Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama > who was > > director of research at two large drug companies and now often > testifies as > > an expert witness against the drugs, calls " in many ways a > visionary. " > > She " has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated, " he > says. > > > > " I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. and > don't > > understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is, " says > > > Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on > Effexor > > to treat her migraine headaches. > > > > In her darkest hours -- when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first > became > > " a monster " and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, > had > > withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk -- Tierney > called > > every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only > > > called her back. > > > > " Dr. never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to > me at > > all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' > she > > said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped > me more > > than anyone else. " > > > > " An unsung hero, " says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who > started > > an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two > years ago. > > " None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our > lives if > > it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann. " > > > > The beginning > > > > 's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, > she > > watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on > Prozac. > > After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was > hunting > > down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said > " Just Say > > No to Prozac. " After that she'd be at the grocery store or church > and people > > would come up to her and start telling her their stories. > > > > " There's great power in those stories, " says Texas trial attorney > Andy > > Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to > > antidepressants. " They have a power to persuade and even change the > > bureaucratic forces of our country. " > > > > And that's just what expects to eventually happen. " I think > these > > drugs are history, " she says. Eventually, the stories told by > parents, and > > the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies > have > > suppressed, will add up to public outrage -- and then > antidepressants will > > be pulled from the market, she predicts. > > > > " What is sad, " she says, " is that so many have had to die or have > their > > lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another > terrible > > mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' " > > > > E-mail: jarvik@d... > > > > Copyright C 2004 Deseret News Publishing Co. > > Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights > Reserved. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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