The Dark Side of Antidepressants

As seen in this report on WVLT 8 TV in Knoxville, Tennessee

Internal documents of Eli Lilly and Co., some dating to the mid-1980s, as well as government applications and patents, indicate that the pharmaceutical giant has known for years that its best-selling drug could cause suicidal reactions in a small but significant number of patients. The reports could become critical as Lilly seeks government approval for its new Prozac.

Among the findings:

--Internal documents show that in 1990, Lilly scientists were pressured by corporate executives to alter records on physician experiences with Prozac, changing mentions of suicide attempt to ``overdose'' and suicidal thoughts to ``depression.''

--Three years before Prozac received approval by the US Food and Drug Administration in late 1987, the German BGA, that country's FDA equivalent, had such serious reservations about Prozac's safety that it refused to approve the antidepressant based on Lilly's studies showing that previously nonsuicidal patients who took the drug had a fivefold higher rate of suicides and suicide attempts than those on older antidepressants, and a threefold higher rate than those taking placebos.

--Lilly's own figures, in reports made available to the Globe, indicate that 1 in 100 previously nonsuicidal patients who took the drug in early clinical trials developed a severe form of anxiety and agitation called akathisia, causing them to attempt or commit suicide during the studies.

--A McLean Hospital researcher and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Martin Teicher, whose early 1990s studies linked Prozac to akathisia and suicide, is a co-inventor of the new Prozac, which Lilly plans to market, along with Timothy J. Barberich, the CEO of Sepracor Inc., a Marlborough, Mass. drug company, and James W. Young.

--A just-published book, ``Prozac Backlash,'' by a Cambridge psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, has drawn Lilly's ire for discussing Prozac's link to suicide, tics, withdrawal symptoms, and other side effects of Prozac and similar antidepressants.

Extensive details and documents quoted at the link.