Debate Resumes on the Safety of Depression's Wonder Drugs

The New York Times has picked up on the story about the safety of Paxil being seriously questioned. Word is that is was a front page news item.

Doctors are just beginning to react to the finding — reported first by British drug authorities in June and then endorsed the next week by the Food and Drug Administration — that unpublished studies about Paxil show that it carries a substantial risk of prompting teenagers and children to consider suicide.

Because the studies also found that Paxil was no more effective than a placebo in treating young people's depression, the regulators recommended that doctors write no new Paxil prescriptions for patients under 18. Experts say that the suicide risk is highest in the first few weeks young patients are on the drug.

[...]

And the findings have unsettled some of the very experts who absolved S.S.R.I.'s of a link to suicide a dozen years ago. Of the 10 American specialists who, as members of an ad hoc F.D.A. panel, formally cleared the drugs of a link to suicide in 1991, seven now say that the new information would prompt them to reconsider that decision, if they were asked.

Let's see, ineffective, and harmful to boot? Sounds like a no-brainer to me.