We have recently received two documents from someone who appears to be Dr Yolande Lucire, who offers them as evidence that they are a whistle blower in Australia. They point to a pattern of corruption in the Australian Medical System the should be troubling to anyone. (We also point people to her site, as there are a number of interesting documents pointing out the hazards os SSRIs)
The first is a text of a troubling letter sent to Sun Herald on 28 Feb 2008. Here is the text of that letter, as I received it
Sir
The Professional Standards Committee (PSC) judgement, said that I needed to consult a senior colleague about deficiencies in my knowledge and communication. It concerned 3 patients out of 30 whose pharmacological treatment I had reported to the area health service and to the NSW Medical Board.
Before I saw them, all had displayed suicidal, homicidal, psychotic, violent or otherwise peculiar behaviours both caused and aggravated by high doses of 'SSRI' antidepressants to which had been added to other medicines which have been well documented interactions with them. Two were on Aropax which its maker, GSK had admitted, a fortnight ago, had increased suicides eightfold in clinical trials over placebo, but they had not disclosed this catastrophic side effect when Aropax was licensed as an 'antidepressant.' The third was on three drugs together with Luvox, a drug so interactive that it had been withdrawn from use in the United States.
The NSW Medical Board had declined to investigate my 30 complaints as prescribing issues. The HCCC used the services of a psychiatrist who was a 'peer' of the prescribers, who found nothing unusual in a series that soon involved four deaths and several more suicides and deaths which were not investigated either and a dozen near lethal suicide attempts and a variety of bizarre behaviours on these drugs. On legal advice, I made the reports prospectively, at a rate of two or so each week, as the doctors of concern continued in their prescribing after I had issued formal warnings supported by documentation to the Superintendent. The first deaths occurred very soon after the prescriber had been ‘exonerated’ by the HCCC for the first group of suicide attempts but the reports of the deaths were ‘lost’ for two years at the HCCC, then not investigated either, or not by relevant experts. .
These same ‘side effects’ have been reported tens or possibly, hundreds of thousands of times to the United States Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) which issued Public Health Advisory in March 2004 and many before and since about worsening depression, suicidality, mania, akathisia, violence, insomnia, agitation, panic and anxiety caused by antidepressants. The Area Health Service, the PSC and the various ‘peers’ all failed to acknowledge the significance and legal importance of such high level advisories.
The PSC was not concerned that one of the three went on to stab a man and attempt suicide when he was given even more of the very drugs that I had warned (in writing) had already caused a ‘serotonergic reaction.’ Nor were they concerned that he had been abandoned by his treaters and re-diagnosed with an ‘antisocial personality disorder’ after he had done that.
That complaint was bizarre in that it was I, who had tried to prevent such a catastrophe by warning in writing, was alleged to be somehow responsible for causing this behaviour. The PSC was advised that I was unethical for making so many unjustified reports and for informing a patient’s mother about her son’s problems, although that information led to his full recovery.
Since 1997, that Area Health Service had increased its mental health beds from 30 to 42 and it was promised another 12 in 2006, after yet another inpatient suicide.
Hospitalised suicide attempts have trebled from 55 to 155/100,000. Suicides under mental health care in NSW (a relatively new phenomenon) run at between 100 and 150 annually and violence and homicides by mental health patients have hugely increased. 194 such patients were admitted to one ward during 2003-4, but it took a psychiatrist with 42 years of experience to see that this was a population which did not exist before this new batch of serotonin altering psychiatric drugs came into use, antidepressants and ‘atypical’ antipsychotics which have the same side effects at double the rate of antidepressants.
We have a Crisis in Mental Health. The Department of Health has installed nearly 500 more mental health beds and there are 1100 more on the drawing boards.
Finding and relieving such patients has been a Mental Health priority in the UK for three years now and in Canada where I had lectured on this problem.
In the USA, 40 State Attorneys are suing the makers of these drugs for criminal fraud, to get funds to compensate patients who had suffered and to recoup costs so generated, and settlements run in billions of dollars. Doctors, when sued, say they were not properly warned, and thus pass the responsibility successfully onto the drug companies.
The Department of Health has been told many times that the causes of this crisis are: new drugs which have suicide attempts, homicidal thinking and hallucinations among their listed side effects. It prefers to kill the messenger by repeated acts of defamation.
The Health Care Complaints Commission is the only body available to look at treatment complaints. It had been was set up in the wake of the Chelmsford Royal Commission to ensure that malpractice of such magnitude could not happen again. Thirty years ago, 26 deaths and suicides were occasioned by pharmacological treatment delivered by the late Dr Harry Bailey over some twenty years.
Today's drugs are far more dangerous inductive of suicide. They are given to a million Australians, 14% of whom do not have the metabolism to deal with them at all. Huge numbers who are at risk of these catastrophic side effects which, more often than not, are taken for schizophrenia, bipolar illness or borderline personality disorder and the patient is given more drugs. Persons seeking mental health care doubled in the decade since Prozac was released in 1992 to 2003 and the numbers are still increasing, as the number of people whose SSRI side effects were taken for schizophrenia, etc mounts up.
I reported this series of suicides deaths and suicide attempts over 6 months, after which I was advised by lawyers to stop reporting because the Medial Board has decided to pursue me. The series was far worse than anything that Dr. Bailey and Chelmsford produced in that short period time and every complaint was dismissed in a cavalier fashion. One senior administrator apologised to me for not dealing with my reports. He explained that it was ‘The System.’
We also have a copy of an interesting report. This report concerns how the Greater Southern Area Health Service (at the time the Greater Murray Area Health Service) has dealt with nearly 40 reports of suicides, dangerous suicide attempts, a homicide, a serotonin syndrome death and many episodes of violence and psychosis due to how certain drugs were prescribed and co-prescribed by certain practitioners. These reports were made initially in 2002 but mostly from September 2004 to April 2005 and again from September 2005 to December 2006. The report notes this as a pattern of cover-up of repeated acts, which caused serious adverse events including deaths.
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