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New Antidepressant Warning Is Too Late For Some

Posting Date: 07/25/2005

Some psychiatrists may have been shocked by the FDA?s recently revised labeling for antidepressants: ?Adults being treated with antidepressant medication, particularly those being treated for depression, should be watched closely for worsening of depression and for increased suicidal thinking or behavior.?

This warning follows a similar one directed towards children and adolescents.

These cautions are doubly troubling because they are long overdue. For years the FDA has reassured physicians and patients that drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft would not make people worse or lead them to suicide.

Shortly after Prozac was introduced, however, we heard from a bereaved father about the death of his daughter who was given Prozac for an eating disorder: ?One month later, after taking this medication, she committed suicide by hanging herself. What was so strange about this unsuspected action was that she was not behaving like a person who was depressed or suicidal.?

When we first heard from him in the late 1980s, we checked published reports of Prozac side effects and found nothing to suggest this could be a drug reaction. In 1990, however, a case report was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Harvard psychiatrists described six patients who suddenly developed ?intense violent suicidal preoccupation after 2?7 weeks of fluoxetine [Prozac] treatment.?

When we asked the drug company and the FDA about this report, we were told that depressed people sometimes commit suicide and that the drug was not to blame.

Over the last fifteen years we have heard of many other instances in which people became preoccupied with harming themselves or others after starting on an antidepressant.

A man taking Zoloft woke in the middle of the night with a strong urge to kill himself. A woman reported wild thoughts on Prozac about ramming her car into other cars and getting a gun to kill an irritating co-worker.