Doctors often tell patients that antidepressants can only cause suicidal behavior in children and not in adults. Many publications also make the same claim. The false claim is based on the FDA-approved Black Box Warning for antidepressants that warns about an increased rate of suicidality in children, youth and young adults taking antidepressants, but not in adults over age 24. The Black Box Warning specifically summarizes, “Short-term studies did not show an increase in the risk of suicidality with antidepressants compared to placebo in adults beyond age 24.” The studies that the FDA relied upon for adults over age 24 were dismally flawed and untrustworthy compared to the ones used for children. According to the FDA at the 2006 hearings:
“Due to the large number of subjects in the adult analysis, almost 100,000 patients, the adjudication process was left as the responsibility of the sponsors [the drug companies] and was not overseen or otherwise verified by the FDA. This is in contrast to the pediatric suicidality analysis in which the FDA was actively involved in the adjudication (p. 14).”
In addition, the FDA also announced at the 2006 hearings on antidepressant-induced adult suicidality that it did not require a uniform method of analysis by each drug company and an independent evaluator as required with the pediatric sample.
Thus, the FDA was comparing somewhat good apples (the pediatric studies) to rotten apples (the adult studies), while making them seem comparable. The child studies showed that antidepressants can cause suicidality — the adult studies (after age 24) showed nothing other than FDA collusion with the self-serving drug companies. As I have described in my books and scientific articles, drug companies routinely manipulate their data on suicide to avoid any causal connection to their drug (see for example my 2006 paper about GSK and Paxil).
In the case of Eli Lilly, here are two memos by employee Claude Bouchey (pages 2 & 3 of document) written to the hierarchy of the company in which he expresses guilt and shame about changing official investigator reports of Prozac-induced suicide attempt to misleading terms like “overdose” or “depression.”
Ironically, the FDA controlled and monitored the original pediatric studies precisely because the drug companies on their own failed to find any risk of antidepressant-induced suicidality in any age group. Why would the FDA assume these same self-serving drug companies, left on their own again, would spontaneously begin for the first time to conduct honest studies on the capacity of their products to cause adult suicidality?
Furthermore, even in the rotten-apple adult studies, despite the drug company’s manipulations, Paxil (paroxetine) turned out to be causally associated with increased suicidality in depressed adults in an internal FDA review of the data. As a result, in 2006 the FDA then forced the maker of Paxil, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), to write a “Dear Doctor” letter to all healthcare providers confirming the Paxil/suicidality causal link in adults.
In April 2006, the FDA also made the drug company put a warning in its Full Prescribing Information (label or package insert) about the risk of Paxil causing suicidality in adults with depression; but GSK convinced them to drop it in subsequent years. The warning appeared in the Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) only once in 2007.
Meanwhile, there are many studies showing that antidepressants do cause suicidality and suicide in adults.
Next time you hear someone say that the FDA studies only showed increased suicidality in children and young adults as opposed to adults, remember that the adult studies, unlike the pediatric studies, were not controlled, monitored or validated by the FDA. This is one more example of the extremes the FDA will go to in order to protect drug companies and their often lethal products.
It was bad enough to find out that antidepressants cause suicidality in children. The drug companies and their minions complained mightily. The FDA and the drug companies were not going to allow a repetition of sufficiently unbiased studies that might conclude that adults are also vulnerable to antidepressant-induced suicide.
Thank You Dr Breggin and MIA.
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