March 9, 2013

A Colorado based company, Sundance Diagnostics, contacted me a few months ago to tell me about work they are doing to develop a genetic test to predict suicide risk when patients are prescribed antidepressant drugs. Their plan is to sequence the entire human genome of about 360 patients and controls to see if antidepressant drug risk can definitively be predicted.
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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Psychiatric Drugs, Suicide

February 27, 2013

In August 2010, my friend and fellow ‘suicide mum’ Deb Williams and I established CASPER – Community Action on Suicide Prevention Education & Research. CASPER’s goals are to provide peer support to families bereaved by suicide, to educate politicians and opinion leaders on suicide and its prevention and to support families and communities to reclaim suicide prevention from medical professionals and governments.
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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Community, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Non-Drug Approaches, Psychiatric Drugs, Research, Rethinking Psychiatry/Medical Model, Suicide | Tagged as: CASPER, suicide, suicide prevention

January 23, 2013

The New Zealand government has just published research showing the numbers of children aged 2-14 years being diagnosed with mental disorders has doubled in the last five years with the key driver being an increase in anxiety disorders.

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Categorized in: Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

December 16, 2012

A couple of days ago, after two years of fighting, I received Mylan Pharmaceuticals assessment of the causal link between their drug Fluox and my son’s suicide. Their conclusion is identical to that of the New Zealand drug regulator Medsafe, that the SSRI antidepressant Fluoxetine is the probable cause of Toran’s death. The rating of ‘probable’ includes an assessment that Toran’s suicide was ‘unlikely to be attributed to disease or other drugs.’
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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Psychiatric Drugs, Suicide

December 12, 2012

Today I paid a visit to the Managing Director of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Lloyd Price. Mylan is the company that manufactured the antidepressant Fluox1 which, according to the NZ government, is the most likely cause of my son’s suicide. My dealings with Mylan in the time since Toran died have not been entirely fruitful.
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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Blogs, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Industry, Psychiatric Drugs, Suicide

October 22, 2012

What if your doctor told you about data collected on antidepressants AFTER they had been released on the market. New Zealand data that shows aggression and death are as common as dizziness in reports from doctors about adverse reactions to antidepressants. That suicidal ideation and suicide attempt are as common as insomnia. Imagine you were told that while being exposed to these risks, the data showed that the most likely adverse reaction you would experience would be that the drug didn’t work or stopped working. How might your decision on this particular treatment option be affected?
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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents, Psychiatric Drugs

August 12, 2012

In Medicine there’s a saying “if you hear hoofbeats, don’t look for zebras.”
It’s a reference to the wisdom of looking for the most likely explanations when making a diagnosis rather than looking for those that are rare and unusual. Hoofbeats are of course more likely to be the common horse than the rare zebra. My encounters with New Zealand’s pharmacovigilance system over the past four years have been akin to a safari, where I have witnessed scientists involved in pharmacovigilance and medicines regulators wildly hunting zebras while a rather large and obvious horse was standing on their toes.
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Categorized in: Featured Blogs, Foreign Correspondents

May 7, 2012

My son is dead. He hanged himself at 17 but meh… whatever… that’s yesterday’s news and I’m totally over it now. I don’t long for my child or feel any sorrow or pain. Actually I hardly think about him or …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents

May 3, 2012

New Zealand has the highest rate of youth suicide in the OECD. The numbers of people who die from suicide in this country are twice that of deaths from road traffic crashes. More young people under the age of 25 …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents

April 16, 2012

I had an epiphany the day I first saw my son in a coffin after his suicide. The moments following his hanging himself were a blur of sirens, screaming, people running, violent medical interventions, the nightmare of panic and noise …
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Categorized in: Antidepressants, Foreign Correspondents, Psychiatric Drugs, Uncategorized

March 26, 2012

A new business model in New Zealand mental health treatment has seen psychiatry lose its role in assessment, diagnosis and treatment planning and delivery. In its push to establish a role within this new model, psychiatry has focused on creating demand for the one role in which it faces no competition from other mental health specialists – prescribing. This focus appears to be in direct conflict with the Hipporatic Oath under which doctors swear to avoid over treatment and therapeutic nihilism.
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents

March 19, 2012

Today is the fourth anniversary of the suicide of my only child. Supporting someone dealing with the grief of losing a child to suicide can be challenging. For all those who have been hurt by well-intentioned comments or interventions, I want to offer the following suggestions to friends, family and helping professionals.
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents, Popular

March 15, 2012

In September 2008, the New Zealand Government rolled out a new universal four year old health screen, the B4 School Check.  In addition to the general health, vision, hearing and dental checks traditionally conducted on kiwi kids, the B4 School …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents, Uncategorized

March 6, 2012

My son, Toran, killed himself between 4.00 and 4.30pm on 20 March 2008. At 9.30 that night, I received a phone call from the Crisis Mental Health Team saying Toran was on their list of people to check in with …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents, Uncategorized

February 16, 2012

When told of my son’s sudden suicide, people often ask me how on earth it is possible to carry on living after your child takes his or her life. The honest answer is that I don’t know. Somehow you keep …
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents

February 4, 2012

On 20 March 2008, I arrived home from work to find my only child, 17 year old Toran, had hanged himself. Toran had been prescribed the antidepressant fluoxetine 15 days earlier, despite having no diagnosis of any mental disorder
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Categorized in: Foreign Correspondents