Antidepressants

A meta-analysis looks at the effects of researcher background on study findings for trials comparing pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy for depression.

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.

The Times Katie Gibbons reports that the UK “NHS is spending a record £780,000 a day on antidepressants as failing mental health services struggle...

The German pilot who apparently deliberately crashed a passenger plane reportedly had antidepressant drugs in his home, use of which is restricted or disallowed by many aviation regulators.

In a new study, researchers found no evidence of antidepressant group variance, which means that there's no particular group of patients who improve more than others on the drug.

A new article in Lancet Psychiatry finds that slower tapering of SSRIs is better for preventing antidepressant withdrawal effects.

In 2010, my 25-year old son was prescribed Prozac for depression. After a psychiatrist doubled his dose, my son became acutely psychotic and had to be admitted to the hospital. Over the next twelve months, during which time he was treated with antidepressants and neuroleptics, my son had five further psychotic experiences. I thought it might be that my son was having difficulty metabolising the drugs.

An increase in suicidal thoughts is a known and serious side-effect for various types of antidepressants. Recent studies suggest that there may be some...

Effects of discontinuing SSRIs and SNRIs reported on an online forum indicate significant and long-lasting withdrawal symptoms.

Ever higher levels of pharmaceutical drugs are turning up in drinking water supplies, and an op-ed in the UK Mirror discusses a study that...

Addiction Today reports "Attention on illicit drugs has deflected focus from the gigantic scale of harms by legal, prescribed drugs. We give you the...

Researchers at Duke University who studied 183 adolescents for three years found that increased depression associated with poverty may be mediated by epigenetic changes in DNA. The...

In the BMJ this week there is a debate about the antidepressants. On the “Yes, The antidepressants are overprescribed” side is Des Spence. This is hardly a new debate and Des Spence makes a good case for the overuse of the antidepressants, but what caught our eye was the response by Adrian Preda, and his discussion about the findings of Irving Kirsch.

A new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry concludes that “antidepressants are largely ineffective and potentially harmful.”

Scientists at the Yale Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency (CRIT) published a new policy paper this month criticizing the current state of biomedical research and calling for improved transparency in research methods.

Zoloft isn't just for depression any more; it also kills fungal meningitis. Researchers from Texas A&M find that "The problem for many current antifungal...

The norm in science is that there is free access to the data underpinning experiments. If free access is denied; it’s not science. In the case of branded pharmaceuticals, we do not even know what trials have been done. What is put in the public domain is not data. The selected highlights of a football game and the comments of the pundits afterwards don't change the score. The selected highlights of pharma studies and the comments of pundits routinely change the score.

Psychotropic medications, including short-acting benzodiazepines, strongly increase the frequency of falls in the elderly, according to research from the Netherlands published in Maturitas: The...

From MinnPost: A new University of Minnesota study has found that anticholinergic drugs, including antidepressants, continue to be prescribed to millions of older Americans despite...

The Nordic Cochrane Center conducted a systematic review of existing research trials on antidepressants and found that the drugs doubled the risk of feelings...

In 2009, my friend Leonie’s 22-year-old son Shane killed himself and another young man after taking Citalopram for 17 days. Eighteen days after Shane’s death, Psychiatrist Dr Michael Corry publicly stated his view that he could not have done what he did had he not been on Citalopram. Initially Leonie admits to thinking he was mad. How could medicine prescribed by a doctor have anything to do with what had happened to her son?

Julia Llewellyn Smith reports in the Telegraph that "Last year, 53 million prescriptions were issued for antidepressants in England alone, nearly double the number prescribed a...

The New York State Supreme Court found in favor of Janice Mazella, widow of  basketball coach and teacher Joe Mazella, in a malpractice suit...

The BBC reports that the number of people in Scotland taking antidepressants has increased by 5% in the past year with most of the patients being women and those in the poorest parts of the country. “We are now looking at the flabbergasting statistic of more than one in seven people in Scotland being prescribed antidepressants this year,” Conservative health spokesman Jackson Carlaw said. “We urgently have to look at better alternatives than simply parking people on medication in the hope things don't get any worse, with no aspiration for complete recovery."