There will be a sequence of 7 weekly posts here about Stephen O’Neill and You that will also feature on Stephen’s Voice Facebook page.
This and next week’s post feature videos about why everyone should help bring some good from Stephen O’Neill’s death – not just because the same could easily happen you but also because his death was caused by decent and honourable people and You can do a lot to prevent decent people doing indecent things.
See the Spotlight on the Suicides series – The Family Doctor, The Hospital Doctor, The Coroner,
The first video is – HERE – the text below.
All Honorable Men
I was an expert at Stephen O’Neill’s inquest. I was told the coroner was a decent man and the doctors treating him seemed decent, so I had hopes the inquest would recognize the obvious – that Stephen’s treatment killed him.
Stephen was put on sertraline – Zoloft – a very commonly used SSRI antidepressant – after he became anxious. His anxiety was probably triggered by an antibiotic – doxycycline which is also an SSRI that can lead to suicide. His doctor didn’t know this.
Stephen had a toxic reaction to Sertraline. He became agitated and suicidal. These reactions are common but his was severe and immediate. He told his family but also told the pharmacist who gave him the pills who agreed the drug had – as Stephen suspected – caused a problem and suggested he contact the hospital which he did.
In the hospital and later over the next few weeks when seen at home or in clinics, he told any staff he came in contact with and any doctor he talked to that sertraline had made him suicidal.
None of them were listening. They heard him alright – they recorded what he said. None of them told him he was wrong. But none of them acted on what he had told them. They later told the family what he said was impossible as the drug was now out of his body – which is just plain wrong.
This pattern wasn’t just a problem with sertraline. Almost every other drug they tried him on – and they threw drugs at him – caused problems that that drug can cause pretty commonly but problems that most doctors don’t know it causes.
Stephen told them for instance that the quetiapine – Seroquel – they gave him for sleep was doing just the opposite. Quetiapine is often given for sleep but the second most common problem reported to FDA on this drug is insomnia. His doctors didn’t listen – he had to insist on it being changed so they changed him to something very similar – Mirtazapine. Both Quetiapine and Mirtazapine cause also cause suicide. Finally, they gave him another Sertraline-like drug Buspirone, which killed him.
Stephen also told them what did work for him – but they kept giving him treatments they were pre-programmed to give him and not giving him the things that he made clear to them had helped.
Stephen knew no more about these drugs and what they do that might help or not help than most of us know but he knew – as anyone listening to this knows – what effect a drug in fact is having on him in his case and on you in your case.
One reason Stephen O’Neill died was because even good doctors now, decent human beings, when it comes to drug induced injuries have gone back to the stone ages. They have no idea what to do – they flail around as I said at the inquest. When I said this, the hospital lawyer went into a splutter of indignation. I thought he might have a stroke.
What do decent doctors do then when it comes to an inquest and they have a family sitting across the room from them? Well in the case of Stephen’s family doctor, as good a family doctor as you will find, it seems to me that – as people where I come from would say – he fibbed.
He said Stephen was dramatically different the day he put him on sertraline. The night before Stephen had seemed anxious to his family but no more so that he’d been for the previous few weeks. He was dramatically different soon after he took the drug – not before.
The doctor then said he gave sertraline because it is known to be much better for severe depressions than drugs like Prozac. This is complete garbage – invented in Pfizer’s marketing department. Anyone who gets to see the data on sertraline knows it to be just about the least effective antidepressant there is.
What did the hospital doctors – also decent people – say? They said they were following orders just like soldiers anywhere do which sometimes leads them to do some pretty awful things. Their orders came from MHRA – the British version of FDA and EMA – and from the writers of the NICE Guidelines for treating depression.
It would be difficult to design a better killing machine – the regulators don’t see the data on the drugs they approve, and the Guideline makers base their recommendations on articles written by pharmaceutical company employees.
What did the coroner – a decent man – do? He was handed the problem on a plate – Sertraline killed Stephen O’Neill and part of the reason it did so was that the literature Stephen’s doctors depended upon is the greatest concentration of fake news on earth. I made it clear I would assist the coroner if he wanted to raise these issues with the powers that be.
He didn’t grasp the nettle. His conclusion blamed the balance of Stephen’s mind without mentioning the drug.
The same thing will happen you if any of your drugs kills you in any way – heart attack, stroke, whatever – coroners don’t have a box they can tick for drug induced death. They don’t collect the data on the drugs people like you and me might be on when we die.
Our drugs and the injuries they can cause are interred with our bones – just as Mark Anthony claimed would happen the good Caesar did unless we did something. We need to have a meeting with the honorable men who killed Stephen and kill tens of thousands with treatments annually.
The coroner didn’t but I have written to some of the men who have been given honours by our system about this problem and will make this correspondence available for anyone of you who wants to use it in your country or in any way.
My feeling on this matter is that when we have seen further posts it may be easier to work out exactly how best to make our voices heard. I am perfectly willing to contact anyone within the Welsh community if you give me a nudge in the right direction. Would a newspaper reporter of Court cases (and inquests I guess), for example, be someone who may know of a way to a ‘listening ear’ within the system?
Watch this space
D
Can it not be arranged to actually gather some evidence of not just how dangerous these drugs are (which you already have plenty of, but also how dependence forming these poisons are and how destructive the process of getting of them can be? I am a (still in WD) recovering addict but now recenlty functional again, and am looking to put an FB “group” together where people can share the “nitty-gritty” of their psych drug histories and, if appropriate, their discontinuation experiences. I will collate it all, anonymise it and share with however I can or is interested. It might also be useful in starting the process of a class action against the very drug companies themselves. Would anybody be interested in assisting? But, whilst there have been numerous horror stories over the years of people’s horrednous experiencea getting off the drugs (and how many have given up and been re-presecribed – it happened to me once) nothing really seems to be happening. I am also certain that there are many more families similar to poor stephen’s where drugs have caused people to take their own lives (a recent report of a student (6m ago?) fits the bill exactly).
“But it was too late, on 29th July 2016 I was dead, six weeks after I first took medication; I was found by brother, kneeling forward with a rope around my neck.”
Honourable people, are they?
They might have degrees, with honours, and perceived as being the most upright and upstanding pillars of society that we have. Especially, now, in this day-and-age, turning some Wall-to-Wall Orators in to Experts…
When these people make huge mistakes with medications because they haven’t looked around, done any research or even read medical journals and newspapers, you have to wonder where their minds have been.. Too busy, too used to the endless queues coming to them with ‘anxiety and depression’, too used to being – one step ahead of the patient..
Except, they are not one step ahead
They are several steps behind
Quite why they develop cloth-ears, when the patient is giving the diagnosis is any one’s guess.
They know that they have the backing of the entire Medical Establishment; they also have the backing of Honourable Sirs; Sirs in the Establishment, Sirs in the Pharmaceutical Industry.
When confronted, they would prefer not to listen.
We have read a lot about Stephen’s care and case:-
Last year I wrote about Stephen’s inquest and the coroner’s verdict:
http://antidepaware.co.uk/the-system-is-not-listening/
Instead of investigating the rôle that drugs with verified links to suicidal ideation may have had on Catherine’s state of mind, the coroner chose to opt for a verdict that would not have been out of place in the Middle Ages.
http://antidepaware.co.uk/news-and-comment/
This case is as explosive as a clear-cut-case should be.
There are huge numbers of people ‘accused’ of taking their own life, mounting up and up, and all the stories point to the medications. Point to the medications by intelligent researchers, not point to the medication by most journalists, doctors; misleading, deceiving, messages to coroners.
Senior figures are beginning to sound more like pharmaceutical representatives, and bluster and wing-it to a very receptive audience.
All their followers fawn and toady, as it seems to most that this is a very unsavoury subject; it just doesn’t happen.
We know it happens regularly, and we know that Doctors can be sneaky and devious when pushed.
Stephen’s Voice with David’s Voice will be unlocking a vast array of ‘secrets’ and looking forward to the unveiling for the next few weeks.
I have great difficulty, knowing what doctors can get up to, when over a loch, a doctor I know, has a weekly newspaper column on ‘the virus’ and has reinvented/repositioned himself, as a ‘local hero’ …
GPs and Coroners have to be held accountable –
for those like the O’Neill family –
The well-oiled and greasy killing-machine –
going full steam ahead ‘with Stephen’, on getting to the nitty-gritty …
It is close to treason, that few understands this …
Do you think that the general public may find it easier to believe us after watching the UK Covid-19 circus? They will at least have seen that those at the top will try anything to throw the blame away from themselves as well as lie and cover up for one another whenever necessary.
It will be up to us to make sure that people realise that the behaviours they have seen during this period is the same as the behaviours that we have endured for years.
Also, we may well find that doctors will expect our support when this is over, as I’m certain that the government are in for a very tough time from all in the NHS and other Care Services. They now know that they have the backing of their communities; let’s move, with them, to push for a real acceptance, at the top, of the need for truth and honesty in all areas of Care and Medicine. I feel that it will be the best chance we’ve had to wake people up to what has gone on – and doctors too may awaken to the fact that “just following guidelines” was their weakest point.
Doctors are totally complicit in the current situation. If they end up getting the wrong end of the stick at the moment – its difficult to feel sorry for them.
Where were and are the doctors and others in healthcare when it comes to the PPE – Personal Protective Equipment – you and I need if we take a drug – access to the data from the clinical trials that have been done.
D
I could not for one moment say that I feel sorry for the doctors generally but I do feel that, in their present situation, they, along with nurses and all other care workers have been let down by the system and have my sympathy.
The fact that we have been let down for years regarding medication matters, whilst absolutely true, should not detract from what is happening at present. The lack of protection for all who come in contact with possible cases of Covid is scandalous. We are fully aware that the whole world is searching wildly for the same equipment but that does not excuse the team in power in the UK to put on a daily act of denial.
Following this fiasco, doctors will need to open up to what we’ve had to say for years regarding the powers behind the scandals – we need to keep repeating our concerns and they need to start listening properly to us. They now know how it feels to have the failures of those in power explained in words of criticism of their own use of equipment – which rings so true of THEIR failures, explained in words of criticism of OUR personalities, so often used to cover the underlying problems with prescribed medications.
Yes. Spot-on. Time to stop beating about the bush with The [Diseased] System, & all who are complicit within it.
One would think and hope so, but judging by the number of people (seems like 98%) happily complying with non legal mask wearing, I think not. Good people ‘trust’ and ‘experts’ take advantage…
Although we CAN draw PPE comparisons, I guess PPE for consumers of drugs is the warning label – it, just like a mask, is insufficient.
Nurses, doctors and hospital staff are experiencing what consumers of antidepressants have been experiencing for years. They’ve been crying out for help, crying out for protection to keep them alive. Whereas eventually, those on the frontline will get that protection, consumers of antidepressants don’t – they just get recommendations on a slip of paper and reviews that churn out the same message, ‘the benefits outweigh the risks’.
I’m often asked who is to blame, prescribers, regulators or drug companies. Whilst they all must shoulder some of the blame, I never really thought about coroners until Brian (antidepaware) came along. Coroners are the ones that have the final say, they tune in to the deceased to try and give them a voice – the deceased are shouting, “Warn others, I don’t want the same to happen to other people” – Alas, coroners aren’t really skilled in mediumship and have no psychic abilities. They do, however, have eyes and ears but like most self-proclaimed mediums and psychics they tend to block out ‘outside influences’ because they claim they have to tune into what the dead person is telling them.
Coroners don’t have the ability to speak to the dead, no more than Derek Acorah did, they just like to think they can. For them, at least, it keeps the dissident voices at bay.
Thank you Dr. Healy.
We found your video (above link) to be deeply moving.
Not least because we were coerced into continuing to “give” our enchanting loved one the drugs “thrown” at her for serially misdiagnosed AKATHISIA.
Drugs like sertraline which induced much more intense and overwhelming akathisia.
This misdiagnosed as “psychotic depression”followed by a cascade of drugs resulting in a generalised psychotropic malignant syndrome which was also misdiagnosed.
The acute and sub acute brain injuries could not have been missed by any of the clinical medical students I taught over many decades. They were denied emphatically by her “doctors”. Many other, multi-systems injuries were to follow.
I was ridiculed for even suggesting such heresy!
Seeking more wisdom and empathy, I moved her care to a different Region.
This lead to coercion into “giving” both quetiapine and mirtazapine, apparently prescribed without any consideration of the devastating ADRs of psychotropic drugs, or indeed, apparently without any evidence of a considered review of differential diagnosis.
Nearly a decade on, the injuries have profoundly and adversely changed her life, and the life of her family as we tread this extended bereavement for The Life That Was Taken, whilst a damaged but living body was left.
When we join neighbours, widely separated on our door steps, to clap and acknowledge our health service staff, it is with great difficulty after experiencing these iatrogenic disasters.
At the same time I recall clearly what it feels like to admit and try to care for patients with a disease which we (then) did not know, whether or not, would kill our staff, colleagues and families.
It would have been more honest to carry a banner, whilst NHS-clapping, identifying those who we do not wish to applaud.Those who could not differentiate ADRs from Severe Mental Illness, and who would not listen to the valid concerns of family, even when they have many years of experience as a medical practitioner.
This experience allows us to perceive the courage, sacrifice, wisdom and life-long commitment that must lie behind your video.
Next time I will be applauding your message Dr. Healy, and also showing gratitude for all those caring for Covid 19.
Sertraline killed my son. I am certain of it. This post confirms all my greatest fears and beliefs.
He had changed in a certain way, from being calm, sunny natured young man aged 21 when studying at Bristol University, where he loved his work and was getting excellent results, but suddenly ‘different’ in a very strange way. He was not depressed. He could rally, but he said his brain wasn’t working quite right. He kept going, building a career, but ‘with a shot brain’, as he described it. If he was anxious, it was because he didn’t understand what the heck was happening to him. No one seemed keen to admit it. It was, we realised, after his death, definitely a well documented reaction to RoAccutane isotretinoin which he had had prescribed for him for acne, aged 21. And because he had been pretty fed up before that with the bad and persistent acne, his annoyance about it was classed later as having been ‘depressed’. But this was NOT your classical depression. This was frustration and disappointment at the appearance of his skin, which took away his confidence. He was fine behind his computer where no one could see him. He only became anxious when he had to lecture to large groups of people in big companies and imagined them scrutinising his appearance. A very reasonable feeling, in actual fact. We might all feel the same.
But the effects of isotretinoin got worse. And his skin got worse. And so he was given more courses of it. And he could NOT believe that his trusted doctors would give him something that could mess up his brain. So he decided it must be his fault, that his mind was acting so oddly, that his memory, once so sharp, was letting him down every so often. So then he was into a new mindset…..”I must be mad”. God help me, I must be hopelessly mad. Anxiety kicks in….
Enter Citalopram, followed by Venlafaxine, followed by Olanzapine, accompanied by Zopiclone. And like Stephen O’Neill he kept asking why he was feeling so much worse and worse. He kept telling them he felt suicidal. (He hadn’t been suicidal on the isotretinoin – furious, fed up, frustrated, sure, but always looking for skin solutions as far as his brain would let him). He begged to understand what was happening to him.
Enter Sertraline. We saw the difference at once. He told us he was suicidal. He told his GP and psychiatrist he was suicidal. They all said, “well, if you want to kill yourself Olly, there’s nothing we can do to stop you.” He was now totally different. He was determined to die. We, his ever loving parents, saw the difference. We’d tried to buoy him up for 11 years through his brain struggles, but now we were terrified, there was absolutely no reasoning with him. We sat down with our own GP and begged her to intervene and co-operate with his, to DO SOMETHING. Before the inevitable happened. She said she couldn’t, it was up to him. But the ‘him’ that had been ‘him’ wasn’t him any more. The Sertraline dose was high. Within just over a month, he was dead.
We watched it all, helplessly. It didn’t need to happen. But we know that there was a difference in the kind of damage from isotretinoin to the effects of Sertraline. It was the latter that killed him, along with the awkward turning away from grasping the nettle by those treating him. They pitched him into hell. And he bravely, decently, honourably, went on believing in them and their lousy medicine.
After he died, we tackled his very nice Coroner. To be fair, we weren’t sure of our ground till we had done a year’s research. We could have made a better case. We’ve since written to many coroners as we’ve teamed up with more and more parents who’ve lost youngsters like our son. The coroners rarely act in any really policy-changing ways. They plead the limitations of their brief. We ask them to report cases to the Head Coroner. We never get a response.
We looked at going the legal route. Suing for what happened to our son. But no, counsel’s advice was that he’d been given lots of difference prescribed medications so how could we hope to blame one against another? How lucky for big Pharma.
We tried looking at protesting about the appalling behaviour of the psychiatrist but the GMC didn’t feel, apart from his caustic words, that he held blame. After all, our son had decided to swallow the medication he and his cohorts had prescribed, so it was apparently only our son’s fault if it killed him, it was his chioce. Unlucky, tough, but there you go. Our son didn’t take an overdose by the way, in fact he was trying to get OFF the Sertraline because he’d at last twigged that the very nice medics were out of their depths after all. It scared him terribly that he was actually possibly more clued-up than they were.
It horrifies me to see how people’s minds are closed to all this. Until it happens to them. I can’t let myself remember too vividly the last few weeks of our son’s life. I wish so much that I’d known then what I know now, what is clearly explained on the video link above, by an authoritative figure who makes a convincing case. Our problem was that no one in authority then was admitting any of this about Sertraline, or any other medications. Our beloved son died before his time. Like thousands of others. And try as we might, and have done, for nearly eight years, we can’t seem to find a way to wake up the Establishment or even many of our unsuspecting peers. But we keep calm and carry on, because we must. It would be good in a way to act indecently but I fear it would undermine our case. We have to be cleverer than that. There will be a way, we just have to find it.
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Chief-Coroner-Guidance-No.-34-COVID-19_26_March_2020-.pdf
15 April 2020 update on CQC’s COVID-19 response
care quality commission
COVID-19 Update
15 April 2020
A weekly update for providers and professionals working in primary medical and dental services, sharing the latest guidance on COVID-19 and CQC’s approach during this period
Updated deaths notification form: clarification
We have now updated our online notification of deaths form so that practices notifying us of any death that meets the above criteria are able to indicate whether that death was the result of either suspected or confirmed coronavirus at the same time. This information will help us to work with system partners to mobilise the right level of support and to inform the government response
No surpises here.
I just don’t understand how the medical profession can be this stupid in 2020.
Consider this article in nz herald recently
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12322376
“The Herald has seen a letter from one senior psychiatrist at a district health board recommending if patients cannot get supplies of fluoxetine they switch to another available antidepressant.
These include citalopram, escitalopram, paroxetine, or a different class of antidepressant such as venlafaxine or mirtazapine.
However, Tauranga psychiatrist Dr Caleb Armstrong urged against switching without consultation with a prescriber because those antidepressants had much greater withdrawal complications than fluoxetine.
“It usually takes four to six weeks of not taking fluoxetine or taking it at a lower dose before people get into major difficulties with relapse into low mood or anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder.
“If this supply problem is fixed in the next couple of weeks there shouldn’t be too many difficulties for people.”
But more than a few weeks without the medication would mean a number of people will relapse into mental illness “and that’s a concern”.
Armstrong said switching to the other antidepressants could present longer-term problems if they also became in short supply as the global coronavirus pandemic continues.”
When they talk here of relapse they are revealing a complete vacuum of knowledge regarding what they are witnessing. All these symptoms are not relapse they are withdrawal symptoms from a too fast taper or non existent taper. Furthermore it is well known that withdrawal symptoms are delayed. Three months is very common. Yet these people continue to blame the patient and not the poison.
Cant help but wonder how many people the above senior clueless psychiatrist and Armstrong have harmed.
Yes, as a New Zealander (NZ), I remain Speechless as to these types of ‘professional’ mindsets & behaviours, etc, in New Zealand, & just the Mindboggling surrounding societal Unconditional, non-questioning going-along-with-it-all. The NZ Medical doctor culture (& within which Psychiatrists fit nicely), for starters, is INDESCRIBABLY DISEASED, behind the outer ‘professional’ façade – evidenced by the Toxic behaviours which emanate from this culture the split second their Walls are ever so lightly touched-upon & they feel in the slightest bit Threatened. Thanks for your contribution here.