The Dram of Eale
They told me the 80 year old man who’d had a stroke must be depressed – he wasn’t rehabilitating properly. Could I see him and look at whether the citalopram he’d been started on a week before needed tweaking?
Jeff was solidly middle class, professional. He had never been ill before his stroke and never ever been mentally ill. He had a large loving close-knit family who came to see him every day. He didn’t seem depressed to me. I stopped his SSRI and said I would come back in a week to see how things looked – perhaps his depression would be more obvious then.
A week later, Jeff seemed much better than he had been on citalopram. He clearly didn’t need an antidepressant – if he wasn’t rehabilitating it was because of where his stroke had struck.
‘While on those pills I had a terrible urge to get up and strangle him. I’ve never seen him before.’
I got up to leave just as his family came in. He grabbed my arm. ‘I’ve something to tell you before you go. You see the man across the room’. There was another older man confined to his bed.
‘Well while on those pills you know I had a terrible urge to get up from my bed in the night and go over and strangle him. I don’t know why. I’ve never seen him before. Those feelings have gone since you stopped my pills.’
This makes it about as Evident as you can get that SSRIs cause violence. The only thing possibly more convincing would be data from healthy volunteer studies where aggressive episodes have been relatively common (see Zoloft Study: Mystery in Leeds).
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Lundbeck should be held accountable. How many more people will die from a Citalopram or Escitalopram induced suicide and/or homicide before their supposed pharmacovigilance department will do its job? How many more victims like my lovely son will have to die before the benefits outweigh the risks? It’s great to see you are warning people about this drug but it saddens me that this dubious company are getting away with murder.
When myself and Tony went to meet with Lundbeck in Copenhagen, they admitted, among other terrible things, that they test these drugs on children as young as 7. They also admitted that their drugs can cause birth defects, although they seemed to think that it was up to the doctor to warn these women. Nice company.
If Odysseus, Jeff, Shane and numerous others I could mention could not cope with these mind-altering drugs, how would a child as young as 7 feel? I presume that all these adverse drug reactions were reported to Lundbeck? I know Shane’s ADR was reported to them. Yet, despite Lundbeck having to admit that their drugs can cause suicide, Irish psychiatry are still denying that these drugs can cause suicide and homicide.
If you would like to hear this company in action, here’s a link to our Lundbeck meeting
Leonie
Recently there have been several articles pondering the increase in heart attack deaths in the elderly taking antipsychotics with questions asked as to the possible reason. Consider this. If antipsychotics depress D2 receptors (as their extrapyramidal side effects would seem to imply) and, as there are D2 receptors in the heart itself…..?
Started Citalopram maybe 6 weeks ago.
The last few days, I’ve found myself having fantasies about killing someone who I believed has ‘wronged’ me. This is me, who can’t even kill ants.
Luckily there’s a few oceans between us, so it isn’t something I could do on impulse. But yep: stopped feeling suicidal, started feeling like killing people… nice.