Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher Page 3

  2. Paxil CR, 25 mg/PO qd (once daily) for depression

  3. Follow-up in four weeks is recommended to assess therapy outcome

  What therapy? Meg never received any therapy, at least not counseling where she could sit down with an unbiased third-party human being and just express her fears, cry her tears, lick her wounds, and claim her life. Compassion is what Meg really needed, not more drugs!

  Now, Meg would risk exposure to long-term treatment on antipsychotic drugs as well. Note, in the psychiatrist’s evaluation, he lists three of the criteria indicated in the symptoms of hypnotic drug dependence and withdrawal: insomnia, anxiety, and auditory hallucinations (hearing voices and music). The following side effects are listed under the Adverse Reactions section of the Vicodin package insert labeled Central Nervous System: drowsiness, mental clouding, lethargy, impairment of mental and physical performance, anxiety, fear, dysphoria (depression), psychic dependence and mood changes (PDR 1357). Therefore, the “depression” and “slightly impaired judgment” he noted could have obviously been caused by the chronic use of high-dose hypnotic drugs. Lastly, his evaluation also clearly states, “Patient denies any suicidal or homicidal ideation.” That was before she was given more drugs. Her mental condition rapidly accelerated in its downward spiral.

  Meg returned to Texas in late July 2004 after exhausting my mother’s patience with her as well. Even the most compassionate people have difficulty being a whipping post. It is hard to imagine how aggressive and out-of-character people behave when reacting adversely to psychiatric drugs. It can be even harder to justify their behavior and to forgive and forget. Once, while swept up in a manic psychotic rage, Meg had threatened my mother with physical violence and burning down her house! I guess we all felt like it was my sister’s responsibility to care for her daughter.

  Meg had no sooner arrived than she was put back in to county mental health services where they prescribed more antipsychotic drugs. This time, it was Zyprexa (15 mg) and Abilify (10 mg). Meg went berserk upon reintroduction to medication. She was extremely agitated and paced incessantly. She didn’t want to take the drugs and refused to do so.

  “I’d rather die than feel crazy like that, Aunt Gwen! I feel like I’m completely disconnected from myself…you know? Like I’m watching myself from a third- person omniscient point of view.” she pleaded for understanding.

  Yes, I did know what she meant. I was so torn! I knew exactly how she felt. I had walked in her shoes. I distinctly remembered that feeling of hovering above myself, my logical mind observing the frantic thoughts and compulsive behaviors performed by my disconnected body. The observer self knew everything that was going on, but it could not feel or control anything. I felt powerless over the protagonist. Just like watching a movie, it was surreal. Even so, my conviction about the forced use of psychiatric medication was now being challenged by Meg’s behavior when she was caught up in a manic tailspin.

  “What if she really is crazy?” I thought.

  Still, intellectually, I knew this couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. My sister was furious with me for influencing Meg and claimed I had brainwashed her by equating her experience to mine. She later typed the following in an angry e-mail to our mother:

  THIS IS A PART OF HER ILLNESS THAT WILL BECOME FURTHER IMBEDDED IN HER BRAIN IF NOT TREATED AND THEN WILL BECOME EVEN MORE DIFFICULT TO TREAT OVER TIME!!!! Oh, her attitude has improved since she’s not MANIC & mean as a snake for now…but she’s pretending & I know she is.she thinks that she can pray & think her way out of this & that just isn’t so. She needs therapy & I don’t have the money…I can’t listen to the delusional, twisted thinking anymore because it’s about to make me go insane.I would never have imagined how much life could suck in one person’s lifetime.. AM MAD AS HELL AT THE SITUATION AND EVERYONE INVOLVED.Oh, but I forgot…Hayley & Peyton & I are really the only ones that are INVOLVED.meanwhile, you two idiots sit around doling out advice when you really don’t have to suffer the consequences…MEGAN WILL BE THE ONE TO SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES ULTIMATELY. WHAT A SHAME.

  In early August, during one of Meg’s highly agitated states and following a heated argument, Meg was arrested on a domestic violence charge. I felt so sorry for her. I had spent the previous twenty-four hours attempting to stabilize her. In her condition, I knew jail was the last place she needed to be. Being the only other family member in the area, the court agreed to release Meg to me. So, in search of answers, I started my research for this book after Meg, once again, moved in with my family.

  When I went to pick her up from jail she looked terrible. She trembled uncontrollably and rambled incoherently and angrily about how she had been abused. She had been forced to strip naked. She was put into restraints, and she was not given a mat or a blanket to sleep with. She had not slept at all in the cold, concrete holding cell. She was completely manic and talking in loose associations (disconnected thoughts). She was convinced Time Warner was programming her thoughts through the television. She knew she was being spied on through her computer. Everyone was wearing red. It was a sign. Yellow made her nervous and so on. She chain-smoked. Her wrists and arms were badly bruised from the handcuffs and other restraints. Her eyes looked wild, and her pupils were constricted. I’d seen that look plenty before!

  We spent the next five days riding out one of the scariest times I could remember since my own psychotic reaction. Meg said she heard command voices thatwould instruct her to harm herself. She would rapid-cycle, just like I had, from daylight until dark so drastically and so predictably that I started to know at what time to expect the crying jags and then the manic, euphoric moods. I assured Meg this was a drug reaction and she was not schizophrenic. With time and faith, she would heal. She desperately clung to that promise. I also assured her I would always be there for her. It was a promise I would regret because I could not fulfill it. Following a particularly nasty verbal attack on my husband in which she accused him of being the devil, Meg was asked to leave again. She had nowhere to go except back to her mother, a place where she definitely knew, because of being told so repeatedly, she was not wanted.

  Meg attempted to withdraw from all of her medications by herself. She even quit smoking. By the time I knew about the severe repercussions of sudden withdrawal from SSRI antidepressants, it was too late. She had been off the drugs for several weeks and could not be reintroduced without additional risk. She suffered horribly debilitating depression and social anxiety. Some days, it was all she could do to get out of bed.

  Meg visited a nutritionist and started walking in an attempt to detoxify her body. She wrote and sketched in her journal. She was unable to concentrate well enough to read much. We took drives down to the lake, and would sit listening to CDs and discussing my latest discoveries in research. Still, she and Michelle continued to violently argue. On more than one occasion, the police were called again to the house. Michelle started drinking regularly, and this further upset Meg. She obsessed about the welfare of her younger sisters, Peyton and Hayley. The stress of it all was starting to wear negatively on me again. Plus, I felt my own energy reserves depleting. Out of self-preservation, I tried distancing myself. It is another thing I would live to regret.

  Meg had called me early in the morning the day before her suicide. She left a message for me to call her back. When I tried later that morning, the phone had been disconnected. My sister had not paid the bill. I thought Meg might stop in after she picked up her sisters from school. (Their elementary school was right up the street from my house.) She didn’t. I thought about driving over to check on her that evening, but I was exhausted. Quite frankly, I was also upset with my sister about the e-mail she had sent that berated my mother and me. So, out of fear of an encounter with my sister, I waited until the next day when I knew Michelle would be at work. I never saw Meg again. My husband and I were en route to the house to check on her when the police called my cell phone. I nearly fainted when they told me Meg had died. A part of me died too. If only I had gone soone
r.

  The night before Meg ended her life, she and her mother had been arguing. Meg was given an ultimatum: she would have to go back on the drugs or leave. Michelle could not handle Meg’s constant dysphoric mood or inability to function socially. Meg still couldn’t make a simple trip to Wal-Mart without feeling paranoid and uncomfortable. And here she was faced with the possibility of starting the whole fiasco over again.

  This happened even though I had discussed everything I was uncovering in relation to the SSRI category of antidepressants with her and my sister; even though they knew I had experienced the same kind of thing. This happened even though I had been thoroughly educated on the subject matter and had left my job to do full-time research and write a book about the pharmaceutical cover-ups involved in a number of blockbuster drugs released in the past decade; even though I had expressed a real sense of urgency to alert others. Still, I had only identified the problem. I didn’t know how to fix it. I knew Meg’s recovery would take time, but I couldn’t offer any guarantees or immediate solutions. It appeared the doctors could.

  Meg knew I couldn’t save her. In spite of all my knowledge and experience, few people were listening to me. This was proven by the fact that my sister was on her way home to forcibly take Meg to the psychiatrist and have her placed on medication again. Why? Because that’s what she had been advised to do. Instead, when Michelle arrived at the house, she encountered the police and victim’s services. Meg was already gone. Ultimately, she would have the final word.

  Emotional Anesthesia: Sedating Our Psychic Pain

  We hadn’t even absorbed the tragedy of Meg’s passing yet. All of us were hovered around the fireplace in my family room that evening, including my mother and father; my sister and her friend, Mark; Michelle’s ex-husband, Scott; my nieces, Peyton and Hayley; and my husband and I. We sat engulfed in an awkward silence. Nobody really knew what to say. The pain was so acute. Our emotions were so raw and guarded around one another. So, the most inappropriate thing that could have been said was the next topic of conversation. I had to nearly bite a hole through my tongue in order to avoid overreacting.

  My sister’s friend retrieved two prescription bottles from his coat pocket and explained he had called a doctor friend to get a couple of things to “help Michelle get through this.” There were two prescriptions: one for Ativan and one for Xanax. Then he jokingly gestured, extending his hand as though offering everyone around the room.

  “Pills anyone? Okay, pills for everybody!” he said with a chuckle as he shook one of the bottles to rattle its contents.

  Did he know about the drug reaction Meg had? Did he have any idea what Michelle’s history with drug and alcohol dependence had done to her family or her health? Did he know how she would respond to a reintroduction to short-acting benzodiazepines after her adverse withdrawal reactions to Prozac? Did he know about the tremendous addiction potential and withdrawal symptoms associated with these drugs?

  That was all my family needed right now, to have another drug tragedy to deal with! Also, that was the last thing my nieces needed, something else to remove their mother emotionally so that she would not be available to comfort or support them in their grief. But, because I felt so paralyzed and so defeated by the battle at that point, I watched in silence as he handed my sister the equivalent of a loaded gun. I simply waited until later to approach my former brother-in-law and ask him to lift them from her purse before the evening was out. I know Mark’s intentions were good, but I cannot help but apply the old adage here: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

  3

  A Case against the Antidepressants:

  Prescription for Disaster

  “Whatever is hidden will be brought out into the open and whatever is covered up, will be uncovered.”

  —(Mark 4:22)

  In spite of a growing body of evidence that they are only nominally effective, antidepressants are routinely prescribed for back pain, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), hot flashes, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, chronic pain, weight loss, muscle pain, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), smoking cessation, and sleep disturbance, to name just a few. Antidepressants ranked as the leading therapy class by dispensed prescription volume in 2007, raking in a cool $11.9 billion in U.S. sales (“IMS Health Reports U.S. Prescription Sales Grew 3.8 Percent in 2007, to $286.5 Billion”).

  The cover-ups, misrepresentation of data, false advertising, and biased clinical research associated with the SSRI antidepressant drugs is staggering. I was shocked to learn of a network of SSRI survivors across the nation, who have either experienced the horror of an adverse reaction themselves or a loved one’s death as a result of these drugs. The side effects reported with antidepressant use include mood swings, lack of emotion, vivid and violent dreams, altered personality, racing thoughts, restlessness, inability to sit still, unusual energy surges, inability to recognize reality, silly or giddy behavior, paranoia, blank staring, hyperactivity, aggression, self-destructive behavior, violence, suicidal thoughts and attempts, mania, and psychosis (Ko).

  History reminds us that it took twenty years after Eli Lilly and Parke-Davis introduced LSD and PCP in the United States before the government declared them illegal. Eli Lilly first produced and marketed LSD in the 1950s as an aid to psychoanalysis, a cure for alcoholism, and a way to clear up mental disorders. Parke-Davis promoted angel dust or PCP as an analgesic and anesthesia. Of course, Dr. Sigmund Freud was one of the strongest supporters of the medicinal use of cocaine in psychiatry before he became addicted. Interestingly, all of these drugs act on the brain by increasing serotonin levels. It would be fair to conclude that psychiatry has given us some of the most addictive, destructive drugs ever recorded in history. Is history repeating itself?

  Several of the leading authorities in psychiatry have come forward to denounce the excessive use of the SSRIs and alert people to the similarities in their clinical uses and side effects to the neuroleptic drugs. Neurological side effects seen with the serotonin-boosters and other dangers not commonly acknowledged by their manufacturers now litter psychiatric literature and case studies.

  Depending on its severity, neurologically-driven agitation can be quite dangerous. This was soon to be discovered when large numbers of children, who had no previous indication of being suicidal, began taking their lives after only brief exposure to these drugs. If a patient has not been warned about this potential side effect and confuses it with the deterioration of his or her own emotional and mental state, it can produce abject terror and precipitate psychosis and suicidal tendencies.

  It was the staggering increase in drug-related suicide that eventually resulted in the FDA’s requirement for manufacturers to place a black box warning on all antidepressants regarding this increased risk in children and adolescents. However, even that didn’t happen until September 2004, and it required two congressional inquiries. In 2007, the black box warning was further expanded to include young adults ages 19-24. Manufacturers fought vehemently against these warning and claimed more harm than good could result if patients declined treatment. They have continued to point to the disease being treated as the cause of suicide rather than the drugs they produce.

  In an article appearing in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1989, only two years after the release of Prozac, doctors were already starting to report drug- induced neurological agitation. The article claimed the agitation was “clinically indistinguishable” from that caused by neuroleptic drugs. It declared neurologi- cally driven agitation to be a common side effect of the drug and estimated to occur in ten to twenty-five percent of patients. Similar reports connected with Zoloft, Paxil, and Luvox started to appear in the literature once they were introduced (Glenmullen 47).

  In 1990, a Harvard researcher, Dr. Martin Teicher, and two associates, Carol Clod and Jonathan Cole, published an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry that discussed six cases in which patients on Prozac had become intensely preoccupied with i
deas of suicide. Subsequently, Dr. Teicher was discredited and portrayed as an alarmist in the scientific community.

  That same year, another group of Harvard researchers made another alarming disclosure in the American Journal of Psychiatry. This Prozac clinical trial involved depressed adolescents, and it was conducted by the University of South Carolina. The study was stopped abruptly because of the “emergence of intense violent suicidal and/or homicidal ideation in five patients” (Breggin, Talking Back to Prozac, 163).

  In March 1991, yet another group of researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine published a report on the “Emergence of Self-Destructive Phenomena in Children and Adolescents during Fluoxetine Treatment.” In the report, the authors stated that:

  Self-injurious ideation or behavior appeared de novo [for the first time] or intensified in six of forty-seven patients being treated with Prozac for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Four of the cases required hospitalization and three required restraints, seclusion, or one-to-one nursing care (Breggin, Talking Back to Prozac, 165).

  In 1997, Dr. David Healy, former secretary of the British Association for Psy- chopharmacology and author of Let Them Eat Prozac, conducted an antidepressant clinical trial on a group of healthy volunteers in North Wales. The group consisted of eleven women and nine men between the ages of twenty-seven and fifty-two. All were senior and junior nurses and consulting or training psychiatrists. The study was a comparison between the antidepressants Zoloft (sertraline) and Edronax (reboxetine). It was designed to asses the “better than well” phenomenon described by some Prozac users. It should be noted that Edronax is a SNRI (selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) drug that has not been approved for use in the United States.