Our psychological, emotional, relational, social, financial and physical lives are important to change for the better but our intellectual, spiritual, moral and religious lives are most important to concern ourselves about changing for the better.

The only one who can really save us from destruction and more importantly from eternal torment is our own selves and the One True Eternal God who created all humans, all earthly creatures and the earth itself.

Psychiatry is such a complicated science. I have difficulty understanding it. It takes 12 years just to become a psychiatrist I understand. Maybe one of those professors of psychiatry could enlighten me to one fact.

The FDA’s “Labeling Change Request Letter for Antidepressant Medications” as shown at http://www.fda.gov/cder/drug/antidepressants/SSRIlabelChange.htm says “Date created: October 15, 2004, Updated, October 28, 2004. One could reasonably assume the drug companies did not start slapping Black Box warning on new batches of antidepressant that very day. In fact if you take into consideration that new labels would have to be made up and put on bottles of antidepressants and that stocks of these drugs in the pipeline to pharmacies needed to be sold, I don’t think the public became significantly aware of any Black Box warning on antidepressants until early 2005.

I didn’t see any significant news coverage of this Black Box warning for antidepressant until December of 2004 as illustrated by the 3 December 2004 issue of “ScienceDaily” which can be found at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041203100252.htm.

So the idea that the Black Box warning on antidepressants had anything to do with an increase in teen suicide is TOTALLY FALSE and just wishful thinking on the part of psychiatrists and a waste of money for any drug company that may have paid them to write such stories. I’m not saying this happened mind you.

In fact, 2004 marked the high point of prescriptions for antidepressants for teens. It is true that prescription rates for antidepressants did drop after the Black Box warning but that didn’t occur in any significant number until 2005–a year that we don’t yet have any CDC suicide stats for. One might just as scientifically infer that the rise in teen suicides during 2004 was due to record numbers of kids taking antidepressants. I wonder if I can get paid for saying that?

Thus, it is not even clear that there was a
decrease in SSRI prescriptions, so there is not even any solid basis for a correlational relationship, much less a causal relationship. I’m glad to see that you are writing on this issue.

But isn’t this exactly what happened with the black-box warning?

There is little evidence antidepressants have caused more adolescent suicides, only that kids think about it more, just as they do when treated with Cognitive Behavior Therapy (Bridge JA, et al. 2005)

OTOH, there is a lot of evidence that alcohol and other “recreational” drugs often used to self-medicate anxiety and depressive disorders greatly increase the risk of suicide.