What other drugs can you name which cause people to run off and kill strangers en masse?
If hundreds or thousands of people died because of Bextra or Vioxx, at least only the people who took them died. How do we justify drugs which cause people not just killing themselves but also their family members and total strangers? With the amount of money companies like Lilly spend in politics, its unlikely the FDA is going to treat these drugs like they treat any other drugs which kill people. So trial lawyers end up being the last line of defense unfortunately.
Medically, it is not even know exactly how SSRIs work. I don’t say this out of ignorance. I’ve actually spoken personally with clinical research physicians who work on them for the pharmas and they readily admit that they don’t know. And they don’t know why the side effects are created and have no idea which people will react in which way because this is slightly better than shuffling the cards to try to get a better hand - you don’t know if you will get a better hand, a worse one or one which is just as bad but entirely different.
For all of the people who are, you can’t say cured since there is no such thing with SSRIs, helped you can also find people who have other side effects which would normally be considered mental illnesses themselves. It is just a matter of whether the people likes the new set of symptoms over their old set. But even if there were 5 cases of ‘cures’ for every case where somebody wanted to kill themselves, would this pass FDA approval if it were a heart medication?
You might also find that people who are given these drugs (mostly by people who aren’t experience or educated in doing so) are getting some of the worst medical care out there. If you can’t spot an alcoholic, you shouldn’t be prescribing SSRIs for depression. And try getting somebody off of Lithium or Haldol compared to meth, cocaine or heroine. The latter are a breeze and they don’t freak out while they are doing it. I’d much rather have somebody come to be on crack than on Prozac. At least I know what the crack addict will be going through but I have to be ready for anything on the psychoactive scripts.
You used an incorrect word there. I don't know any drugs which caused people to run off and kill strangers, en masse or otherwise. Your supposition that this is the case does not make it so. The increase in public shootings is not really even linked to SSRI usage. We have no evidence that the last shooters (Colorado or Omaha) had taken SSRIs in the previous weeks. Just that they'd taken them in their life. Now if you have a severely troubled person, you'd expect them to have been put on a psych drug at some point in their lives. That doesn't mean that 4 years later that the SSRI plays even the slightest role in the killing. Correlation is not causation. I'm sure this won't deter you a bit.
“would this pass FDA approval if it were a heart medication?”
- and that’s the real problem, isn’t it ? Psychiatry and the pharm companies concocted the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness, with no provable science behind it, and now they are trying to have the FDA and the general public think that the SSRIs are as well tested for mental illnesses as Synthroid is for thyroid disease.