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A drug that failed to fight the blues could be the female answer to the little blue pill Viagra, the lead North American investigator analysing tests of the drug said Tuesday. Women who took the drug flibanserin when it was being tested as an anti-depressant said it didn't help them beat the glums, but did give them "an increase in libido that they liked," John Thorp, one of the investigators analyzing data from three clinical trials of the drug, told AFP.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Use of antidepressant drugs in the United States doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a mix of factors, researchers reported on Monday. About 6 percent of people were prescribed an antidepressant in 1996 -- 13 million people. This rose to more than 10 percent or 27 million people by 2005, the researchers found. "Significant increases in antidepressant use were evident across all sociodemographic groups examined, except African Americans," Dr. Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry. "Not...

Gadfly or Watchdog? by: Bethany Stotts, July 15, 2008 Some controversies never die. As Accuracy in Academia recently reported, Dr. Alan Schatzberg and around thirty medical researchers are now under investigation by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for financial conflicts of interest. In Dr. Schatzberg’s case, the conflicts reach as far back as 1998, when he co-founded the company that purchased a patent for mifepristone from Stanford University, his then (and current) employer. To this day Dr. Schatzberg continues as the principal investigator on Stanford’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study the anti-depressant effects of mifepristone, an abortion drug....

The Medicated Americans: Antidepressant Prescriptions on the Rise Close to 10 percent of men and women in America are now taking drugs to combat depression. How did a once rare condition become so common? I am thinking of the Medicated Americans, those 11 percent of women and 5 percent of men who are taking antidepressants. It is Sunday night. The Medicated American—let’s call her Julie, and let’s place her in Winterset, Iowa—is getting ready for bed. Monday morning and its attendant pressures—the rush to get out of the house, the long commute, the bustle of the office—loom. She opens the...

The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found. In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal...

Parents of clinically depressed children often find themselves in a troubling quandary, forced to weigh the mood-lifting benefits of antidepressants against the small but very real risk of suicidal behavior that may occur in young people who take these drugs. The Food and Drug Administration requires a black box warning on antidepressants (including Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft) concerning the possibility of suicidal thoughts, attempts, and behaviors in anyone under 25 who takes the drugs. But a new study, published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association, indicates that the drugs' benefits outweigh the risks. Researchers examined 27 clinical...

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- The suspected gunman in the Virginia Tech shooting rampage, Cho Seung-Hui, was a troubled 23-year-old senior from South Korea who investigators believe left an invective-filled note in his dorm room, sources say. The note included a rambling list of grievances and ended with the words "Ismail Ax" in red ink on the inside of one of his arms.

Close window Published online: 7 August 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060807-1 Club drug finds use as antidepressantPsychedelic ketamine hits the blues surprisingly fast.Erika Check Pills popped in a nightclub are potential therapeutics too.© Punchstock The 'club drug' ketamine may be the fastest-acting antidepressant ever tested, researchers report today. A team based at the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, studied ketamine in 17 people with major depression. All the subjects had failed to respond to treatment with standard antidepressant drugs or more drastic methods, such as electroshock therapy. But 71% felt better the day after taking ketamine,...

A British diplomat went berserk after a drinking binge on his flight home from tsunami aid work in Thailand, a court heard today. Colonel Peter Roberts, the British defence attaché in Thailand, hurled obscene abuse at other passengers in business class, threatened to kill cabin staff, grabbed at women, and struggled free of the plastic ties binding his wrists and ankles to subdue him, it was alleged. He was arrested when his flight landed at Heathrow and then tried to punch and kick police officers, Isleworth Crown Court in London heard. As fellow passengers and cabin staff tried to restrain...

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), include the drugs Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Lexapro, and Celexa. The drugs increase the availability of serotonin, which acts as a chemical messenger in the brain among other areas. Millions of Americans take SSRIs for depression and other mood disorders, and in the U.S. alone sales of the drugs top $10 billion a year. In a newly published essay, anatomy professor Jonathan Leo, PhD, along with colleague Jeffrey Lacasse, say that SSRI ads aimed at the public are often misleading. Leo teaches neuroanatomy at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Bradenton, Fla. "The advertising is...

BETHESDA, Md., Sept. 14 - Federal drug regulators should warn physicians and patients in the strongest possible terms that antidepressants not only cause some children and teenagers to become suicidal but most have also failed to cure their depression, a federal advisory committee voted Tuesday. The committee voted 15 to 8 that the Food and Drug Administration should mandate that the drugs contain "black box" warnings on the sheet of information that physicians review when prescribing drugs. This type of warning is in boldface type, surrounded by a black border and placed at the top of a drug's warning label....

PHOENIX, June 1 — In the midst of a worldwide debate on whether depressed children should be treated with antidepressant drugs like Prozac, a landmark government-financed study has found that Prozac helps teenagers overcome depression far better than talk therapy. But a combination of the two treatments, the study found, produced the best result. The study, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, was the first to compare psychotherapy and drug treatment for depressed adolescents. Statistically, the researchers found, talk therapy — in which a patient discusses problems with a therapist — was by itself no more effective in...

The number of depressed American children being treated with antidepressants has soared over the past decade -- a tectonic shift in the practice of psychiatry -- but new scientific reviews of the research that fueled the trend suggest that the drugs' benefits have been dramatically oversold. The use of antidepressants among children grew three- to tenfold between 1987 and 1996, data from various studies indicate, and a newer survey found a further 50 percent rise in prescriptions between 1998 and 2002. The explosion in antidepressant use occurred even though the vast majority of clinical trials have failed to prove that...

Top Food and Drug Administration officials admitted yesterday that they barred the agency's top expert from testifying at a public hearing about his conclusion that antidepressants cause children to become suicidal because they viewed his findings as alarmist and premature. "It would have been entirely inappropriate to present as an F.D.A. conclusion an analysis of data that were not ripe," Dr. Robert Temple, the Food and Drug Administration's associate director of medical policy, said in an interview. "This is a very serious matter. If you get it wrong and over-discourage the use of these medicines, people could die." Dr. Temple...

<p>The study examined antidepressant use from 1998 to 2002 among 2 million youngsters ages 18 and younger who were covered by commercial health insurance. About one in 15 children in the United States is covered by commercial insurance, according to officials of Express Scripts Inc. of St. Louis, which conducted the study.</p>

Check your local listings for airtimes. (Current show is updated every weekday at 5pm EST.) HEALTH Health Experts Warn of Antidepressant Dangers for Children, Teens By Darla SittonCBN News Producer In America, Prozac is the only drug the FDA has "approved" for pediatric depression. CBN.com – (CBN News) - As many as one in eight adolescents suffers from clinical depression. And these kids are often treated with anti-depressant drugs that have been tested and approved for adult use. But the drugs may not be safe for children. Corey Baadsgaard doesn't remember storming into his honors English class with a...

Source: Stanford University Medical Center Date: 2003-07-17 Antidepressant Helps Alleviate Compulsive Shopping Disorder, Stanford Researchers Find STANFORD, Calif. - While a trip to the mall may mean a cute sweater or new CD for most of us, it has ominous implications for the thousands of Americans who suffer from compulsive shopping disorder, a condition marked by binge shopping and subsequent financial hardship. Now Stanford University Medical Center researchers have found that a drug commonly prescribed as an antidepressant may be able to curb the uncontrollable shopping urges. In a study appearing in the July issue of the Journal of Clinical...

Homeschool killings By CAROLYNN BRIGHT, IR Staff Writer - 08/29/02 Officials try to squelch attempts to explain murder of 2 children. As officials investigating the alleged murder of two Augusta youths by their mother earlier this week clamp down on details of the case, area residents have developed their own explanations for the tragedy. Some newspaper reports quote sources who point accusatory fingers at the anti-depressant Paxil — a drug Jeanette Swanson’s mother said her daughter started taking only weeks before she called 911 stating that she shot her 10-year-old daughter Louisa, and her 14-year-old son, Swen. Other conjecture...

<p>Jeanette Swanson was taking an antidepressant that can cause delusions and mania -- and is similar to the drug taken by Texas mom Andrea Yates, recently convicted of drowning her five children in a bathtub.</p> <p>Swanson of Augusta is accused of shooting two of her children Monday.</p>