- 23 Mar 2009
The attack against Prozac was launched in November 1989 by the Church of Scientology, a group characterized by die Wall Street Journal as “a quasi-religious/business/paramilitary organization” and defined by Funk and Wagnall’s 1984 New Comprehensive International Dictionary as “a religious and psychotherapeutic cult purporting to solve personal problems, cure mental and physical disorders, and increase intelligence.” Founded by L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer who died in 1986, Scientology considers its doctrines to be, as the subtitle of Hubbard’s book Dianetics explains, “the modern science of mental health.” After that book’s publication in 1950, mental health professionals spoke out against Scientology. Perhaps in retaliation. Scientologists have long counted psychiatrists, psychiatric medications, and pharmaceutical companies among their many enemies. Prozac, a spokesman alleged, was a “killer drug.”
Leading the Scientology attack against Prozac is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a group which was founded by Scientology in 1969 and which had in the past attacked the amphetaminelike drug Ritalin (widely used for helping hyperactive children achieve a normal attention span.) Once the CCHR set its sights on Prozac, it lobbied against it, sent out mass mailings, and, in October 1990, filed a citizen’s petition with the Food and Drug Administration requesting the withdrawal of Prozac from the market—only a few months after the FDA reaffirmed Prozac’s safety and efficacy as an antidepressant.
As ammunition, the CCHR made extensive use of an article published in February 1990 in the American Journal of Psychiatry by several Boston psychiatrists. The report stated that after two to seven weeks on Prozac, six out of 172 high-risk mental patients who had not been responsive to other drugs became preoccupied with violent, obsessive suicidal thoughts, and that two of them tried (without success) to kill themselves.
Nothing about this was in the least extraordinary to psychiatrists who are familiar with and treat depression. Depressed people are often suicidal: it’s a symptom of the disease. About 15% of patients with diagnosed depression eventually commit suicide; about 80% of all patients who commit suicide or make a serious attempt to do so are depressed. At the time and now, most leading psychopharmacologists in the United States felt that it was not a surprise that a few of the deeply depressed patients in the Boston study were suicidal. In addition, four of the six were taking other medications (in one case, five other medications). It was also noted that, although none of these patients seemed suicidal when they began taking Prozac, five of the six had had suicidal thoughts in the past.
Nonetheless, because serotonin, the neurotransmitter Prozac specifically affects, may be linked with aggression, there was reason for concern. It was speculated that in a few instances, Prozac might “tip the balance in the wrong direction, toward violence and aggression.”
When the article came to the attention of the CCHR, they took the figures, which were based on a small group of nonresponsive mental patients, and extrapolated them to the entire population. Using the article’s statistics, they asserted not only that “up to 140,000 people in the United States have become violent and suicidal by Prozac” but also that Prozac could easily promote killing sprees, a prediction they backed up with one unique story of mass murderer Joseph Wesbecker. In 1989, Wesbecker attacked his co-workers at the Standard Gravure printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky. Using an AK-47 assault rifle, be killed eight, wounded twelve, and then shot himself.
Why did he do this? Speaking on the “Phil Donahue Show,” Dennis Clarke, president of the CCHR, announced that he did it because he was taking Prozac. Before that, Clarke said, Wesbecker “had no history of violence.”
However, as the Wall Street Journal revealed in April 1991, this was completely untrue. Wesbecker had made twelve previous suicide attempts, had often talked of killing his employers, and had accumulated a collection of guns, with which he regularly practiced shooting—all before he started taking Prozac.
The attack on Prozac was well under way when, on May 6, 1991, Time magazine ran a cover story entitled “Scientology: The Cult of Creed.” The
Church of Scientology struck back with a $3 million ad campaign in USA Today that suggested that Time had attempted to forward Hitler and included an attack against Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Prozac.
The result of all this? Sales of Prozac, by then a full 25 percent of the antidepressant market slipped to 21 percent. In a dozen cases around the nation, defense attorneys argued that their clients were not responsible for their actions because they had been taking Prozac. Even more disturbing to me and other psychiatrists, many patients decided on their own to discontinue the drug, with the predictable result that their depression worsened and in some cases their suicidal thoughts became more intense. Worst of all, some patients needed to be hospitalized as a result of going off their medication.
In July 1991, the FDA rejected the CCHR petitions, once again reaffirming the safety of Prozac. Two months later, the FDA Advisory Committee and an independent scientific advisory committee unanimously announced that Prozac and other antidepressants do not cause suicide or violent behavior, in fact, Prozac seemed to protect against violent behavior, and large clinical trials indicate that patients taking Prozac are actually less suicidal than those taking a placebo or other antidepressant drugs.
Nonetheless, the CCHR and a handful of attorneys have continued this campaign against Prozac, twisting the scientific data, misrepresenting the clinical experience, and discouraging patients from taking a drug that has been accepted in more than sixty-three countries around the world as a safe and effective way to treat depression. The anti-Prozac campaign has been thoroughly discredited by the FDA, the American Psychiatric Association, and all leading medical authorities. Unfortunately, the ultimate victims of the disinformation campaign are the patients, their families, and the medical profession.
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- Tags: Anti Depressants
- Category: Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid