Antidepressants can cause homicide
If you use Artificial Intelligence to find out if depression pills can cause homicide, the answer you get will depend on the source.
I have found that Grok, which is provided by X, is far better than other sources. Grok tells you, with references that are spot on, that antidepressants can contribute to homicide in rare cases and it also explains what the mechanisms of action are: “akathisia (severe inner restlessness), agitation, mania, emotional blunting, or disinhibition.”
With Google, you will be told that that the issue is controversial, with some studies speaking for and some against. This is not illuminating. It is what we could say about most issues in healthcare. A major reason for this is the doubt industry.1 When robust research has shown that a product is dangerous, numerous substandard studies are produced saying the opposite, which confuse the public because – as journalists will tell you – researchers disagree.
If we compare the tobacco and the drug industries, we’ll find that they have much in common. The morally repugnant disregard for human lives is the norm. The tobacco companies were proud when they increased sales in vulnerable low-income and middle-income countries, and without a trace of irony or shame, Imperial Tobacco’s management team reported to investors in 2011 that the UK-based company won a Gold Award rating in a corporate responsibility index. The tobacco companies saw “many opportunities for us to develop our business,” which The Lancet described as “selling, addicting, and killing, surely the most cruel and corrupt business model human beings could have invented.”2
This is a pretty accurate description of what drug companies do with psychiatric drugs. Selling, addicting, and killing.
As I wrote on the first page in my book about organized crime,3 tobacco executives know they are peddling death and so do drug company executives. It is no longer possible to deny the fact that tobacco and psychiatric drugs are major killers, but the drug industry has done surprisingly well in hiding this. With its paid lackeys among psychiatrists, they have hidden that antidepressants cause dependence, just as all the chief tobacco executives testified at a US Congressional hearing in 1994 that nicotine isn’t addictive, although they had known for decades that this was a lie.
Lundbeck has claimed that antidepressants protect against suicide.4 And Eli Lilly has said that “There is no credible evidence that establishes a causal link between Prozac and violent or suicidal behavior. There is, to the contrary, scientific evidence showing that Prozac and medicines like it actually protect against such behaviors.”5
This is perverse since antidepressants cause suicide. It makes Lundbeck and Eli Lilly even worse than tobacco companies, which never claimed that cigarettes protect against lung cancer.
“Doubt is our product,”6 a tobacco executive once said, and this smokescreen always works. Create a lot of paid noise and confuse people into disbelieving the rigorous studies and believing the noise instead.
The doubt industry is very effective at distracting people into ignoring the harms of their products. The industry buys time while people continue to die.
The drug companies knew how dangerous their drugs were before they marketed them. Eli Lilly knew that fluoxetine could cause a strange, agitated state of mind with unbearable rage, delusions, and disassociation, or an unstoppable urge to commit suicide or murder.7
In 2006, David Healy reported that both clinical trial data and pharmacovigilance data suggest that antidepressants can cause violence and noted that the mechanisms of action include akathisia, emotional disinhibition, emotional blunting, and manic or psychotic reactions to treatment.8
When my research group used FDA-defined precursors to suicide and violence, we found that antidepressants doubled the risk of such harms in adult healthy volunteers compared to placebo.9
When David and I examined the two clinical study reports Eli Lilly had submitted to drug regulators to get fluoxetine approved for depression in children, we found highly disturbing results that do not appear anywhere in the published literature.10
In the biggest trial, six of 109 children dropped out of the study while receiving fluoxetine and one of 110 while receiving placebo. In Lilly’s view, they dropped out for nonserious psychiatric reasons, but this was not the case. They quit fluoxetine for exactly those reasons that increase the risk of suicide and violence: agitation, elevated mood coded as euphoria, physical aggression coded as hostility, hyperactivity coded as hyperkinesia, mania, and behavioral disinhibition coded as personality disorder.
According to the narratives, these patients were more severely affected than Lilly’s tables suggested. The agitation, for example, was severe, and additional events included irritability, fatigue, decreased concentration, insomnia, anger, hearing voices, racing thoughts, mood swings and temper tantrums, which suggested drug induced psychosis and possibly akathisia.
A cohort study from Finland found that homicide was related to the use of antidepressants, risk ratio 1.31 (95% confidence interval 1.04 to 1.65; P = 0.02), and benzodiazepines, risk ratio 1.45 (1.17 to 1.81; P = 0.001), for current use versus no current use.11 Such studies underestimate the risk of violence because people who have come off their drugs might suffer from akathisia and commit homicide for this reason but would be counted as non-users.
The organized professional denial is shocking considering the many school shootings and other mass murders where the killers were on depression drugs.12 When one of the teenage shooters in the Columbine High School massacre was found to have taken a depression pill, the American Psychiatric Association denounced the notion that there could be a causal relation and added that undiagnosed and untreated mental illness exacts a heavy toll on those who suffer from these disorders.13 This sickening marketing-speak is also what the drug industry propagates. The other murderer had also taken depression pills.
The Germanwings pilot who took a whole plane-load of passengers with him when he committed suicide in the Alps, and the Belgian bus driver who killed many children by driving his bus into a mountain wall, were on a depression pill.14
The authorities routinely hide which drugs the killers were on in order not to raise concerns about the pills, but they cannot hide the adverse events reports they have received.
