Replies to '09/28 Overmedicating America: The Cruise Controversy'

Exactly! The misinformation out about these drugs,especially antidepressants,is criminal. I almost lost my child to a reaction to paxil. Suicidality,aggression,violent thoughts are all things to watch for. TWO adolescent psychiatrists missed all the signs and just kept increasing the dose until he attempted suicide. Now withdrawal was a whole other story. Months of hell! We as consumers have a right to complete information about the drugs that we take. We should have been told that the clinical trials showed NO efficacy in children and SHOWED the increased risk of suicide. This was only after ALL the clinical trials were made public. The FDA only saw one. Yet it took hundreds of families fighting everyday to have the FDA finally issue a black box warning. Withdrawal is still denied by pharma, yet thousands are living this hell everyday. To subject a childs brain to the unknown effects of these drugs is scary. To this day my now recovered son has short term memory loss and twitches. He lost out on 3 years of high school due to paxil side effects and subsequent withdrawal. Don't do this to your child, learn from my mistakes in allowing him to take this.I consider my son very lucky. I started to look on the internet to find answers to what I was seeing and found them. I talk to families every day who weren't so lucky and their children has successfully committed suicide. Everyday new warnings about these drugs are coming out. Great Britian has banned these drugs outright for under 18 and has put in place required therapy for treating children and teens. They are light years ahead of the U.S. in recognizing the danger of ssri's. You cannot alter the neurotransmitters of the brain without affecting every other process in the body. Only the future will tell the true damage being done. The insulin/diabetes argument, while a favorite of docs, doesn't fly. When they can give you a "normal" range in serotonin and norepinephrine and a test kit to take home with you that argument may work. Until that time it's guesswork. They can't prove the chemical imbalance "theory" any more that I can dissprove it. It's a moot point, it's NOT measurable by current medical testing. The only accurate way to measure serotonin is with a brain biopsy. Yet we're altering something that may be completely normal.To randomly alter the brain chemicals with no controls opens up a Pandora's box.