Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank everyone for coming today.
Dr. Carr, thank you very much for coming today. I wanted to talk to you about the relationship between medicines and suicides. We don't hear a lot about it.
Dr. David Healy, in his book Let Them Eat Prozac, believes that 25,000 suicides happened from patients being on Prozac, suicides that otherwise would not have happened over the period Prozac has been on the market. All antidepressants have very similar adverse effects. There's a list of about 200, including serotonin syndrome, which can be life threatening; nightmares; sexual dysfunction; psychosis; and about 190 others, including akathisia, which is described as when you feel so horrible that you want to crawl out of your own skin.
My concern is with suicides, particularly of young people, which rarely hit the media, because the media doesn't write about them for good reason—because they're afraid of creating a copycat. I hear about them, because I worked on drug safety for years. In my own town of Oakville, there was a 15-year-old girl who lay down on the GO tracks with her puppy. Her mother is quite sure that she changed a lot and believes that the antidepressants her daughter was on caused that.
Sara Carlin, who took Paxil for three months, quit everything she did. She was captain of her hockey team. She had a job. She was at Western University. She went downhill, including substance abuse. Then she came home and hanged herself at three o'clock in the morning after taking her makeup off—a very violent and relatively rare form of suicide, especially for a woman.
Brennan McCartney was 24 years old. He was depressed because he had split up with his girlfriend. The doctor gave him a free sample of Cipralex, so he didn't even get a chance to talk to a pharmacist. He went out four days later and with a rope around his neck jumped out of a tree in a public park.
I hear a lot about these, but I never hear the media talk about them. I think that's because on U.S. television, where you might hear a lot about it, the number one advertiser is the pharma companies. The news companies depend on them for their business success.
When you see young people committing very violent suicides and you see a warning on the label—not a clear warning—that warns against suicidal ideation, this is really a vague way of saying “This drug may make you want to kill yourself.” This is really what I think they should be warned about. Every label for every antidepressant says that patients should be monitored closely. But I have never seen that. I have never heard of it.
What doctor has time to monitor a patient closely? How can that occur? How can your members monitor patients closely? How do they? How can family doctors, who are so extremely busy and have a huge volume of patients, possibly monitor their patients closely so they know that if they start to think about killing themselves, they say “Hey, my doctor warned me. I better call my doctor right away.” They know that when they change their dose it's the most dangerous time. When they start it and when they stop it are other very dangerous times. How can we monitor patients closely and make sure they understand and get a clear warning of the risk of suicide?
