In it, he takes a passionate position on the adverse effects of SSRI's, particularly with respect to suicidality. While initially convinced that prozac did not induce suicidality, Dr. Healy was subsequently an expert witness on several suicide/homicide lawsuits related to SSRI use. While researching those cases, he had more data made available to him, and was then convinced that SSRIs significantly increase suicidality. The supporting data include:
*Re-evaluations of results from SSRI studies
*Cases in which patients were started on an SSRI, became akathetic and agitated, stopped the SSRI, improved, then were subsequently restarted on the SSRI (or other serotonergic drug) and deteriorated once more (challenge/dechallenge/rechallenge, which is how causality can be established)
*Internal Memos from Lilly, which stated things like, "We know prozac causes a 5.6 times greater risk of suicidality than placebo, so we need to figure out how to deal with it, and specifically, how to figure out which patients will benefit from Prozac."
*His own trial of and SSRI in healthy volunteers, in which suicidality emerged
*Early studies in which subjects who developed akathisia and agitation on Prozac were either removed from the study, or given benzos for those side effects, essentially demonstrating that benefits in the study may have been from benzos, rather than Prozac.
*The fact that the BGA (the German equivalent of the FDA) did not approve fluoxetine, claiming that it was not sufficiently effective, and that it induced akathisia and agitation in patients, and ran the risk of inducing suicidality. Fluoxetine was approved in Germany a number of years later, under what appears to be powerful political pressure.
What I liked about the book is the fact that, despite how strongly Dr. Healy feels about this subject, and despite the fact that he lost a job because of his opinions, he still doesn't assume a conspiracy took place. Rather, he makes a case for a series of bad decisions, bad luck, predictable greed, overall good intentions, and selective blindness.
I also liked the fact that he is not advocating a complete moratorium on SSRI use. He believes, and this confirms my clinical impression, that there are subgroups of patients, some of whom do well on SSRIs, and others who don't. He advocates for research to figure out how to predict which group a given patient will fall into. He also advocates for research to specifically examine suicidality in SSRI use, and points out that, remarkably, no such study has been undertaken.
What I didn't like about the book was that his arguments are sometimes difficult to follow, causing me to question his conclusions, My impression, in general, though, is that the dude knows his stuff.
This is only "sort of" a book review because I'm including a link to his paper, Antidepressants and Suicide: Risk-Benefit Conundrums, as part of the online journal club The link is from his site, and another thing I like about his work is that he encourages open sources, and provides links to publications.
He's written more recent papers on this topic, but this one, in particular, summarizes what he covered in Let Them Eat Prozac, although the paper is for a professional audience, while the book is more for a lay population.
This is a table from the paper:
Note that on Placebo, there were 2 completed suicides, and 21 suicide attempts, on Active Comparators (e.g. TCAs), there were 5 completed suicides, and 24 attempts, and on All SSRIs, there were 23 completed suicides, and 186 attempts.
I'm very curious to hear people's evaluations of his statistical methods, so please comment.
