Bad Trips on SSRIs

Britain’s Medicines Regulator (MHRA), taking a very similar line to FDA in the United States, EMA in Europe, Health Canada and the TGA in Australia, has recently been trying to extricate itself from a corner into which lawyers crafting pharmaceutical industry strategies have painted all regulators.

Pharmaceutical companies write drug labels and are legally obliged to update these as new information becomes available. In the US, they routinely did so up to the turn of the millenium – with trickle down effects in for the rest of us.

Taking a cue from a ‘Prozac Liberation Front‘ – and below – company lawyers said we cannot argue in court that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) give gold standard knowledge of what drugs do, if company doctors continue to interview patients and their doctors and add our drug caused X or Y to the drug’s label – How the Safety of Medicines was Destroyed.

Ducking out of acknowledging their drug can cause a problem. companies have created the impression regulators are responsible for drug labels.   As a result we are all now liable to be gaslit if injured. Our families or entire communities like Tumbler Ridge are gaslit if we’re dead – See Prozac Liberation Front.

When this happens in cases where the only sensible way to explain things has been Drug X did it, activists fighting on finasteride and isotretinoin fronts have laid siege to regulatory offices and forced minor label changes, which to the activists feel derisory given the gravity of the problems. See

• Isotretinoin and Safety –
• Isotretinoin and Consent
• Finasteride and Consent
• Consenting to Finasteride and Isotretinoin Treatment – .

Activism though has led to these 4 posts which have been built on a ‘gift’ from MHRA. As part of an effort to show a touch of human decency, in association with the British Association of Dermatologists (BAD), MHRA produced a video which they seem to think solves the informed consent problem.

Within RxISK the consensus was the BAD video did more to tell people how great dermatologists and isotretinoin are than it did to inform takers about serious hazards and how poor dermatologists are at spotting them and how impotent at remedying them.

Sabotaging Hamlet we felt forced to make an alternate video.
Thoughts fly up but thoughts without words never change things on Earth 

Isotretinoin and Consent features the BAD and our Not-BAD videos. As Finasteride and Isotretinoin share key problems – suicide and sexual wipe-out – we borrowed the Not-BAD template for Finasteride and Consent

The SSRI antidepressants share these suicide and sexual problems. As MHRA have an Expert Working Group earworming on a way to ensure consensual relations between us and our family doctors and psychiatrists, it makes sense to return the favor and give them a video template shorn of a droit de seigneur ethos.

But SRI links to Suicide and Sexual wipe-out go back way before isotretinoin or finasteride were a gleam in Roche or Merck’s eyes. There is so much material that SSRIs and Suicide and SSRIs and Sex each need their own 6 minute video slots.  So does the equally complex story of the very real benefits SSRIs can have.

The challenge then will be to assemble all these bits into one 6 minute feature.

Bad Trips on SSRIs

Today’s post features Bad Trips on SSRIs. In our increasingly polarized world, calling it Suicide on SSRIs risked it being banned.

Some of the imagery in the video needs a comment.

1. The dramatic image above is the root of Rauwolfia Serpentina, the plant from which Reserpine comes. In the early 1950s, this Indian herb made a dramatic entrance into Western medicine lowering the raised blood pressure that had killed Franklin Roosevelt.  Just like Prozac it was good psychotherapy in pill form making some feel Better than Well. Others committed suicide.
2. Fighting back against compelling evidence that Prozac can cause suicide, Eli Lilly the makers of Prozac, borrowed a phrase in use by the Pedophile Liberation Front – Anecdotes are not Science.  See File under Phile and Prozac Liberation Front.  Anyone who thinks Anecdotes are Science is just plain Pharmaphobic and should be No Platformed. See Probity Blockers and Transmedicine.
3. For more on the 1 in 10 healthy volunteers becoming suicidal see Let Them Eat Prozac.
4. The Red Dots story is covered in more detail in Did Regulators Fail Over SSRIs.  The background story here is that BMJ were too scared to publish exactly the same article except for one work difference in the title – the original was Did Companies Fail — but Regulators don’t sue. The article was held up for a year over this. The Red Dot maneuver breaches FDA regulations and would probably qualify as fraud – it can’t be done innocently – except that the companies claimed FDA knew exactly what they had done and had no problem with it.
5. The Fraudulent Article is Study 329 – see Children of the Cure. An ongoing legal action aims at getting this 25-year old article which has been built into guidelines retracted.
6. Another of the Prozac Liberation Front ‘tricks’ was to claim there were fewer suicidal events on Prozac compared to placebo.  This was managed by keeping a few people doing well on Prozac in the trial for months and months while everyone on placebo dropped out after 6 weeks.  If you divide time all trial participants spent on the drug by the number of events this can make Prozac look safer.  Presenting the data this way was probably intentionally deceptive – it’s hard to think of any other explanation for this regulation breaching move,  In the same way NASA could claim travel on a Space Shuttle is the safest form of travel in the universe if you count deaths per mile travelled.  Deaths per trip is an entiely different matter. This Prozac Shuffle maps onto the Shuttle story – shockingly..
7. Scarecrow – this Model Doctor is from the Wizard of Oz. See Medical Care Medical Science.  We need a Dorothy or a bunch of them.

This is a Sister post to the Prozac Liberation Front post.

We also have a new RxISK You Tube channel which features a host of video clips from Isotretinoin, Finasteride and Bad Trips on SSRIs.  it would  be great if these could be spread on Instagram and Tik-tok etc