RxISK blog

Protracted Antidepressant Withdrawal

July 1, 2020 | 16 Comments

Following H’s report of difficulties with Effexor, we asked Will Hall, Altostrata, Bob Fiddaman and Josef Witt-Doerring, all experienced in this area, how they would Manage her Withdrawal. We also asked Peter Groot who helped develop the first Tapering Strips for Antidepressant withdrawal – who with colleagues has demonstrated that this can help many people […]

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Managing Effexor and SSRI Withdrawal

June 24, 2020 | 13 Comments

H’s nightmare with Effexor withdrawal was laid out in last week’s post. Experts on antidepressant withdrawal were asked to comment – Will Hall, Altostrata, Peter C Groot, Bob Fiddaman, Josef Witt-Doerring have generously given time to do so. James Moore, Stevie Lewis and Ed White, administrator for a Facebook venlafaxine withdrawal group, who have substantial […]

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Side Effexor Withdrawal

June 17, 2020 | 16 Comments

About 12 years ago I was diagnosed with mild depression and prescribed 75 mg effexor. I did achieve relief from my symptoms on this dose. Later, maybe a few years, my dose was increased to 150 mg when my job became more stressful. There was no discussion about duration of treatment. I used to be […]

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The Lancet, The BMJ, The NEJM and RxISK

June 10, 2020 | 14 Comments

.. The RxISK post on Medications Compromising Covid Infections resonated with many. Its basic premise that many of the drugs we are on might compromise our ability to fight the infection seems close to self-evident. It made a call to the powers that be to ensure that data was collected on the meds that people […]

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Children of the Cure: Fear of Lying

May 27, 2020 | 15 Comments

Samizdat has just published Children of the Cure – the Preface of which is here This Book is not a Game. Quotes from the text are in Hand of History on davidhealy.org. Most of the first chapter is below. Flying to Philadelphia Shelley Jofre was 32 when she got on a plane to Philadelphia in […]

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Montelukast: Beyond the Black Box

May 20, 2020 | 27 Comments

Dozens of these buttons flooded the United States Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) headquarters at a meeting for the widely prescribed asthma/allergy medication, montelukast (brand name, Singulair). The message was simple: “The benefits did not outweigh the risks.” As each button approached the podium, the panel of experts heard gut-wrenching testimonials about the unimaginable psychiatric […]

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Sexually Confused or Chemically Imbalanced Cosmopolitan

May 13, 2020 | 22 Comments

April’s Cosmopolitan features How Depression Stole my Orgasm – an article on Sex for sure… but Sex and Depression or Sex and Antidepressants? It’s worth downloading the full article and telling us what you think the message is. It opens with some pretty clear examples of how SSRIs have immediate effects on sex and can […]

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Catch San Marino if you Can

May 4, 2020 | 25 Comments

There have been some major developments on the RxISK Prize front. First we are hovering around the $66,666 point – depending on how exchange rates go we may be wandering back and forth over this line as I write. More important however is that San Marino has raced out in front as the donor leading […]

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Starship Corona: Captain’s Log

April 26, 2020 | 21 Comments

The use of psychiatric meds in the U.S., already sky-high, is on the rise as a result of Covid-19. That’s not surprising – it happened after the 9-11 attacks, the 2008 crash and other crises. This graph comes from “America’s State of Mind,” an April 2020 report from Express Scripts. In the month from February […]

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Covid and the Market in Research

April 13, 2020 | 20 Comments

There are 3 bits to this post – an interview with Joan-Ramon Laporte. An article by Ariane Denoyel and a Q and A with Laporte and Healy. Laporte Interview As part of a series for ROAR Magazine, Frank Barat has run some striking interviews about aspects of the Covid pandemic not usually mentioned. Here […]

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Medications compromising Covid Infections

April 2, 2020 | 59 Comments

IN THE MIDST OF THE SARS-CoV-2 PANDEMIA, CAUTION IS NEEDED WITH COMMONLY USED DRUGS THAT INCREASE THE RISK OF PNEUMONIA. Joan-Ramon Laporte, M.D. Emeritus Professor of Clinical Pharmacology, Department of Pharmacology, Therapeutics and Toxicology Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Fundació Institut Català de Farmacologia. WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Pharmacoepidemiology. jrl@icf.uab.cat David Healy […]

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Snakes in a Love Drug 2

March 29, 2020 | 4 Comments

This image is widely viewed as a symbol of medicine. Many, particularly in America, owing to a bad mistake by the American Medical Association, would identify it as the Rod of Aesclepius, a healer in Ancient Greece. But its not a symbol of medicine – as it used to be at least – its the […]

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Snakes in a Love Drug on St Patricks Day

March 17, 2020 | 7 Comments

IJME In recent years the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics has been to the forefront in grappling with tricky issues in medical ethics and politics – topics that the best known medical journals and authorities should deal with but steer clear of. One of us (DH) had a growing awareness of IJME’s lead on tricky […]

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Causes Sexual Dysfunction, Suicide and Birth Defects?

March 3, 2020 | 35 Comments

Everyone who reads RxISK posts will know that SSRI and related drugs (some antibiotics, painkillers, antihistamines and most antidepressants) can cause sexual dysfunction. This has been known since 1961. And that they can cause suicide. This has been known since 1959. And that they can cause birth defects. The first publication by an Australian obstetrician, […]

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The Politics of PSSD

February 18, 2020 | 33 Comments

Members of the British parliament In October 2019, we were contacted by a British PSSD sufferer who had done some excellent work in getting his Member of Parliament (MP), Steve McCabe, interested in the condition. We were informed that Mr. McCabe wanted to get a large group of MPs together to try and get some […]

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Gateway to the Soul

February 3, 2020 | 79 Comments

Read the accompanying Sex, Withdrawal and Boundaries post first. We are looking for anyone interested in the material raised there to comment on or add to the set of questions below. We are so insensitive to the fact that our skin and gut principally, but also bladder and maybe the inner linings of our lungs, […]

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Sex, Withdrawal and Boundaries

February 3, 2020 | 31 Comments

“Do you think studying monolayers of cells will tell you why you fall in love with a girl?” The quote comes from Rudolf Hess, who won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1949. His students remembered him as telling them never to study a neurotransmitter or even a cell without thinking about where this bit […]

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What’s Sex Got to Do with It

January 23, 2020 | 28 Comments

This post gives the text of an article that has just been published online in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine – see Here. Another version of the material is in video form – Antidepressants and Sex: a Strange Story. Background In June 2019, in response to a petition, the European Medicines Agency […]

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The Banality of Health Service Evil

January 9, 2020 | 39 Comments

In the early 1960s, the American social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, ran now famous experiments using university students – then largely white and middle-class – as his subjects . His research interest lay in the Nazi concentration camps and the defence used by Adolf Eichmann (featured image) in his trial in Israel in 1962 – that […]

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Everything’s in Hand: Isotretinoin and the Usual Guff

January 4, 2020 | 30 Comments

Niks aan de Hand – Nothing out of hand. This item has just appeared in the BMJ: An expert group has been reconvened to review recent safety data relating to the acne drug isotretinoin (Roaccutane) and evaluate the risk of sexual and psychiatric adverse effects, including suicide. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s isotretinoin […]

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Healthcare or Health Service?

December 23, 2019 | 15 Comments

Up to 1800, no-one went near a doctor if they could avoid it. At best doctors might amuse the patient while nature cured the disease – the doctor’s business was to take as much of the credit and the money as possible. The best was rare. In an effort to get the money, doctors liked […]

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Trust Withdrawal and Antidepressants

December 10, 2019 | 18 Comments

The images, which are a wonderful metaphor for the coming back to life, the restoration of emotions and senses that stopping an antidepressant can bring, comes from this news item – its worth clicking on the video link There have probably been more posts about withdrawal from antidepressants – especially if PSSD is included as […]

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Antidepressant Withdrawal – The Enemy Within

November 18, 2019 | 47 Comments

National Horror Show It goes completely against the grain for almost everyone in the UK to say anything bad about the NHS. But in the case of the antidepressant group of drugs, with the brief note the NHS has just issued alerting people to the effect that antidepressants may be difficult to stop puts […]

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Sleep Problems After Stopping Antidepressants?

November 5, 2019 | 72 Comments

It is well known that antidepressants can interfere with a person’s sleep, but it’s less clear what happens after they stop taking the drug. One of our earliest blog posts from 2012 was written by someone experiencing terrifying nightmares while withdrawing from Cymbalta. The post received a number of comments from other people reporting the […]

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Coming off Depakote

October 28, 2019 | 14 Comments

I stopped Depakote – See Going on Depakote. First Try This was a nightmare to cold turkey off. I felt crazy, like my brain was going to explode and was on fire. I kept an ice pack on my head for days and listened to meditation tapes. I am not sure how I managed to […]

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Going on Depakote

October 21, 2019 | 7 Comments

Beginnings Childhoods are difficult to remember in detail. My first few memories were about the age of 2 1/2, maybe 3. I had chickenpox and I got an encephalitis. I didn’t know that this is what it was until years later, when I became a medical provider. My experience was that I visually hallucinated (the […]

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Not the RxISK Manifesto

October 18, 2019 | 11 Comments

Last week’s RxISK Manifesto post featured an article then just published in BMJ. The BMJ picture that went with the article looked like this. This gives entirely the opposite message to the article. The article says a doctors job would be a lot more interesting if they listened and encouraged anyone consulting them to become […]

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RxISK Manifesto

October 7, 2019 | 11 Comments

This post is close to identical to an article that has just appeared in the BMJ – Clinical Judgments, not Algorithms, are key to Patient Safety. Immediately on taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), most people have some genital anaesthesia.1 This may be aggravated on withdrawal of the drug and can remain for years […]

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PSSD Patient Experiences

September 25, 2019 | 34 Comments

New paper “If you wish to have such “syndrome” continue what you are doing … read obscure studies and reviews in obscure databases and I can guarantee to you that you will have it till the end of your life!” Anyone who has experienced a serious side effect from a medication will know how difficult […]

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Business Opportunity courtesy of Impeto Medical

September 9, 2019 | 32 Comments

Some months ago we had organised for 6 volunteers with PSSD to get tested for peripheral neuropathy, using a Sudoscan, made by Impeto Medical, who are based in Paris. By chance we found that there is a genital adaptor for the Sudoscan that has been in use for several years in Paris, leading to a […]

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