Editorial Note: Following a redesign of the website in 2015, the Suicide Zone mentioned in this article now works differently. You can search for suicide related side effects in the Drugs A-Z section. Side effects can be reported using the main “Report a Side Effect” function.
Free online tool shows possible links between prescription drugs and suicide
Toronto, Ontario (November 19, 2012) — RxISK.org, the first free independent website for researching and reporting prescription drug side effects, has added a Suicide Zone to demonstrate and collect data on the links between prescription drugs and suicidal thoughts and behavior.
According to the World Health Organization’s World Report on Violence and Health, each year more than 1.6 million people lose their lives to violence, with 50% of these deaths classified as suicides. Self-inflicted injuries are the fourth leading cause of death, the sixth leading cause of ill-health and disability, and the leading cause of death for people aged 15-35 years.
“Suicide is the deliberate termination of one’s existence while in the possession and enjoyment of his or her mental faculties. Taking one’s own life under the influence of drugs is death by misadventure, not suicide,” says Dr. David Healy, a world-renowned psychiatrist who has written extensively about the lack of data in evidence-based medicine, including in his latest book, Pharmageddon. “This has huge legal, financial, insurance, and religious implications, as well as being of great importance to family and friends.”
“Taking one’s own life under the influence of drugs is death by misadventure, not suicide.”
Healy says that the risk of suicide is greatest when a patient begins or stops taking a prescription drug. “Similar to space shuttle travel, the riskiest periods for many drug side effects are entry into treatment and exit from it.”
The Suicide Zone allows users to enter the name of a prescription drug and see the side effects relating to suicidal acts and thoughts that have been reported to the FDA’s MedWatch System since 2004, as well as to RxISK, for more than 35,000 drug names from 103 countries. The data is presented in tables, tag clouds, heat maps, and interactive graphs, showing what’s happening with other people taking the same drug around the world and in a user’s community.
Users can then select the effect(s) they are experiencing and click on Report a Drug Side Effect to complete a report. This will add their anonymized experience to the RxISK database so that others can benefit from this information, as well as provide them with a personalized RxISK Report linking their symptoms and meds, which they can take to their doctor or pharmacist to facilitate a better treatment conversation.
Dr. Dee Mangin, Data Based Medicine’s Chief Medical Officer and a professor and Director of Research in the Department of Public Health and General Practice at the University of Otago in New Zealand, says, “Suicide has traditionally been attributed to anti-depressants like Prozac and Paxil, anti-psychotics like Seroquel and Zpyrexa, and some anti-seizure drugs. But the range of drugs now linked to suicide has grown, including drugs used in smoking cessation, dermatology, asthma, weight loss, insomnia, and malaria.”
About Data Based Medicine Global Ltd.
RxISK.org is owned and operated by Data Based Medicine Global Ltd. (DBM), based in the UK. DBM’s founders have international reputations in early drug-side-effect detection and risk mitigation, pharmacovigilance, and patient-centered care. Although drug side effects are known to be a leading cause of death and disability, less than 5% of serious drug side effects are reported. DBM’s mission is to capture this missing data directly from patients through RxISK’s free drug side effect reporting tool and use this data to help make medicines safer for all of us.
Florence says
I saw noting on your site about Xarelto. I was given this blood thinner about a year ago and was on it less than two months.
It has caused me some really serious problems that have not abated since going off the drug. I still have severe muscle pain and cramping and a traveling head pain on occasion.
Dr. David Healy says
Have a look at https://rxisk.org/clopidogrel-withdrawl/
Johanna says
A recent article about patterns of suicide in America, coming out of the public health research community, caught my eye. While it says nothing specific either about meds or lack of meds, it raises some red flags about antidepressant use in this country.
Titled “Increase in Suicide by Hanging/Suffocation in the U.S., 2000-2010”, it concludes that overall suicide rates rose 16% during that time, but suicides by hanging or suffocation (a grouping that includes mainly hangings) went up 52%. In people ages 45-59, overall suicides were up 39% while suicides by hanging/suffocation more than doubled (up 104%). While no detailed figures were given, it did state the suicide rate was rising faster among women than men. You can read the whole study here, courtesy of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine:
http://www.ajpmonline.org/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/AMEPRE_3653%5B2%5D-stamped.pdf
So what’s up? As an American aged 45-59 I can tell you our access to guns and pills is still as good as ever. However, hanging does seem to be a feature of most of the SSRI-linked suicides I have read about. And the group seeing the biggest rise in hangings are heavy users of SSRI’s — women especially. Eleven percent of Americans over 12 are taking these pills, but among women aged 40-59 it’s 23%. Almost a quarter.
We constantly hear cries from official medical bodies and their drug company backers that depression is undertreated and that it’s crucial to get more people on the pills in order to prevent suicides (see Julie Wood’s excellent story above on AFSP). Yet if that were true wouldn’t the most medicated group (middle-aged women) be seeing a decrease in suicides rather than registering the sharpest increases? And why would hangings be on the rise far faster than traditional methods like pills and shootings (which have actually decreased)? There is a disconnect here that the medical establishment, especially groups like AFSP, need to explain.