Colleen Bell, Stephen O’Neill’s niece, set up Stephen’s Voice and through Stephen’s Voice started Prescribed Harm Awareness Day on July 29, 2020, four years after his death on July 29, 2016.
Several years later Katinka Newman who had set up Antidepressant Risks, got in touch with Colleen to find out more and linked to their conversation Katinka set up a Stolen Lives Day on July 29, to coincide with Prescribed Harm Awareness day – See Stolen Lives Goes Global.
Both Prescribed Harm Awarenss and Stolen Lives are happening on Wednesday this week. This is advance notice.
Stephen
Stephen was from Northern Ireland. He was prescribed sertraline (Zoloft), somewhat mistakenly, to which he had a catastrophic reaction, the start of a difficult five weeks in and out of hospital with the hospital and his family doctor stopping treatments he said were helping him and prescribing treatments he told them were not helping, which ultimately led to him taking his own life.
There is no doubt in my mind that the prescribing killed him. The story of his death is told in the first 8 links below.
Stephen came into my life a year after he died. Colleen emailed asking me for a view about whether the prescribing had killed him.
Everyone involved in Stephen’s case and later inquest seemed to be decent people. The decent medical people, perhaps on the advice of their lawyers, shucked off responsibility – as medical people, advised by lawyers, regularly do.
See The Death of Stephen O’Neill and The Perfect Killing Machine links below complete with video clips.
An inquest is one of the few times a doctor can make the medicines we take safer – by telling a coroner that it is likely the drug they prescribed did kill the person they treated or contributed at least to the death.
Unless a doctor opens up this possibility, it is impossible for a coroner to do anything. At best s/he can draw the attention of the powers that be to the case – who will then ignore what has happened. See Kingston’s Rule and Tangled up in Bureaucracy.
It was unfortunate that Stephen’s doctor failed to rise to the challenge, because this was an occasion where a family was hoping to bring good out of the situation rather than seek retribution. This family had the resources and Colleen had/has the drive to make a difference if someone works with her.
How the system dealt with Stephen is almost certainly how it will deal with you whether you die from drug induced agitation, a heart attack, or stroke – unless the failings of the system have been so gross they cannot be ignored in which case they get passed off as a rotten apple issue and you are called upon to witness the throwing of the apple out of the barrel which leaves you thinking the barrel is now safer than before – when just the opposite is the case. See the posts below.
- Spotlight on the Suicides in Northern Ireland
- Spotlight on the Suicides: Overture
- Spotlight on the Suicides: The Coroner
- Spotlight on the Suicides: The Family Doctor
- Spotlight on the Suicides: The Hospital Doctors
- Spotlight on the Suicides: The Politicians
- Spotlight on the Suicides: Women and Knights (?)
- Spotlight on the Suicides: Behind the Scenes
The Powers that Be
This image by Paul Klee is called Whose Fault is it?
Stephen’s death and the way it was handled was an everyday occurrence. You and I are unlikely to have someone like Colleen to spearhead efforts to bring some good from the situation. She has since set up Stephen’s Voice on Facebook, dedicated to raising awareness of the issues.
Stephen’s death and the failure of his inquest to move things forward opened up possibilities to write to Departments of Health throughout the Western European Archipelago (Ireland and Britain), as well as to the Guideline makers in the National Institute of Clinical and Healthcare Excellence (NICE), drugs regulators, the British Medical Association and Brenda Hale, the then Chair of the British Supreme Court, drawing their attention to the fact that the medical literature on drugs like sertraline is almost entirely ghostwritten and there is a total lack of access to the data from clinical trials on this and all on-patent drugs.
The letters to and responses from these bodies are linked to the 7 posts below. Extraordinarily, the responses make it clear the powers that be know about all the problems – the ghost-writing and lack of access to the data – but feel helpless to do anything. Instead, they quickly jumped on a phrase, I supplied them with – it’s not our job to police the medical literature.
- The Death of Stephen O’Neill and You
- The Perfect Killing Machine
- I Recognise these Constraints
- Orders from Nowhere that Kill
- The NICE before Christmas
- There is no Sanity Claus
- Doxycycline and Stephen O’Neill
What is true for the Western European Archipelago is almost certainly just as true of the powers that be in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Japan, Korea, China and India.
The Crack of Doom
Can good be brought from a death like Stephen’s? The 15 linked posts above are the most that I (DH) have ever written about one person and his case.
[There are later posts/letters, now of fascinating historical interest, to both Michelle O’Neill after she became Northern Ireland’s First Minister and Jeffrey Donaldson who was then her partner in the post. See Escape from a Prescription Drug Maze. You’d have to Norn Irish to understand this title].
I’ve been involved in an almost endless series of inquests for heading toward 30 years, where decent families have been seeking to alert others to the risks of treatment rather than trying to hold doctors or anyone else responsible.
Samuel Morgan’s death in Wales was one of the saddest. I spent time in this case trying to liaise with his doctor before and since the inquest, trying to get him to do what only a doctor can do to help make treatment safer for the rest of us.
Samuel lived in South Wales, where some of the healthy volunteer trials of SSRI drugs took place and where the capacity of treatment to induce suicidality and enduring sexual dysfunction in healthy volunteers became evident several years before the drugs came on the market.
Where also the leading medical officer in the Welsh Government had acknowledged an awareness of the ghostwriting of the medical literature and lack of access to the data. There was a chance for Dr Adams to do far more than almost any other doctor can do in circumstances like this – had he chosen to ally with the family.
See High Noon: Do not Forsake me Oh My Doctor.
Colleen is aiming at an online presence that might work its way into Tik Tox and other algorithms – so she will appreciate your linking and spreading this post. There is a growing global awareness of the Prescribed Harm idea in many venues, helped in part by Stolen Lives and the extra coverage it generates.
Unlike Stolen Lives, Prescribed Harm normally has no physical events, but this year there is a PHA Day walk with all proceeds going to Katinka and Antidepressant Risks.
Given an online presence and a physical events focus with the growth of both escalating, and determined women behind them, it looks as though if Colleen doesn’t get you Katinka will and vice versa.
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