With our national love of drugs, sex, celebrities and
violence you�d think SSRIstories.com
would be more popular.
The 12-year-old web site lists 3,500 crime related news
reports linked to the use of SSRI antidepressants with celebrities like Wynona Ryder, Heath
Ledger, Brittany Murphy, Anna Nicole Smith, Heather Locklear, Glen Campbell,
Carrie Fisher, Sharon Osbourne, Phil Hartman, Princess Di�s driver, Patrick
Swayze�s sister, O.J. Simpson and the Crown Prince of Nepal generously
sprinkled in.
You can search and sort stories by drug -- Lexapro, Celexa, Luvox,
Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil and the related Effexor and Cymbalta -- date,
location, type of violence and the articles about school shootings, famous
cases and legal cases won on SSRI defenses are color coded.
You don�t even have to read the whole article.
SSRIstories founder and manager Betty Henderson pulls out and boldfaces
the story�s drug-related citation like Lynyrd Skynyrd harmonicist Mike Caruso�s
remark that �the doctor put me on Cymbalta. That turned me manic,� and Oklahoma
murder suspect Ronson Bush�s remark, �I killed my friend when I took these. I�m
not going to take them,� when offered SSRIs at the Grady County Jail.
The site even has medical journal credibility, cited in an article in the
spring 2009 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons in which author Joel M.
Kauffman, Ph.D, wrote, �Since no clinical trial involving multiple homicides is
ever likely to be run, no firmer evidence [of SSRI dangers than SSRIstories] is
likely to be found.�
Pharma and the FDA may still be agnostic about SSRIs causing violence but
700 murders, 200 murder-suicides and 47 postpartum depression cases, including
the 2006 case of Andrea Yates who drowned her five children while on Effexor,
don�t lie.
Nor do 51 school shootings incidents including Columbine, where
shooter Eric Harris was on Zoloft and Luvox, Red Lake
where shooter Jeffrey Weise was on Prozac, and Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University where the shooters were
reportedly affected by antidepressants. Nor do hundreds of suicides -- including
children -- lie and veteran-related violence, like the May 11 deaths of five at
a combat stress center near Baghdad allegedly committed by Army Sgt. John
Russell who was on antidepressants, eerily presaging the shootings at Fort Hood�s
Soldier Readiness Center.
Of course, there have always been murders, suicides, postpartum
depression and veteran despondency. But parents killing children, children
killing children, children killing parents and people killing their whole families wasn�t
news-as-usual before SSRIs appeared in 1988, say anti-SSRI advocates.
�There are two cases of women who stabbed a man close to 200 times and a
case of a man who stabbed his wife over 100 times and then went next door to
the neighbor�s house and stabbed the neighbor�s furniture about 500 times,�
says Henderson, a retired teacher who lives in Texas. �There is also a case of
a woman close to 80-years-old who stabbed her husband 56 times and then stabbed
herself to death. This kind of energy, rage and insanity was not seen before
SSRIs.�
Just as startling as the ferocity of the SSRI-related violence is its
bizarre, often unprovoked nature: A Midwest City, Oklahoma, woman accepted a
cup of tea from an elderly nurse she had just met and then strangled her. A
12-year-old boy, left in his cousin�s car while she shopped at Target, killed
her 5-week-old daughter for no earthly reason.
SSRIs also produce kleptomania as seen with the Ryder/Zoloft case,
observes Henderson, pyromania as seen in an English millionaire who burned down
his own house and immolation suicides and a �strange kind� of nymphomania. �SSRIstories
has 10 cases of women school teachers who molested their minor male students.
The O�Reilly Factor has said it�s receiving one case a week of this same kind
of new crime.�
Just as dangerous as SSRIs themselves is withdrawing from them says the site in a prominent warning. �It is
important to withdraw extremely slowly from these drugs, usually over a period
of a year or more, under the supervision of a qualified specialist.�
Henderson began SSRIstories as a message board in 1997 after experiencing
side effects of Prozac, prescribed to her to quit smoking, that were so severe
she was hospitalized. Soon she was joined by two other anti-SSRI activists, one
whose daughter had killed herself on the antidepressants, and they began
posting SSRI stories from news sources. Henderson has spoken on the radio and
at FDA hearings, and the site has been cited by the New York Times, Chicago
Tribune and Los Angeles Times.
But it plays David to the �Goliath� of pharma-funded sites like WebMD,
emedicine, Medicinet, Righthealth and Everydayhealth with their ubiquitous �Are
You Depressed?� ads. In fact Eli Lilly was a founding partner of WebMD,
according to the Washington Post.
SSRIstories just archives 22 years of important drug related
stories that the 72-year-old Henderson researches and verifies as a public service.
More of a public service than the FDA which has yet to withdraw the drugs
named in the 3,500 stories or even call them dangerous.
Martha Rosenberg is a Chicago
columnist/cartoonist who writes about public health. She may be reached at martharosenberg@sbcglobal.net.