Antidepressants Pose Suicide Risk for Young Adults Too

"Widely used antidepressants double the risk of suicidal behavior in young adults, from around three cases per thousand to seven cases per thousand, according to a huge federal analysis of hundreds of clinical trials....
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"Critics of the drugs said they were deeply distrustful of both the medical profession and FDA itself because of conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. ...

"Gwen Olsen, a former pharmaceutical industry representative, told the panel she had influenced doctors by offering them free food, gifts and gimmicks to get access and then presented them with skillfully manipulated data. ...
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"'Industry controls the data, and industry with the aid of FDA have miscoded the data so all the articles in all the journals that purport to represent clinical trial data are misleading,' [psychiatrist]Healy said in an interview. His own analysis, published in the British Medical Journal in 2005, found a two-fold increase in risk among all adults taking the drugs."

—By Shankar Vedantam, "Antidepressants a Suicide Risk for Young Adults," Washington Post Staff Writer, December 14, 2006