As the details of the Robin Williams tragedy continue to unfold, shocking new information has come to light and the mainstream media has as usual failed to ask some incredibly relevant and important questions. Why isn't anybody talking about possible SSRI usage? Why isn't the association between SSRI usage and Parkinson's disease being discussed?
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| As the details of the Robin Williams tragedy continue to unfold, shocking new information has come to light and the mainstream media has, as usual, failed to ask some incredibly relevant and important questions. | |
| The Telegraph reported that, quote, Williams was working on four projects when he died this week, but the source, who wished to remain anonymous, said that he felt compelled to keep the money coming in. | |
| According to the neighbor and close friend of Williams, he did not feel that starring in film was good for his mental well-being. | |
| Quote, He signed up to do them purely out of necessity. | |
| He wasn't poor, but the money wasn't rolling in anymore, and life is expensive when you have to pay off two ex-wives and have a family to support. | |
| Now, just last month, Williams said he was returning to rehab to, quote, fine-tune his sobriety. | |
| Dr. | |
| Harry Croft, a psychiatrist and addiction expert and chief of CNS trials at the Clinical Trials of Texas, says the phrase suggests to him that Williams wasn't actually planning to visit a rehab center for addiction, but was instead seeking help at a psychiatric hospital. | |
| I would surmise that he was in treatment for depression, not substance abuse, Croft told CBS News. | |
| One doesn't really enter a facility for maintenance of sobriety unless there's something else that's going on that threatens that sobriety. | |
| Croft pointed out that checking into rehab has become an intrinsic part of celebrity culture, but getting help for mental illness still carries plenty of stigma in society. | |
| After his death, it was revealed that Williams had been battling severe depression of late. | |
| While not confirmed by his representatives, given that antidepressants and SSRIs in particular are commonly prescribed to those battling depression, it's hardly unreasonable to ask if Williams was taking such medications. | |
| In 2011, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention published a report that identified about 11% of the American public as antidepressant users, a 400% increase since the 1980s when previous surveys were taken. | |
| $11.3 billion is the amount of money spent on antidepressant medications annually in the United States. | |
| Americans consume more antidepressants than any other developed nation in the world. | |
| According to the United Kingdom's National Health Service, SSRIs are the most widely prescribed type of antidepressants. | |
| They are usually preferred over other antidepressants as they cause fewer side effects. | |
| Martin Teicher, a Harvard psychiatrist, stated back in 2005 that Eli Lilly& Co., the company behind Prozac, applied for a license in Germany, but regulators rejected the application, citing the risk of suicide. | |
| A 2005 article from the Harvard Mental Health Letter stated, quote, The risk that antidepressants will incite violent or self-destructive actions is the subject of renewed controversy. | |
| Suicidal thoughts, although no suicides, in patients taking SSRIs were first reported in 1990, shortly after the drugs were introduced. | |
| An FDA committee rejected the association, but the issue was never completely settled. | |
| In October 2004, after much hesitation and pressure from parents and Congress, the FDA issued a black box warning for physicians and pharmacists, its strongest available measure short of withdrawing a drug from the market. | |
| The warning is placed on package inserts for all antidepressants in common use. | |
| It mentions the risk of suicidal thoughts, hostility, and agitation in both children and adults, specifically citing statistical analyses of clinical trials. | |
| Robin Williams' wife also released a statement revealing the following. | |
| Robin's sobriety was intact and he was brave as he struggled with his own battles of depression, anxiety, as well as early stages of Parkinson's disease, which he was not yet ready to share publicly. | |
| Now, given that he was involved in four multi-million dollar movie projects, it seems quite surprising that he would be so secretive about his Parkinson's disease. | |
| My understanding is that if you are going to sign on to a very expensive film project, you must be forthcoming with all of your health issues, and it seems hard to imagine that people would sign him on if he had Parkinson's disease without knowing ahead of time. | |
| So this could be another reason why he had anxiety. | |
| He may have felt that he had to pay off his ex-wives and that he did not have many more years of work ahead of him where he could make the kind of money he'd made in the past. | |
| Now, a 2001 study found that patients with mania or depression were 2.2 times more likely to develop Parkinson's disease. | |
| It concluded, this study supports the hypothesis of a common etiology for major affective disorder, mania or depression, and Parkinson's disease. | |
| In a 2002 study of almost 70,000 subjects, a strong positive association was found between depression and subsequent incidents of Parkinson's disease. | |
| Another study on the use of antidepressants and the risk of Parkinson's disease found that the initiation of any antidepressant therapy was associated with a higher risk of Parkinson's disease in the two years after initiation of treatment. | |
| Yet another study states,"...persons treated with antidepressants or lithium are at increased risk of subsequent treatment with anti-Parkinson drugs, showing an association between anxiety-slash-affective disorder and Parkinson's disease." Why isn't anyone talking about Robin Williams' possible SSRI usage? | |
| Why isn't the association between SSRI usage and Parkinson's disease being discussed? | |
| Now, this, of course, is all speculative. | |
| There's no proof for any of this. | |
| But these are important associations to understand. | |
| The reason why there's not a lot of probing in the mainstream media of the relationship between SSRIs and suicidal or violent ideation is, let's look at a 2012 report in the British Medical Journal, which stated that pharmaceutical companies spent 19 times more on advertising than on research. | |
| The top two advertisers in America, Pfizer, the makers of Zoloft, and Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, have spent a little over a billion dollars in advertising in 2012. | |
| For comparison, America's biggest advertiser, AT&T, annually spends about $1.6 billion. | |
| While direct-to-consumer advertising spending has backed off from the $5 billion a year high during the last decade, outrageous sums are still spent. | |
| According to Nielsen, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies spent $2.7 billion on advertisements. | |
| The Nielsen company determined that there are, on average, 80 drug commercials every hour of every day on television. | |
| For every dollar spent on ads for drugs, over four dollars in retail sales are generated. | |
| A study showed that new drugs that feature direct-to-consumer advertising are prescribed nine times more than their new counterparts that lack consumer advertising. | |
| Very few people go into business to bite the hand that feeds them, and you are not likely to get detailed exposés on the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs from the mainstream media, which itself is getting massive revenues from the makers of those pharmaceutical drugs. |