There are always doctors who can be easily bought. When violence and suicide were related to Prozac at FDA-held hearings, Breggin reports that "most of the doctors who were making the judgment at the hearing were taking money from drug companies." One consultant, who supported Prozac in court, was getting paid huge sums by Lilly to write a paper on the subject. Another doctor who voted in favor of the drug was paid by Lilly to tour the country and make speeches on its safety and benefits. "Dozens of them are getting paid by Lilly and doing clinical research for them. Nonetheless, they think they can sit fairly in judgment about whether Prozac is harmful or not."14
Breggin stresses that it all comes back to the fact that organized psychiatry is part of a medical industrial complex. "It is out to push drugs, not ethics," he feels. "It's not science but a myth. They're part of industry. They're no more objective than doctors who work for tobacco companies and say tobacco doesn't cause cancer."14
Side Effects of Prozac
Overstimulation
Prozac acts like a stimulant, and some of its side effects are thus the same as those of amphetamines. Breggin explains that "the major adverse effects of the amphetamines - like those of Prozac - are exaggerations of the desired effects, specifically stimulation, including insomnia, anxiety, and hyperactivity...As is now commonly done with Prozac, amphetamines were often prescribed along with a sedative to relieve overstimulation."29
Overstimulating the central nervous system can cause a wide range of symptoms, including agitation, anxiety, nervousness, increased headaches, sweating, nightmares, insomnia, weight loss, and loss of appetite. Two common manifestations of overstimulation are akathisia and agitation, discussed below.
Akathisia - The term akathisia refers to a need to move about. A person feels driven to shuffle his or her feet, or to stand up and walk around. At the same time, there is an inner sense of anxiety or irritability, "like chalk going down a chalkboard, only it's your spine."14 The feeling can be mild or torturous.
Agitation - Prozac can produce extreme feelings of agitation, often associated with akathisia. Studies have shown 30 to 40% of people on Prozac, even when some of them are taking sedatives get agitated or get akathisia. Both of these conditions are associated with violence and suicide because they are related to a breakdown of impulse control.
Psychosis
When overstimulation becomes extreme, a patient's nervousness reaches psychotic proportions. People become manic and do outlandish things. They start directing traffic naked, or spending all their money. Extreme overstimulation can ruin lives. People can become paranoid and extremely dangerous to others, as well as bizarrely depressed and compulsively suicidal. This effect was noted in FDA controlled studies that were only four to six weeks long. Out of the 286 people who finished the short-term studies, 1% became psychotic. Actually, the rate may be higher than 1% since these were such short, controlled studies, and the population of people studied was so narrow. As mentioned earlier, the people chosen for the study were carefully screened to exclude those with a history of being manic depressive, schizophrenic, or suicidal. As a result, one can see that the craziness people experienced was strongly associated with the drug.
Depression
Depression is an aftereffect of overstimulation. While researching FDA materials on Prozac, Breggin discovered that Lilly knew Prozac caused depression and that, in fact, the company initially reported it:
"Lilly admitted on paper, in its final statement about the drug's side effects, that it commonly caused patients to get depressed. Then it got scratched out at the FDA, along with a whole bunch of other things. It went from being 'common,' and being scratched out, to not even appearing under 'uncommon.' It just disappeared from the label."14
In other words, the manufacturer admitted that Prozac causes the very thing it is supposed to cure. Ultimately, this places patients in jeopardy. Breggin explains:
"[People] start taking the drug, and in the beginning they feel better. Maybe, after all, because it's just good to get a drug. They feel like, wow, I'm doing something for myself. Or maybe the drug gives them a burst of energy. Stimulants will do that. They will make people feel energized. Then they get more depressed. They get suicidal feelings. They don't know the drug hasn't been tested on suicidal patients. They don't know that Eli Lilly once listed depression as an effect of the drug. And so they end up thinking they need more Prozac, and their doctor agrees. When that fails to work, they end up eventually getting shock treatment, never knowing that if they hadn't been started on Prozac they might never have gotten so severely depressed."14
Tardive Dystonia and Tardive Dyskinesia
There have been reports of serious nerve damage with Prozac. Some former users charge that Prozac has essentially wrecked their nervous systems, leaving them with permanent disabilities such as tardive dystonia, a condition in which muscles tense up involuntarily, or tardive dyskinesia, in which there is involuntary movement.
Many psychiatric drugs, such as Haldol and Thorazine, are recognized as causing tardive dyskinesia (TD) in roughly one out of five long-term users, and warnings are contained in the manufacturers' prescribing information cautioning against this permanent brain damage caused by the drugs. But no such warning is provided with Prozac by the manufacturer. The Prozac package insert does note that users of the drug have developed dystonia and dyskinesia, but it contains no suggestion that these conditions could become permanent. Current medical knowledge holds that the permanent damage of TD is not expected to develop until the person has been on the psychiatric drug for a year or more, hence the name "tardive" (meaning "late developing"). With Prozac, however, the condition can develop rapidly and without warning.
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