The FDA issued a black box warning about antidepressants in 2004, updated in 2006, about “Increased risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults.”
It is far worse than this. Depression pills double not only the risk of suicide, and not only in young people, but also suicides (1-4).
Despite the convincing facts, derived from placebo-controlled randomised trials, leading professors of psychiatry in the whole world continue to lie, claiming that these drugs protect against suicide (5,6). And as guidelines and so-called suicide experts continue recommending depression drugs for people at risk of suicide (5), it is not surprising that suicide prevention programmes all over the world have increased suicides (7,8).
This is a betrayal so deep, particularly considering that psychotherapy can halve the risk of new suicide attempts in high-risk patients, those admitted to hospital after a suicide attempt (9), that we must do our utmost to warn patients against accepting treatment with depression drugs, which, moreover, do not have any meaningful effects in depression (1,2,5).
I shall therefore republish patient stories on this website. When I launched my first psychiatry book (1) at a meeting in Copenhagen in 2015, five of the involved women heard about it and came at their own expense to talk about their losses. There was total silence while they recounted their shocking stories, which I have uploaded (10).
1 Gøtzsche PC. Deadly psychiatry and organised denial. Copenhagen: People’s Press; 2015.
2 Gøtzsche PC, Healy D. Restoring the two pivotal fluoxetine trials in children and adolescents with depression. Int J Risk Saf Med 2022;33:385-408. Full article available here.
3 Hengartner MP, Plöderl M. Newer-generation antidepressants and suicide risk in randomized controlled trials: a re-analysis of the FDA database. Psychother Psychosom 2019;88:247-8.
4 Hengartner MP, Plöderl M. Reply to the Letter to the Editor: “Newer-Generation Antidepressants and Suicide Risk: Thoughts on Hengartner and Plöderl’s ReAnalysis.” Psychother Psychosom 2019;88:373-4.
5 Gøtzsche PC. Is psychiatry a crime against humanity? Copenhagen: Institute for Scientific Freedom; 2024 (freely available).
6 Gøtzsche PC. Usage of depression pills almost halved among children in Denmark. Mad in America 2018; May 4.
7 Whitaker R. Suicide in the age of Prozac. Mad in America 2018; Aug 6.
8 Whitaker R, Blumke D. Screening + drug treatment = increase in veteran suicides. Mad in America 2019; Nov 10.
9 Gøtzsche PC, Gøtzsche PK. Cognitive behavioural therapy halves the risk of repeated suicide attempts: systematic review. J R Soc Med 2017;110:404-10.
10 Videos from International meeting: Psychiatric drugs do more harm than good. Copenhagen 2015; Sept 16.