Is it a Drug or is it Sweet Sweet Death?
filed in Art, Newsworthy on Aug.19, 2005
This is just sad. The FDA is again warning parents that drugs created to treat depression could in fact make kids want to kill themselves.
How’s that for a side effect?
Update 8/21:
I got a couple of e-mails from concerned readers. They tell me antidepressants have helped them and perhaps I’m being insensitive. So I want to clarify.
I’m not implying that prescription drugs are worthless. I know that there are a lot of people out there who take antidepressants and feel a hell of a lot better. I’m totally supportive of that. It just seems morbidly ironic that children are being prescribed drugs to treat depression when the federal government warns those very drugs could increase the risk of suicide. The picture is a commentary on that.
August 19th, 2005
Sweet sweet death.
August 20th, 2005
I briefly worked in a doctor’s office and a patient came in to report that the medicine he had been prescribed by our office had made him suicidal. I don’t know if I believed him or not, but I definitely thought it was weird that a medicine prescribed to fix whatever his ailment was would make him want to kill himself. Then again, if you’re dead your depression is cured, right?
August 21st, 2005
Poppy, that’s horrible, but a bit funny and a little true. It’s just too easy to throw everyone on drugs these days, as if that’s really solving our problems.