Newer antidepressants led to less, not more, tee...(efforts to the study of teenage suicide ...),Health

People need to know if the antidepressant medication they are taking is increasing or decreasing their risk for suicide, Brown said. It would be bad if antidepressants were causing an increase in suicides, in which case the appropriate policy would be to restrict their use in adolescents. It would be even worse if FDA policies led to less treatment of depression and more suicides.

Brown and his group examined different statistical approaches that might assess whether a widely used class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (i.e., Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa) were causing more or less suicides in the teenage population.

The analysis was problematic because suicide occurs in one person out of 10,000 youth, but there were only a few thousand youth enrolled in all the clinical trials of antidepressants. And in none of these trials was there a suicide, either among those given an antidepressant, or those given an inactive placebo. There was no ability to compare rates because the number of subjects in the clinical trials was too small.

Given those limitations, Brown used several data sources where depressed individuals were treated differently with different classes of antidepressants or no medication, and he examined the rates of suicide along with the rates of antidepressant prescriptions at the county level. He also looked at the reports of suicide detailed by U.S. doctors after medication use.

Brown found that suicide attempts were dramatically lowered once antidepressant medication began, indicating an overall benefit of these newer medications. Also, very few people who died from suicide had been taking antidepressants.

He also found consistent reductions in suicide across counties as well as across countries during the time when there was increased use of antidepressants. Now that the overall level of antidepressants have de
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