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Monday, January 02, 2006But now, a large-scale, federally funded study suggests that the suicide fears may be largely unfounded. The study of 65,000 adults, adolescents, and children being treated for depression found that suicides were extremely rare and the number of serious attempts immediately dropped by more than 50 percent compared with the month before patients began taking antidepressants. The real problem is that they don't work so great: ''Keeping a close watch on patients after they begin taking these drugs is a good idea, although not because these medicines are especially risky or dangerous," said Dr. Greg Simon, a psychiatrist at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle and lead author of the suicide study. ''The real problem with antidepressants is that they don't work right away, they have side effects, and . . . unfortunately, doing miserably is common." Neither the paper nor its abstract is available online yet, just its title. The Boston Globe reporters must have gotten their issue early. posted by Sydney on 1/02/2006 08:22:00 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:The articles are now up on the journal's website (http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/). The real shocker: only 28% of patients taking Celexa fully recovered during treatment. (And this is almost certainly an over-estimate of 'real-world' results, since patients in the study had a med eval every couple weeks, with timely expert dosage adjustments).
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