New suicide warnings on SSRI antidepressants after Royal Family death

Warnings about the risk of suicide from a SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressant could be strengthened after a relative of the UK’s Royal Family took his own life while on the drug.

Coroner Katy Skerrett, who was investigating the death of Thomas Kingston, said that people should be better informed about the dangers of SSRIs, and especially the increased risk of suicide.   She sent her warning to the UK’s drug regulators and has urged them to ‘take action’ to stop further deaths.

Thomas, the son-in-law of the Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, committed suicide last year while he was taking Zoloft (sertraline), an SSRI.  He had been on the drug for just three weeks when he shot himself.

Coroner Skerrett also questioned whether it was appropriate to persist with the drugs when there was no notable benefit.

SSRIs were founded on the theory that depressed people don’t have enough of the ‘happy chemical’, serotonin, in their brain, but the theory has never been proven.  Nobody has been able to establish what the ‘right’ amount of serotonin looks like, let alone how to measure levels, and psychiatry’s bible of mental disorders, the DSM, doesn’t even mention the possibility of a chemical imbalance being a cause of depression.

A landmark study by UK psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff couldn’t find any evidence that low serotonin had anything to do with depression, and she concluded that depression and anxiety have nothing to do with the brain itself but are natural responses to life’s shocks, slings and arrows.  People need to learn how to cope with disappointments and tragedies rather than pop a pill, she says.

The lack of evidence hasn’t stopped the SSRI bandwagon.  Around 35 million Americans and nearly 9 million Britons regularly take the medication, and any benefits are a placebo response, studies have demonstrated.

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