An Analysis of Use of SSRIs in USA 1988--2002 - FDA and Suicides

You can download this paper "An Analysis of Use of Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft in USA 1988--2002" by Graham Aldred here. Some excerpts:

Long Term Use
"Although the majority of patients are forced to drop out during the first year of use, many patients remain on SSRIs for many years, some out of choice, but some become dependant and cannot withdraw. GSK have now been forced to admit that 25% (not 2% as they previously claimed) of patients will have “difficulty” in withdrawing (June 2003).

Other long term patients confuse their drug induced withdrawal symptoms and believe that these are their own original condition and that therefore the drugs must be making them well. The lack of thoroughness of coroner investigations and the inadequacy of post-mortem analyses means that there is no data to indicate how many suicides may be triggered by attempted SSRI withdrawal."

(...)

Table1 shows that, in 2002, 7.8 million Americans became new users of either Paxil, Prozac or Zoloft and therefore they faced a net risk of induced suicide that is not likely to be lower than 32/100K and very probably is higher than 104/100K. Nevertheless, even using these cautionary rates, somewhere between 2500 and 8200 excess suicides may have occurred in 2002 alone due to these drugs. Whatever the value of the suicide rate, it was not zero. At least two thousand Americans may have died in 2002 who were not warned of the possible lethal outcome of their SSRI medication. This is the consequence of a dysfunctional drug safety regulation system in which the drug manufacturers have not only failed to disclose evidence of great harm but also have infiltrated virtually every organisation that could criticise, study and report on their drugs with scientific objectivity. This is compounded by the doctors who continually fail in their duty to report possible adverse effects, (i.e. suicide within days of starting the drug), associated with the dangerous drugs that they prescribe so frequently and so readily for virtually all the problems of life, culture and society.
But the spotlight must now fall on the FDA (together with the other national regulators,) to explain why it has been so unreactive, unaware and in such positive denial of the possible harm and deaths caused to the American population by the drugs that it has approved since 1988.