Depressed over Prozac
Antidepressants dangerous and should be banned, crusader says
Sit with Tracy for an hour and pretty soon your head is swimming in details: the shooting at Columbine, a study of violent mice, the conversation she had with Rusty Yates, whose wife drowned their five children in a bathtub. Andrea Yates was on maximum doses of Effexor and Remeron, she reminds you. The world according to Ann Tracy is a place full of people who were put on antidepressants and then went on to do horrible things.
Tracy is executive director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness, which she operates out of her home office in West Jordan, a home she has mortgaged twice to pay for her 15-year crusade against antidepressants and the pharmaceutical companies who make them.
She is heartened by recent scrutiny of the drugs. Last year, the British version of the FDA banned all antidepressants other than Prozac for use in children under 18. In March, the Food and Drug Administration issued a Public Health Advisory about antidepressants — urging doctors and families to monitor adult and child patients on the drugs — and then appointed a panel of experts to reanalyze the incidence of suicide attempts during clinical trials of teens. In June, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued the makers of Paxil for consumer fraud, and 30 Utahns joined a nationwide class-action suit charging that GlaxoSmithKline "concealed, suppressed and downplayed" severe withdrawal reactions in people trying to go off the antidepressant.
Some people call her a visionary. Others roll their eyes and call her misinformed — and worry that she is hurting the very people she wants to help.
Panacea or Pandora?
In 1991, Tracy wrote an 80-page pamphlet called "Prozac: Panacea or Pandora?" Three years later she expanded it into a 424-page book that she published herself. She wrote a lot of it longhand, while sitting in the Salt Lake LDS Temple: the one place, she says, where she was sure Satan didn't have a foothold.
Hers was one of the first books to criticize antidepressants, but others followed: Dr. Peter Breggin's 1995 "Talking Back to Prozac," Dr. Joseph Glenmullen's 2000 "Prozac Backlash," Dr. David Healy's 2004 "Let Them Eat Prozac." As the titles suggest, Prozac has become shorthand for antidepressant, the way Kleenex is shorthand for tissue, because Prozac was the first of a new class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). But there are now plenty of others, including Paxil, Effexor, Zoloft and Luvox.
Recent comments
re: "how do I get a copy of ann's tapes or cd's"...
JIm | June 4, 2008 at 12:54 p.m.
how do it get a copy of ann's tapes or cd's. thank you
cindy | May 17, 2008 at 8:43 a.m.
My nephew and my sister, his mother, are both taking ssri type drugs...
Anonymous | Feb. 13, 2008 at 7:07 p.m.
