The Meds They Do Good

Posted on September 8, 2007 in Suicide

If anything is a bad advertisement for the virtues of Scientology, it is this:

After a decade of decline, the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-old girls jumped by 76% in 2004, and their method of choice changed from firearms to suffocation and hanging, federal officials said Thursday.

The rate among older boys and girls also increased substantially, driving the overall suicide rate among 10- to 24-year-olds to an 8% increase in 2004, the largest jump in 15 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The rate had declined 28% between 1990 and 2003 before the unexpected jump to 4,599 suicides in 2004….

“It seemed like something was working,” said Ileana Arias, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “What’s concerning is that it is changing for these groups.”

Arias said she did not know what caused the increase, but she noted that the declines in the 1990s may have been part of a general trend toward less violence.

Other experts attributed the increase to a drop in the number of prescriptions for antidepressants following widespread publicity in 2003 linking the drugs to increases in suicidal thoughts in young people. The Food and Drug Administration responded by requiring the drugs to carry a black-box warning, the strongest possible advisory. The debate about the impact of the warning has been simmering for more than a year.

Dr. Julio Licinio, chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Miami, said that the decline in suicide rates during the 1990s coincided with the 1988 introduction of a family of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, including Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil.

After the flurry of warnings about the drugs, prescriptions for them dropped by 22%, according to a report in this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry by researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

It should be amusing to watch Tom Cruise try to explain this one away.