Outrage: Drug researchers caught hiding suicides linked to antidepressants

Matthew Miller was just 13 years old — and had only been taking Zoloft for six days — when he did the unthinkable.

He hanged himself in his bedroom closet.

We’re hearing more of these tragic stories every year — of young children and teens who committed suicide (or tried to) while taking prescription antidepressants.

But it looks like we’ve all been kept in the dark about just how serious the problem has become.

A new report has found proof that researchers have been covering up the number of kids who attempted to take their own lives while on the drugs.

And while this disgusting, criminal show of greed makes Big Pharma a fortune, it may be putting a teen you love at dire risk.

Hiding the truthWe’ve known for a decade that prescription antidepressants like Paxil, Prozac, or Zoloft can cause suicidal thoughts, especially in kids. Lots of these drugs even carry suicide warnings.

But if you talk to your typical mainstream doctor, you’ll hear about just how rare these tragedies are.

And there’s a good reason most doctors think that. Because according to a new study in the British Medical Journal, researchers have been lying to doctors (and the rest of us) about the real number of children and teens attempting or committing suicide.

In fact, they’ve been at it for a long, long time.

A Danish research team was able to get its hands on the raw data for nearly 70 antidepressant studies involving more than 18,500 young kids and teens.

And when a child either killed himself — or attempted to — in lots of cases the researchers either omitted the information or intentionally called it something else.

That’s no accident — that’s criminal.

In one study, for example, more than 90 percent of suicide attempts were missing from the data and not recorded in the final, published study. You know — the study that thousands of doctors end up reading and using to make drug recommendations.

In another study, a drug company decided to lump suicide attempts under “worsening of depression” when it reported side effects.

Well, I guess “worsening of depression” is one way to refer to a child trying to kill himself. Another way to put it is that these researchers were intentionally hiding these dreadful events so we’d never learn just how dangerous these antidepressants can be.

More than half of the clinical study reports didn’t include any individual patient data at all, so we really don’t know how many distraught children tried to take their own lives. But you can bet it’s a lot more than we’ve ever been told.

As the Danish researchers put it, this “raises concerns why this information is allowed to be withheld.”

Raises concerns? People should be going to prison over this!v
It’s not as if this failure to report were an innocent oversight. And it’s not like they were hiding data on minor side effects like nausea or a slight headache. These were kids who tried to kill themselves — and in some cases, succeeded. And Big Pharma bent over backwards to make sure we never learned about it.

The fact is, we’ve known for a long time that these drugs were dangerous for kids — and it turns out they’re even riskier than we thought.

That’s why, if there’s a child in your life suffering from depression, it’s important to keep him as far away as possible from prescription antidepressants.

Now that doesn’t mean ignoring the depression or leaving it untreated. In fact, there are three things you can do, starting today:

1. Insist on a full workup from your child’s doctor. It’s amazing how many kids on antidepressants have never had a simple blood test to determine what might be causing their symptoms. Things like nutritional deficiencies and even thyroid disorders can trigger depression.
2. Help the child start an exercise program. Lots of people who are depressed end up becoming couch potatoes. But research has shown that exercise can relieve depression just as effectively as drugs — and it’s a whole lot safer.
3. Check out alternative therapies and supplements. In addition to counseling, nutritional supplements like St. John’s wort and 5-HTP have been proven to help relieve depression and anxiety.

I know a lot of people’s first reaction is that these solutions aren’t strong enough to help someone who is truly depressed. And, in many cases, they aren’t. But they also will not make your teen MORE depressed or at higher risk of suicide like these dangerous drugs do — and do a lot more than we’ve been told.

Sources:
“Antidepressants double suicide risk: study” Nick Tate, January 28, 2016, Newsmax, newsmax.com