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Editor: Robert Binstock
Profession: Paxil Side Effect Attorney

Category: Paxil Suicide

A few years ago the news broke that antidepressants could lead to teen suicide. This news caused millions of parents to pull their teens off of the accused drugs, like Paxil. One would think that this would lower the teen suicide rate. As it turns out, new study now shows that there has actually been a significant increase in teen suicides in recent years. This increase appears to coincide with drop in children taking antidepressants.

From 2003 to 2004, the time period that coincides with a huge drop in antidepressant prescriptions, the youth suicide rate increased by the greatest rate in history. While the government only started collecting this data in the late seventies, this is still very disturbing news. This disparity did not only occur here in the United States; in the Netherlands a 22 percent decrease in prescription written presumably can be linked to a 49 percent increase in youth suicide during the same period.

The data suggest that for every 20 percent decline in antidepressant use among patients of all ages in the United States, an additional 3,040 suicides per year would occur, said Robert Gibbons, a professor of biostatistics and psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who did the study. About 32,000 Americans commit suicide each year.

While the study is far from proving the link of a drop in youth antidepressant prescriptions and a rise in suicide rates, it does make you wonder what could have attributed to this drastic increase around the same time. I have read that withdrawals from trying to stop taking these drugs can be worse than the side effects of taking them. I don't know, just a thought.