Where Have All the SSRI Lawsuits Gone?

     In 1998 Donald Schell of Gillette, Wyoming, took a .357 magnum and a .22 caliber pistol and murdered his wife, his daughter and her baby before he killed himself. Donald had experienced occasional depression and had earlier been prescribed Prozac, but he had become too agitated by the antidepressant and he was taken off it.

     His doctor later prescribed him Paxil. A few weeks later Donald began his shooting rampage. A jury found GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of Paxil, responsible for transforming Donald from a peaceful, loving grandfather into a murdering madman. They awarded his daughter’s remaining family $6.4 million.

     Schell’s case was one of the first major settlements by a Big Pharma firm for damages from withdrawal and for suicide or homicide caused by their SSRI drugs. For the next twenty years thousands of such cases were settled – mostly out of court – for billions and billions of dollars: $1 billion for Paxil cases, $313 million for Celexa and Lexapro cases, $50 million for Prozac cases, $3 billion in fraud penalties for Paxil alone.

     No one knows for sure the total amount of restitution paid for the ma jority of SSRI cases that settled by Big Pharma out of court. Of course, given the 1.7 trillion dollar annual revenue of the pharmaceutical industry, those few billion dollars paid in lawsuits are a pittance. Since 2020, though, there have been almost no new SSRI lawsuits, per DrugWatch.com.

     Why?

      First, in the early 2000s the FDA required Black Box warnings on all SSRIs for the drugs’ risk of suicide or violent “agitated” behavior. That nullified the earlier legal claims of “failure to warn” that were a keystone of the earlier legal cases against Big Pharma.   Therefore, because the FDA had mandated the exact legal wording of these warnings, Big Pharma companies were not allowed to add any additional, unapproved text and so were free from prosecution.

     Second, the thousands of pre-2020 lawsuits filed against these SSRIs were eventually combined as Mass Tort or Multidistrict Litigation cases so they could be settled more efficiently, given the huge numbers of them. By 2020 most of these cases had been settled out of court by payments made to the individual plaintiffs, once the presiding federal judge had approved their legitimacy. Payments generally ranged up to $300,000 per individual case, although many cases, similar to Donald Schell’s, resulted in millions of dollars paid in compensation.

      None of those out-of-court payments needed to be made public, though, nor did the details of the damage done to individuals through suicide or through homicidal sprees like Donald Schell’s while on Paxil.

     That’s like Big Pharma merely being quietly sent to its room without supper and taking away fifty cents from its weekly allowance for strangling the neighbor’s cat.