Youth Suicides After Rx

     By Robert Carter/July 11, 2024

     The psychiatrist’s office was typical. Tattered copies of Redbook, Sports Illustrated and Highlights lay in disorder on the coffee table. An already worn copy of today’s local paper, separated into sections, was mixed in with the magazines.

     Twelve year old Candace Downing and her mother sat with their knees together, their backs straight against the thin padding of the hard chair backs. They were nervous. Candace was a bubbly child, popular with her peers at school. She was also an honor student, and her mother and father were proud of her and loved to tell their friends how well she was doing. A bit of an overachiever, though, Candace had recently started freezing up before exams in school and she was now failing some classes.

     Her mother was worried. She wanted to help her daughter. The appointment lasted fifteen minutes. Mrs. Downing left with a prescription for Zoloft and a three word diagnosis. Her daughter had “generalized anxiety disorder,” she was told. Soon the doctor raised Candace’s dose of the anti-depressant.

     Within a few months Candace had hung herself from the valance over her bed. An hour earlier she had been sitting happily in her father’s lap watching Animal Planet. Stories of the death of a child due to psychiatric medication have become increasingly common.

     Thirteen year old Matthew Miller hung himself inside his bedroom closet seven days after taking an antidepressant.

     Ten year old Raymond Perrone hung himself in a garage during a house warming party four months after being prescribed stimulant drugs for being “hyperactive.”

     Eighteen year old Matthew drove to the top of a bridge, parked his truck and jumped to his death eight weeks after starting the antidepressant Lexapro.

     Fourteen year old Daniel Erlich hung himself while undergoing sudden withdrawal trying to get himself off the prescribed amphetamine-like drugs.

     Twelve year old Kara Fuller-Otter killed herself while suffering withdrawal trying to get herself off an anti-depressant. She hadn’t liked how it made her feel.

     Fourteen year old Kevin Neil Rider shot himself while suffering withdrawal as he tried to get himself off an antidepressant.

     The list goes on and on. Suicides from youngsters on anti-depressants. Suicides from youngsters trying to get themselves off anti-depressants.

     These children may not have even been suicidal before they were prescribed these anti-depressants. After all, suicidal ideation is only a “side effect” of these meds, per their black box warnings and the caveats noted in the tv ads for the medication.

     Today, when a mother takes her young child to the pediatrician for a routine checkup, the child is given a form to fill out that asks if there are moments of anger, sadness, lethargy, hyperactivity that he or she has been experiencing. What seven year old has the maturity to realize those moments are fleeting and pretty normal for someone that age?

     That form, though, is the entry point on a road to prescription medication that can result in the suicides like the ones listed above.

     That form is not an indicator of the health industry’s concern for the well being of a child. It is a marketing tool used by Big Pharma and psychiatry to reel in new customers. A seven year old is the ideal consumer of these dangerous drugs, of course, because he or she may not answer those questions maturely enough to avoid being prescribed medication. No mother wants her child to suffer from any “mood difficulties” that the counselor – who she is then advised to take hr child to — is about to tell her can be alleviated by a little white pill.

     Big Pharma spent $55 million on tv advertising for medications in 2020 and another $20 million or so on other marketing tools like the forms mothers innocently allow their children to fill out at the pediatrician’s. Informed consent law means a child does not have to fill those forms out, but Big Pharma is banking on the ignorance of most mothers – and many medical office staff, as well — about informed consent law.

     Consequently between 8 and 12 percent of youth today are taking some form of anti- depressants. Today suicide is the second most frequent cause of death for those between the ages of 10 and 24 years of age, and that horrible statistic reflects a 62% increase in suicides for that age group during the last twenty years.

     But of course, per Big Pharma, that’s just a “side effect” of the immense  profit pharmaceutical companies make with these medications. Along with banks
and oil companies, they are the most profitable businesses on the planet.

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