Depression pills made me unfit to be a mother
In a new book, a documentary maker tells how medication triggered a devastating breakdown, and says thousands could be affected like her
NOT long after the break-up of my marriage, I went to see my GP. Although it was right for my husband, Robert, and I to part, I was stressed over the prospect of having to sell the family home.
When I came home from my work as a documentary film-maker, I started having a glass of wine, followed by sleeping tablets when I went to bed.
My GP — rightly, I now realise — said he couldn’t do anything. I also now know I should have suffered the sleepless nights, felt the pain. It would have been fleeting. We — Robert, our children Lily, then 11, and Oscar, ten, and I — would all have adjusted.
But I’m very impatient, and when things don’t go my way I am prepared to pay for a solution. Someone out there must have a solution to the feelings I was faced with, I believed. So I consulted a private Harley Street psychiatrist. After a 20-minute interview, he pronounced me depressed and prescribed an antidepressant drug, escitalopram.
In my attempt to run away from my problems, albeit in a small way, I’d started a descent into hell. For I suffered a reaction to the drug that turned me into a self-harming, hallucinating, suicidal wreck.
But doctors failed to realise my symptoms were caused by an adverse drug reaction, so they put me on
more pills. Escitalopram is one of the SSRI class of antidepressants (the bestknown is Prozac). They are designed to raise the levels of the ‘feelgood’ chemical serotonin in the brain.
The theory is that depressed people’s moods are lifted by increasing their serotonin. However, many experts now dispute this idea.
Tim Kendall, director of the UK’s National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, dismisses the serotonin theory as ‘complete bunkum’ which pharmaceutical companies use to sell their pills.
Hours after taking the first tablet, I remember feeling its effects, flooding my brain with serotonin and tipping my mind into psychosis.
I became withdrawn and unable to sit still. This was akathisia, a condition where you are so anxious you continually pace around — a known effect of antidepressant poisoning.
I seemed to lose the power of speech, as if something was taking over my mind and body. When I rose the next morning, I felt certain it was my last day alive. Lily kept asking me what was wrong, but I had begun hallucinating wildly.
Hours later, I took a kitchen knife and slashed a 6 in wound in my forearm. It was pure luck I didn’t kill myself or someone else. I had no sense of reality. I thought I was in a dream.
That night, my sister took me to one of London’s most expensive private hospitals. There I was sedated, put into a room with bars on the window and fell into a deep sleep.
Over the next few days, I calmed down and began to make some sense of what was happening. I explained to the doctor that, as a result of the escitalopram, I’d been hearing voices, had talked about suicide and had paranoid hallucinations.
‘It made me go crazy,’ I told him. But then another doctor pronounced that I was very ill with what he called ‘psychotic depression’, a rare condition that combines severe depressed mood with delusions and hallucinations.
The hospital switched my antidepressants. When the new drugs kicked in, the akathisia was worse than ever. My body was racked with involuntary movements. My mind seemed to blank out. When Lily and Oscar came to see me, I couldn’t speak to them.
My condition worsened and I fell into what I believe to be the most frightening hell a human can experience. An acknowledged sideeffect of antidepressants is loss of empathy. Suddenly I didn’t give a damn about anyone.
This feeling descended on me just as I was sent home from hospital. I was also too frightened to go out and meet people.
My doctors had a ‘cure’ — more drugs.
A year later I was on five, including antipsychotics and mood stabilisers. One was olanzapine, a powerful antipsychotic linked to unexplained deaths, strokes and diabetes. It can also cause you to binge-eat.
Before I knew it, I’d put on 3st. I wore an old tracksuit, shuffled when I walked and dribbled. I needed carers to wash and dress me because I couldn’t look after myself. The effect on the children was devastating. Oscar begged me not to go anywhere near his school. I remember clearly him saying: ‘I hate you, Mummy! I don’t want you here any more. Please get out!’
When I could no longer bear the children’s reactions, I moved out of the family home (where Robert was also living, to look after them) into a flat two miles away. I just ate — and smoked; for after 20 years off the fags, I was now on 70 a day.
What saved me was when I caught sight of myself in the mirror — bloated in a stained dressing gown, my hair unwashed, eyes glazed, and sores around my mouth from dribbling and drugs. An image floated in front of me of my children’s sad faces at my funeral.
I couldn’t do this to them. Eleven months after I was first put on an antidepressant, I asked to be taken to hospital. Not to the £6,000-a-week private one, but to a local NHS hospital. There I told them I wanted to kill myself.
They immediately sectioned me. The doctors took me off all the antidepressants. The immediate effect was terrible. I couldn’t sleep, eat or think. I writhed in agony. Three weeks later, I was crying from the anguish of medication-withdrawal.
Crying? I told myself if I was in tears I must be feeling some emotion . . . for the first time in a year. Was I actually getting better?
Yes. After little more than a week, the mystery illness that had brought me to the brink of suicide had vanished.
I was allowed out shopping with Lily. Soon we were laughing and smiling. I felt what I had been missing for so long — human warmth. Mummy was back.
That was in autumn 2013. Within weeks I got a job, a house, and started training for a half-marathon.
I also resurrected the skills I’d learned years ago as an investigative reporter with Esther Rantzen on the BBC’s That’s Life! and began to research the dangers of antidepressants.
I accept that not everyone who takes antidepressants becomes a knife-wielding maniac and ends up nearly catatonic for a year. And I do know that some people are supposed to benefit from the emotional numbness that antidepressants offer.
YET wherever I went, I came across stories of other people whose lives had been blighted by the drugs. There was, for example, a friend whose teenage daughter hanged herself after taking Prozac. In some cases, patients on antidepressants became so psychotic they killed.
I spoke to Kim Crespi, from North Carolina, whose stressed banker husband David was prescribed Prozac. A week later, he stabbed their fiveyear-old twins to death, but did not even realise what he had done until he came off the medication. Recently, I heard from the daughter of an
84‑year‑old man in Scotland who has just been released after serving a sentence for killing the wife he adored after taking escitalopram. He remembers nothing about it.
James Holmes became known as the ‘Batman killer’ after he went into a cinema in Aurora and shot dead 12 people and injured 70 as they watched The Dark Knight Rises in July 2012.
Psychiatrists who interviewed him, and to whom I have since spo‑ ken, believe he was in an antide‑ pressant‑induced psychosis and unable to distinguish between dreams and reality.
More than 57 million prescriptions for antidepressants were issued in England in 2013 — a rise of more than 500 per cent since 1992. Eleven per cent of women and 6 per cent of men are taking them.
Of course, not everyone becomes suicidal or homicidal on these pills. But it’s more common than you might think. David Healy, a professor of psy‑ chiatry at Bangor University, told me he estimates that one patient in 100 taking escitalorpram is affected.
Nordic Cochrane Centre research‑ ers published the biggest‑ever review of evidence on this subject in January and concluded that antide‑ pressants double the risk of suicide and aggression in under‑18s.
The fact is life sometimes gets tough. In my view, if you go to your doctor and say: ‘My marriage has broken down and I’m crying all the time,’ their answer ought to be: ‘Good, that’s what you should be doing. That’s what tears are for.’ But too often doctors give in to pressure from patients who want a pill to magic away their anguish.
Do antidepressants do more harm than good, or more good than harm? The medical profession has opposing views on this. One problem is that the drug companies don’t give us the facts. Often side‑ effects are hidden, as are the details of trials when they’re not positive.
Professor Dinesh Bhugra, of the World Psychiatric Association, told me that previously unpublished clinical trials show that antidepres‑ sants are no more effective than a placebo in treating mild to moderate depression.
Professor Kendall said: ‘Some people have very bad reactions to these drugs. All are associated with with‑ drawal symptoms and many patients are finding that two years down the line they can’t get off them.’
People need proper information, with the risks (as well as benefits) spelt out. A piece of paper inside a pill packet which says, in small print, that 1 in 1,000 cases may suf‑ fer violence and hallucinations is insufficient. I go along with those experts who want a warning in large print on the outside of the box.
During my research, I discovered an important clue as to why I — and perhaps countless others — suffered such an extreme reaction.
SELMA EIKELENBOOM is the medical director at Inde‑ pendent Forensic Services in Colorado. She believes a lot of people who react badly to antide‑ pressants have a particular gene mutation (called a polymorphism) which means their bodies are unable to break down the drugs. Instead they become toxic.
The genes control a group of enzymes called cytochrome P450 that process medications.
Dr Eikelenboom has used her test on a number of people who have killed while on antidepressants, including the ‘Batman killer’, James Holmes. She reports that mutations on four of Holmes’s genes mean that he could not metabolise the SSRI antidepressant Zoloft he was given.
She offered to test me. Using Q‑tips, I gathered swabs of mucus cells from my gums and sent them to her lab. I know it’s early days for this test and the jury is still out as to whether it can really show the link between genes and people becoming violent or suicidal on these drugs.
Nevertheless, her results indicated that I have an inherited inability to properly metabolise the chemicals in certain drugs, especially when they get mixed up in the sort of pill cocktail I was on. Those chemicals might have a benign, and even beneficial, effect on other people, but to me they were poison.
So why hadn’t my doctors recog‑ nised the signs of drug toxicity and spared me this horror?
When I was better, I put this to one of them. He grudgingly admit‑ ted that the drugs he’d prescribed for me might have backfired.
‘What happened to you was very unfortunate,’ he said, conceding it was ‘possible’ I couldn’t metabolise the drugs. But there was no warmth in his eyes. I had no idea whether he truly believed he got it wrong, or whether he still thought I was barking mad. ‘I’m not going to say I’m never going to prescribe another drug again,’ he declared.
People say to me, so what’s the alternative to antidepressants? The answer is that for most of us, it’s probably: no antidepressants. life can be a bitch, but is it any worse than it was for other generations who have coped without medication?
Grief, despair, heartbreak, these are all perennial themes. My own experience tells me the mind and body have a unique ability to deal with life’s ups and downs. But if you try to short‑circuit that process with any kind of medication — drink, drugs, prescribed or illegal — then you do so at your great peril.
WARNING: People who have been prescribed antidepressants should not suddenly stop taking them. Gradual tapering is advisable. Any‑ one considering altering the dosage of medication or withdrawing from it needs to seek medical advice first.
The Pill That Steals Lives: One Woman’s Terrifying Journey To Discover The Truth About Antidepressants, by Katinka Blackford Newman, is published by John Blake on Thursday, priced £8.99. Offer price £7.49 until July 12. Order at mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15. Katinka’s campaign website: thepillthatsteals.com