Psychiatrists cast doubt on defense claims

The idea that taking antidepressants could wipe a person’s sense of right and wrong “doesn’t make clinical sense,” psychiatrists told the Herald.

“The chances are one-in-a-thousand,” Harvard psychiatry professor Roger Pitman said about the claim made yesterday by Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist hired by 20-year-old Michelle Carter’s legal team, that her dosage of the antidepressant Celexa rendered her “involuntarily intoxicated” and unable to grasp the impact of her texts encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to commit suicide.

Pitman, also a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the phrase “involuntarily intoxicated” didn’t “sound legitimate” in relation to the drug.

Psychiatrists said the closest connection to the legal team’s defense is the manic episodes that bipolar people can experience when they are put on antidepressants.

“It’s not that common, but it can happen,” Pitman said. “She’d have to be in quite a manic state, in my opinion, for her not to understand what she was doing.”

Dr. Samuel Miles, a psychiatrist from Los Angeles, said, “The idea of an intoxication from taking Celexa doesn’t make clinical sense.”

He said even a bipolar person’s reaction to antidepressants would be unlikely for someone who had been on the drug for a few months, as Carter was.

“With the manic, you can have grandiosity, but you have other things,” Miles said. “You have speech problems, impulsivity. That’s the closest you can get to that.”