|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
.............................. .............................. .............................. ..............................
[ SEARCH THIS SITE ] |
Inquest jury rejects suicide verdict on account of Shane Clancy's SSRI levels The jury in the Shane Clancy inquest returned an 'open verdict' following evidence given at Wicklow Coroner's Court on 15 April 2010 and the coroner's instruction that their choice of verdict had to be either suicide or an open verdict. Earlier, expert witness Dr David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff University in Wales, told the court that behaviour such as suicidal or violent thinking or actions, seen in patients prescribed SSRIs, such as the Cipramil tablets taken by Mr Clancy, arose not from the patient's condition but from the drugs.
Leonie Fennell and her partner, Tony Donnelly, after the inquest
Read more here
Minister for Mental Health must end light touch drug regulation — now On Wednesday 15 April 2010, a jury in Wicklow returned a historic verdict in the Shane Clancy inquest. The jury accepted medical evidence which implicated antidepressant prescription drugs in the death of Shane Clancy and, by implication, the death of Sebastian Creane at Clancy's hands. The coroner's court heard of defects in the warnings on suicide and aggressive behaviour in both package leaflets and doctors' prescribing information for antidepressants, and of lack of monitoring by doctors of patients prescribed SSRIs. As Wellbeing Foundation founder Dr Michael Corry commented following the double tragedy last August: "If [Shane] was not on medication, he would not have done what he did. I would stake my career on that. His behaviour was out of character. He went from homicidal to suicidal." A coroners' jury has now accepted this is the case. The drug did it, nothing else. Minister of State John Moloney, in charge of mental health, must act immediately to protect the public, and other families, from the dangers of SSRIs provoking more horrendous events such as this double killing. The regulatory regime is like of the banks before the crash: "light touch". Which means, in practice, no touch. It's time to end light touch drug regulation before more young people die — or there is a mass killing like the Columbine massacre in the US, also SSRI-driven.
Read our full editorial here
How antidepressants led a On the night of August 15-16 2009, Shane Clancy stabbed his friend, Sebastian Creane, to death in Bray, Co Wicklow, seriously injured his ex-girlfriend and almost killed his victim's brother. He then stabbed himself to death. He had been taking SSRI antidepressants. Police said he may have been 'overdosing'. In any case, he had been prescribed the drugs by a GP rather than a psychiatrist, after presenting with the symptoms of sadness and a broken heart after breaking up with his girlfriend. These drugs are dangerous, and they don't work. Their use has become widespread, and prescribing is uncontrolled and unmonitored, as Ali Bracken demonstrated by going undercover as a 'depressed patient' in the weeks that followed. In the Sunday Tribune of 4 October, Ali Bracken reported that Shane Clancy was given a three-week supply of antidepressant medication by a pharmacy on the day before the tragic events, despite his doctor instructing he should only be supplied one week's dosage at a time because of a previous overdose.
Read our full coverage of this important and tragic
sequence of events here
|
More information here |
|
 Inquest jury rejects suicide verdict on account of Shane Clancy's SSRI levels. See
our report at left. More news here |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
 |
|||
Wellbeing's new website goes live This is the home page or front page of our new website. It went live on the evening of 5 May. This site integrates the first website we launched in 2005, Depression Dialogues, and the site we set up when we founded the Wellbeing Foundation in 2006. Clicking a link to pages on depressiondialogues.ie now takes you to an error page where you can click a link to this site, but the best way to avoid this kind of thing if you are a regular visitor is to delete your old Depression Dialogues bookmark and create a new one for http://wellbeingfoundation.com. Over the next days, we will be uploading most of the material on depressiondialogues.ie, and transferring existing articles and stories from the old Wellbeing Foundation site to the new format. Some changes, other than our new look, are already visible, such as the 'share or print' facility which will allow visitors to send articles on this site to friends, blogs, news sites, Facebook, Twitter and a host of social network and news sites. But that's not all. We plan to turn the site into a resource, multimedia and social website, with audio and video podcasts, interviews and discussions on video and audio, and a whole new series of articles and essays on various topics, whether clinical articles, consciousness topics, or to do with education in maintaining your mind and its health. In addition, we will add exercises and toolboxes covering such areas as anger management, panic attacks, relaxation, stress management, breathing exercises, meditation, cardiac coherence and so on. These resources will also be available as audio or video downloads as appropriate. In short, we plan to turn the site into a provider of resources, toolboxes and first aid kits under the heading 'Protect your mind'. Beyond that, we plan to add a
discussion forum and other interactive or participatory approaches such
as a Facebook site and YouTube channel. And all that we do at present
will continue — the campaign against ECT and the campaign to protect
users from irresponsible marketing and prescribing of potentially and
actually dangerous psychiatric drugs, and for reform of the Irish
Medicines Board, another regulator whose 'light touch' is a recipe for
trouble in the field of mental health. Irish Times censors Corry With regard to the controversy around SSRIs and similar antidepressants, the Irish Times has censored the views of people writing to point out the well-recorded dangers of SSRI antidepressants, including dropping a letter from Dr Michael Corry.
The 'newspaper of record' published a completely one-sided and unprofessional article by Kate Holmquist on 10 October 2009, in which she parroted the views of the pro-SSRI lobby among psychiatrists and attacked Dr Corry's statements setting out the dangers of SSRIs and their possible implication in the death of Sebastian Creane, stabbed by Shane Clancy who then knifed himself to death. Holmquist also praised the Irish Medicines Board, a regulator funded by the drug companies, as a source of unbiased information. She did so despite the fact that the Oireachtas Committee on the Adverse Side-Effects of Pharmaceuticals recommended the break-up of the IMB in 2007 — a recommendation which the Government has chosen to ignore — because of its cosy links with the drug makers. Holmquist's far-from-impartial piece was followed by the letter from the eight professors published on 19 October, gushing their congratulations on her support. Since then one letter taking issue with these views has been printed, that of Dr Orla O'Donovan on 22 October. Dr Corry wrote to the Times the same day to rebut the false accusations made against him by the eight professors and to set out his views and some of the evidence implicating SSRIs in aggression, violence and homicide more clearly . The Irish Times did not publish his letter. Instead the newspaper has left false accusations against him to stand uncorrected. Basil Miller of the Wellbeing Foundation wrote to the paper on 24 October, expressing astonishment and disquiet that the eight bosses of teaching departments of psychiatry in Ireland publicly profess to be ignorant of the dangers of the drugs they recommend, despite extensive evidence. His letter questioned the effect of such ignorance on the thousands of students who pass through their departments and qualify as psychiatrists and stated his belief that this poses a continuing danger to health service users. The Irish Times has not published his letter either. The Irish Times has not published any other letter challenging the eight professors or Kate Holmquist's article — and we are aware that several have been sent to the Letters Editor. |
|
© The Wellbeing Foundation 2009 || Design by publicEye media and Graphic Communication Services || Hosting by LetsHost |
He
was a fearless campaigner for the rights of mental health service users
and all those suffering psychological distress; an opponent of
bio-psychiatry and its reliance on psycho-pharmacology; an implacable
campaigner for the abolition of ECT as a so-called 'therapy’; and a
compassionate healer appreciated by thousands of patients. 
Drug
safety: 
