Youth, meds and suicide
Keeley Schwindt was a high school freshman who became moody and angry, and one day swallowed a massive dose of aspirin to see what would happen.
Kevin Rider was a cerebral 12-year-old who gradually lost interest in his schoolwork and pleasure in his precious Boy Scout activities.
Like millions of boys and girls beginning adolescence, they were diagnosed with depression, and their parents decided to put them on medication.
Soon Schwindt, of Garden City, Kan., was thriving, playing on the basketball team, later heading off to college. Last year, at age 19, she won a teen beauty pageant, and her parents believe antidepressants helped saved the girl's life.
Rider, of Orem, Utah, wasn't so fortunate. He had good and bad stretches on the medication. One day, at age 14, he was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head, an apparent suicide that his mother, Dawn Rider, blames on the drugs. "He was not at all a suicidal person, not at all," she said. "The drugs ended his life."
In public hearings today a panel of experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration is set to address the underlying question: Could the same drugs that doctors say have helped make life more enjoyable and fulfilling for millions also increase the risk of suicide in some children?
The hearings come weeks after health officials in England effectively banned doctors from prescribing a range of antidepressants to children, citing concerns over suicide risk. As the debate heats up in this country, some psychiatrists say that the uncertainties could vastly alter the treatment of depression in American minors.
"The potential implications of this are enormous, because FDA decisions carry so much weight in terms of what medications are available to patients and families," said Dr. James McCracken, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute. McCracken said concerns over suicide "are genuinely confusing to many doctors who've used these drugs for some time and are comfortable with them. To suggest that the drugs may be harmful for kids is an about-face that is very hard to understand."
The debate is over how to interpret research on SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), the popular class of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. All agree that a risk of suicide shadows any treatment for depression. It's not just that the disease itself puts a person at increased risk, psychiatrists say; it's also that effective therapy can lift mood and energy level just enough to prompt someone to action.
