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Old 29th Mar 2015, 04:06
  #2468 (permalink)  
Chicklets
 
Join Date: Mar 2014
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I'm not a pilot. I'm an epidemiologist. I had to wade in and say that the alleged association between SSRIs or other antidepressants and suicidal or violent behavior is a bit more nuanced than perhaps is being portrayed here in recent posts.


The problem is that people who seek out medical care for depression or other illnesses and are prescribed these drugs are already at a higher risk for these behaviors. To state that "In other mass murder/suicide incidents, psychotropic drugs played a role" is not quite accurate. The persons involved may or may not have taken antidepressants, but this does not mean the drugs caused the behavior. The scientific literature on the subject is complicated but overall seems to indicate that the drugs don't cause suicidal or violent actions in adults.


I hasten to add that infowars is an extremely poor site for obtaining health information. Mr. Jones likes to promote such nonsense as vaccines causing autism, etc. In addition, the TIME magazine article linked has a major flaw. In it, they report data from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). This is a passive reporting system that states right on the front page that none of the reports prove causality. There is quite a low standard of reporting--any consumer can send in an alleged adverse event to a drug. The good part of the FAERS system is that it's an excellent brute-force screen for adverse events that weren't picked up during FDA approval. The bad is that anything at all can be reported and subsequently misinterpreted by people, such as the author of the TIME article, who don't understand its limitations.


What does this have to do with Lubitz? I very much doubt that antidepressants caused him to deliberately fly a plane into a mountain. However, they may have caused another symptom, which caught my attention immediately--vision problems. If it's not a side effect of a drug, sudden vision problems in and of themselves, depending on their severity, might very well be cause for serious concern in a person as young as Lubitz. Of course we don't know the severity of the vision issue, but this particular symptom could be a harbinger of something far worse.
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