Antidepressants May Cause People to Become More Violent

A recent investigation - conducted by David Healy and David Menkes from Cardiff University in Britain and Andrew Herxheimer from the Cochrane Center - showed that newer antidepressants can raise the risk of violence in people who take them as medication. This research comes immediately after a study which found that individuals on antidepressants are more likely to commit suicide.

A study completed on the 10th of August this year showed that children and teenagers who take common antidepressant medications are more likely to commit suicide than those who are not undergoing such therapy. The research was conducted on about 5,500 children and teenagers with ages ranging from 6 to 18 by a team of researchers from the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.

All the participants in the trial received antidepressant treatment. The kids and pre-adults investigated in the study were found to be 1.5 times more likely to attempt suicide and 15 times more likely to succeed in their suicidal attempt than regular youngsters who had not been treated with any depressants.

"The new issues highlighted by these cases need urgent examination jointly by jurists and psychiatrists in all countries where antidepressants are widely used," wrote the researchers involved in the current study in their report published in the Public Library of Science-Medicine online journal.

For this study researchers consulted data from the Committee on Safety of Medicines Expert Working Group in Britain, from legal cases and e-mails sent by 1,374 patients as a response to a BBC program broadcast on paroxetine, one of the newer widely used antidepressants. The team involved in the study also found that people who received antidepressants as medication were twice as likely to have a violent episode or "hostility event" than those who were on placebo.

"When violence is a suspected outcome, every case has to be considered carefully, on the principle that individuals are responsible for their conduct, unless there is clear evidence of compromised function that cannot be otherwise explained," experts concluded in their report.