Prescription For Suicide?

Nonsense, say scientists who favor sharing such data. The reason some studies remain unpublished is that the drug companies don't like to admit negative results. According to Dr. Martin Teicher, a researcher at McLean Hospital outside Boston who has published case reports linking suicide and Prozac use, an internal Eli Lilly study of adults taking the drug showed "a substantially greater incidence of suicide attempts in people in the study receiving Prozac than in people receiving placebo or other antidepressants."

But that study wasn't published, he says, while research showing no increase in suicide attempts was. Says Dr. Richard Harrington, an expert in child and adolescent psychiatry at England's University of Manchester: "It's very important that things get peer reviewed. There is no question about that. But if you have to make decisions about giving drugs to children, you might sometimes have to go on unpublished reports."

Starting this week, the FDA will try to make sense of it all: the studies, published and unpublished; expert testimony from both sides; and the personal stories of ordinary people like Mark Taylor, 19, wounded in the Columbine school shootings by Eric Harris, 18, who was taking the antidepressant Luvox at the time.

The agency could come to a decision by next summer, but it might not be as well informed as some would like. The truth, suspect many psychiatrists, is complicated: SSRIs help some people and hurt others. Says Teicher: "To figure out what impact [SSRIs] have on a side effect like suicidal thoughts that might only affect a couple of percent — or even less than 1%--of people in a study, you need a much, much larger study." And, says Teicher, nobody is doing those studies yet. Besides, argues Koplewicz, SSRIs are most often prescribed for kids by pediatricians or family practitioners, not by experts in child psychiatry. "We need to train these physicians properly," he says, "not ban drugs that are clearly effective."