Tune in to our radio show on your local public radio station, or sign up for the podcast and listen at your leisure. Here’s what it’s about:
More than 150 million prescriptions are dispensed each year for antidepressant medications. It seems counterintuitive that medicines designed to fight depression might trigger suicidal thoughts or actions. Perhaps that is why so many doctors seem not to have recognized the evidence of this potential side effect. It can also be extremely difficult to stop taking an antidepressant. Prescribers rarely mention that withdrawal symptoms can be disorienting and can take weeks or even months to disappear.
In the book Pharmageddon, Dr. David Healy talks about the pharmaceuticalization of medicine. How did big Pharma seduce so many doctors?
Guest: David Healy, MD, is a professor in psychological medicine at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales. He is also the director the North Wales School of Psychological Medicine and former secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology. He is the author of Pharmageddon, along with 20 other books and more than 200 articles. His websites are davidhealy.org and RxISK.org, which is designed to collect online direct patient reports of drug effects so that adverse effects can be detected more quickly.
The podcast of this program will be available the Monday after the broadcast date. The show can be streamed online from this site and podcasts can be downloaded for free for four weeks after the date of broadcast. After that time has passed, digital downloads are available for $2.99. CDs may be purchased at any time after broadcast for $9.99.
