SSRI Stories Note: The Physicians Desk Reference states that
antidepressants can cause a craving for alcohol and can cause alcohol abuse. Also, the
liver cannot metabolize the antidepressant and the alcohol simultaneously,
thus leading to higher levels of both alcohol and the antidepressant in the
human body.

http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/man-angry-at-juvenile-delinquency-chases-

youths-with-chainsaw-454896.html

Man angry at juvenile delinquency chases youths with chainsaw
22/04/2010 – 14:29:48

A man who was so frustrated with juvenile delinquency in his neighbourhood
that he tried to scare off some youths with a chainsaw has been ordered to
carry out work in the community in lieu of a jail sentence.

Patrick Mulligan (aged 50), a bus driver for children with special needs,
was still holding the running chainsaw in his driveway when gardaí arrived
and he waved it in the direction of garda Colin Noonan and two of his
colleagues.

Mulligan of Whitechurch Avenue, Ballyboden, pleaded guilty at Dublin
Circuit Criminal Court to possession of the chainsaw under the Firearms and
Offensive Weapons Act at his home on October 4, 2008. He had no previous
convictions.

Garda Noonan told Ms Una Tighe BL, prosecuting, that it took a short time
to convince Mulligan to put the tool down while his wife stood in the couple
’s doorway in a distressed state.

He said it was clear that the accused had been drinking. Mulligan told
gardaí that he had number of problems with some of the people in his
neighbourhood and was concerned for his property and the bus he drove for work.

He told gardaí later that his wife could not walk down their street
without “being hassled”. He said some youths had gathered outside his house that
night and were interfering with his bus and he had brought out the
chainsaw as tactic to scare them off.

He said he was shocked when gardaí arrived and that was why it took him
some time to put the tool down.

Garda Noonan agreed with Mr Garnet Orange BL, defending, that his client
was very apologetic to the gardaí during interview and co-operated with
their investigation.

He accepted that Mulligan’s wife had called the gardaí because she was
concerned for her husband before he further accepted that it had not been an
incident of “domestic violence”.

Garda Noonan agreed with Mr Orange that Mulligan had been on
antidepressants at the time and the medication did not mix well with the alcohol he had
taken that night.

Mr Orange told garda Noonan that his client wanted to express his
apologies for “any action that he engaged in that might have been perceived as a
threat to you and or your colleagues”.

He told judge Katherine Delahunt that there had been a problem with “
juvenile delinquency” in the area, involving “keying of cars and damage to both
vehicles and property”.

He said his client had been concerned for his and his family’s personal
safety and that of his property but added that Mulligan had “completely lost
the head and acted in an irrational manner”.

Mulligan had €500 in court to offer the gardaí as a token of his remorse
which garda Noonan said he would pass onto the Garda Benevolent Fund.

Judge Delahunt ordered Mulligan to carry out 100 hours community service
in lieu of a two-year sentence after telling him that had not been for the “
very fair evidence” of garda Noonan, and the manner in which he had met the
case, he would be going to jail.

“Garda Noonan has underplayed what must have been a very terrifying
experience for both him and his colleagues,” Judge Delahunt said before she noted
that she had also taken into account that Mulligan was 50 years old and
had not come to garda attention.

She said she was also taking into consideration the fact he may lose his
job due to his conviction and said that in itself would be “a very
significant penalty to suffer”.

Paragraph 13 reads:  “She said the incident had a huge impact on
her client’s marriage, his wife was left shaken and Todd had consumed alcohol while on medication and with an
empty stomach that night.

SSRI Stories Note:  The Physicians
Desk Reference states that antidepressants can
cause a craving for alcohol and alcohol abuse.

Also, the liver cannot metabolize the antidepressant and the alcohol
simultaneously,  thus leading to higher levels of both alcohol and the
antidepressant in the human body

http://www.standard.net.au/news/local/news/general/pilot-strikes-below-the-belt/1801972.aspx

Pilot strikes below the belt

ANDREW THOMSON
14
Apr, 2010 04:00 AM

A LONG-TIME RAAF officer has piloted his way into
trouble after grabbing another man’s testicles at the Port Fairy Folk Festival.

Jeff Todd, 51, of Ramsey Court, Lowood, pleaded guilty in the
Warrnambool Magistrates Court this week to unlawful assault.

He was not
convicted and fined $1000.

The court was told that on March 7 this year
Todd was at the festival between 6.30pm and 7.30pm when he became involved in a
verbal incident in a bar with a man not known to him.
Todd bumped into the
man several times in a bar and was asked to move away before the victim
requested security personnel to assist.

Todd moved away a few paces,
made some derogatory comments, then came up behind the victim and grabbed his
testicles with significant force.

“You’ve got no balls, mate,” Todd told
the victim and there was a short struggle before he released the victim’s
testicles.

Todd was kicked out of the venue and told not to come back.

He told police during an interview he had drunk a bottle of wine and had
little recollection of the incident.

At the time Todd was suffering
anxiety and depression and could have suffered a blackout.

The victim
suffered pain for about 12 hours and Todd wrote a letter of apology which was
passed on through police.

Defence counsel Danielle Svede said Todd had
no prior convictions, glowing references and had not drunk alcohol since the
incident.

She said the incident had a huge impact on her client’s
marriage, his wife was left shaken and Todd had consumed alcohol while on
medication and with an empty stomach that night.

Ms Svede said her client
was on 12 months leave from the air force, had undertaken anger management and
knew his behaviour was inappropriate.

Magistrate Jonathan Klestadt said
there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the defendant’s actions were
appalling.

He said the folk festival was not a place to be confronted by
drunken, boorish behaviour and assaulted.

From the last paragraph in the article below I quote the author: “I will say only this: I no longer count on Lexapro to make me well. Which is to say I no longer fret if I miss a day or two, I no longer rush to the drug store to get my refills, and I place far more importance on getting my life in order: regulating my alcohol consumption, getting a decent night’s sleep, exercising (I’m not the only depressive who’s become an amateur triathlete) and, corny as it sounds, pausing at intervals to ponder my blessings.”

Although there are some good ideas mentioned here that I have been recommending forever for depressives such as the great importance of sleep and exercise and counting one’s blessings, there are other things that could produce life-threatening consequences for both the author who is using an SSRI or those around him. Those areas of grave concern are the consumption of alcohol with an antidepressant and the lack of concern about skipping a pill or picking up a refill for his Lexapro – both all too common with antidepressant users.

Why are they common although dangerous? They are common because of two side effects produced by these drugs:

1, Antidepressants can produce overwhelming cravings for alcohol as well as a tolerance for alcohol and then when mixed can produce toxic effects leading to psychotic breaks.

2. Antidepressants produce what the patients call the “I don’t give a damn” attitude leading one to not care about missing a pill or refilling a prescription. The grave concern with this is the warning put in place by the FDA along with the Black Box warning of suicide. That FDA warning is that ANY ABRUPT CHANGE IN DOSE of an antidepressant can produce suicide, hostility or psychosis – generally a manic psychosis. Skipping a pill is an abrupt change in dose as is starting or stopping the use of one of these drugs or switching the brand of antidepressant you are taking. If you survive a manic psychosis instead of being told what caused that psychotic break, you will likely be diagnosed as Bipolar and/or spend the rest of your life in prison for what you did while psychotic. The possibilities can be more than just frightening!

Paragraphs 18 through 22 read:

” ‘How’s the Lexapro working’?”

” ‘I don’t know’.”

‘Agnosticism, I’ve found, is a common refrain among my medicated friends. We’re feeling OK, thanks. Is it the pill? Natural cycles? A good week at work? The fact that the sun is shining? Not always apparent. The only thing we’re really clear on, honestly, is our side effects. Nausea, nightmares, hypomania, agitation, headaches, decreased sex drive, decreased sex performance … the list is exquisite in its variation. My first two nights on Lexapro, I lay for hours on the precipice of unconsciousness, unable to take the last plunge. To fall asleep, I had to get a prescription for Ambien, which I then spent another week weaning myself off. To this day, the prospect of sleep holds a mild terror for me that it never did before.’

‘Oddly enough, the side effects are often the pills’ best advocates. If we’re feeling that crappy, we figure something of great moment is happening inside us. What’s harder to accept is the alternative explanation — that, when it comes to depression, we’re still wandering in the dark. As Charles Barber, author of “Comfortably Numb,” argues, scientists don’t really know how antidepressants work. ‘They change the brain chemistry, but the infinite spiral of what they do from there is very unclear’.”

“So if you don’t know how something works, and you can no longer credibly claim it does work (even some industry spokesmen are beginning to qualify their claims), you’re not left with much of a fallback position. The placebo effect is real — the body actually does heal itself when it believes it is being healed — but it is founded on faith, and in the wake of the JAMA study, it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain that faith except through a rather larger act of denial.”

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/04/05/is_my_lexapro_working/

Monday, Apr 5, 2010 04:01 EDT

My antidepressant gets harder to swallow

As studies shed doubt on certain psychiatric drugs, I wonder: Do I really need my little white pill?

By Louis Bayard

Salon

I take it every morning, right after I brush my teeth. A single white pill, with the letters F and L stamped on one side, the number 10 on the other. It’s so small it nearly disappears into the folds of my palm. You could drop it in my orange juice or my breakfast cereal, and I’d swallow it without a hitch.

And, for the last three years, I have been swallowing my Lexapro — and everything that comes along with it. And, apparently, I’m not alone.

Between 1996 and 2005, the number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled. According to the Centers for Disease Control, antidepressants are now the most commonly prescribed class of drugs in the U.S. — ahead of drugs for cholesterol, blood pressure and asthma. Of the 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in 2005, 118 million were for depression. Whether the pills go by the name of Lexapro or Effexor or Prozac or Wellbutrin, we’re downing them, to the tune of $9.6 billion a year, and we’re doing it for a very good and simple reason. They’re supposed to be making us better.

Which leaves a quite massive shoe waiting to drop. What if these costly, widely marketed, bewitchingly commonplace drugs really aren’t fixing our brains?

The implications are troubling, and not just for the pharmaceutical industry. In a study published last January by the Journal of the American Medical Association, scientists conducting a meta-analysis of existing research found that antidepressants were unquestionably “useful in cases of severe depression” but frankly not much help for the rest of us. “The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo,” the study’s authors concluded, “may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.”

In other words, antidepressants work, but only because we believe they’re working. If we’re not seriously depressed and we’re taking a tricyclic or a serotonin reuptake inhibitor or a norepinephrine booster, we’d fare about as well with a sugar pill. Which means that antidepressants are, to borrow the phraseology of Newsweek writer Martha Begley, “basically expensive Tic Tacs.”

And so, like millions of Americans, I’m left with the problem of it: that little white pill that travels down my gullet every morning. What is it really doing down there — up there? What if it’s not doing anything? Is there any good empirical unassailable reason that I should be swallowing it day after day after day? If I stop believing in it, will it stop working?

More than half a century has passed since the first antidepressants were prescribed, but it’s fair to say that the opposition to them coalesced in the 1990s, with the explosive sales growth of Prozac. As critics like David Healy and Ronald W. Dworkin warned that Big Pharma was medicalizing sadness for profit, the widespread usage of ironic terms like “happy pills” conjured up visions of smiling zombies wandering through sinister dreamscapes. Eric G. Wilson, in his overwrought “Against Happiness,” actually envisioned a day when antidepressants would “destroy dejection completely” and “eradicate depression forever.”

Looking back, we can see that both critics and advocates were working from the same premise: that these drugs change us in some fairly profound way. (Even pro-drug Peter Fisher [Kramer], in his bestselling “Listening to Prozac,” worried about the cost of making people “better than well.”) But as researchers like Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein are increasingly finding, the truth may shade more toward the comic end of the spectrum. Far from transforming us, antidepressants are leaving us pretty much as they found us. Emperors in gleaming new clothes.

The more I ponder my experience, the less surprised I am. I turned to medication because I couldn’t stop crying in public places — Starbucks was a popular spot — or imagining my death. (Crucially, I never got around to planning it.) And because I realized that although I was meeting life’s core requirements, I was not always exceeding them. And because, after a couple of years of sessions with an empathetic therapist, I came to believe that my wiring really had shorted out, that some form of grayer matter had fastened itself to my brain and was hard at work, siphoning away my joy.

I remember watching the camcorder footage of my son’s first birthday party and being shocked by the sight of myself, staring back at the camera with sad eyes. Depression had always been a sporadic companion, but in my 43rd year, it began to take up permanent residence. I felt like I was walking around on rotting floorboards. I cried. I lost my temper on the flimsiest of pretexts. I saw myself dead.

At which point medication seemed like a reasonable alternative. Before another week had passed, I had secured a low-dosage prescription for Lexapro, prescribed not by my therapist but by my primary-care physician. (Even that’s not quite true. It was the doctor who was taking my doctor’s patients while she was on vacation.)

“Who’s going to monitor this drug?” my partner asked.

“Um … you? Me?”

When it came to Lexapro, all my responses had the same interrogative lilt. If someone asked me how I was feeling, I’d say, “Better, I guess?” When asked if I would recommend Lexapro to others, I’d say: “Maybe kind of?”

This was the most surprising part of the whole experience: that the transformation or malformation I had expected to feel never quite arrived, that in the course of ramping up my serotonin levels, I should remain so freakishly myself.

It is, in fact, one of the amusing side effects of living in the age of pharmaceuticals that you can always compare your lack of progress with those nearest and dearest to you in this case, my mother. Not a lunch goes by that one of us doesn’t say to the other:

“How’s the Lexapro working?”

“I don’t know.”

Agnosticism, I’ve found, is a common refrain among my medicated friends. We’re feeling OK, thanks. Is it the pill? Natural cycles? A good week at work? The fact that the sun is shining? Not always apparent. The only thing we’re really clear on, honestly, is our side effects. Nausea, nightmares, hypomania, agitation, headaches, decreased sex drive, decreased sex performance … the list is exquisite in its variation. My first two nights on Lexapro, I lay for hours on the precipice of unconsciousness, unable to take the last plunge. To fall asleep, I had to get a prescription for Ambien, which I then spent another week weaning myself off. To this day, the prospect of sleep holds a mild terror for me that it never did before.

Oddly enough, the side effects are often the pills’ best advocates. If we’re feeling that crappy, we figure something of great moment is happening inside us. What’s harder to accept is the alternative explanation — that, when it comes to depression, we’re still wandering in the dark. As Charles Barber, author of “Comfortably Numb,” argues, scientists don’t really know how antidepressants work. “They change the brain chemistry, but the infinite spiral of what they do from there is very unclear.”

So if you don’t know how something works, and you can no longer credibly claim it does work (even some industry spokesmen are beginning to qualify their claims), you’re not left with much of a fallback position. The placebo effect is real — the body actually does heal itself when it believes it is being healed — but it is founded on faith, and in the wake of the JAMA study, it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain that faith except through a rather larger act of denial.

Of course, even the most ardent critics of antidepressants caution strongly against sudden withdrawal. (Those side effects suck, too.) And few scientists will deny that drugs help people with severe unipolar depression. But what of the rest of us? Should we find some way to make ourselves believe in our little white pills again? Or should we find other things to believe in? Should we, in fact, begin to rethink our relationships with our brains?

I don’t bring much in the way of ideology to these questions. I’ve always felt that the rise of Prozac and its ilk at least had the salutary effect of removing the stigma attached to depression. Reconfigured as a chemical condition, it could now be owned and acknowledged and treated. But by translating it from the personal to the pharmacological, we may have left people even less empowered to combat it.

It’s bracing to see how depression is treated in other countries, where the relationship between drug manufacturers and physicians isn’t quite so hand-in-glove. Great Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, for example, recommends that, before taking antidepressants, people with mild or moderate depression should undergo nine to 12 weeks of guided self-help, nine to 12 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy, and 10 to 14 weeks of exercise classes. They should, in short, work on themselves before they can be worked upon.

Unfortunately, as Barber notes, that’s work, and not always pleasant. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we should admit that the drug companies aren’t the only ones who want that pill. We want it, too. If every last antidepressant were to vanish from the market today and a new one were to appear tomorrow, promising greater benefits than before, which of us would not line up? There is, after all, a strength in numbers, whereas grappling with yourself — your self — is a lonely business.

But it is, finally, a necessary one. The little white pill sits in my palm. In the glare of the bathroom light, I give it a good hard searching look. And then once more I clap it in my mouth and swallow it down.

Maybe, as one team of researchers has suggested, it’s the triumph of marketing over science. Maybe, as Samuel Johnson once said of second marriages, it’s the triumph of hope over experience. Maybe I’m just weak.

I will say only this: I no longer count on Lexapro to make me well. Which is to say I no longer fret if I miss a day or two, I no longer rush to the drug store to get my refills, and I place far more importance on getting my life in order: regulating my alcohol consumption, getting a decent night’s sleep, exercising (I’m not the only depressive who’s become an amateur triathlete) and, corny as it sounds, pausing at intervals to ponder my blessings. And also appreciating the ways in which my brain and body regulate their own climate through such time-honored techniques as the crying jag. Which is no less effective for happening in the middle of a busy Starbucks.

Three years and however many dollars later, can I honestly say Lexapro has made me a happier person? No. Has it usefully complicated my thinking? Maybe. In my pre-pill days, I regarded happiness as a form of grace, descending upon me whether or not I was worthy of it. Now I think of it as something that, however elusive, is there to be sought. Swallowing a pill every morning is not, in my mind, an act of obedience but a tiny spark of volition, a sign that I’m willing to find the light wherever it’s hiding. My Lexapro may be no better than a Tic Tac, but it’s a daily reminder that I won’t take depression’s shit lying down.

Brittany
Murphy‘s Family Continues to Deny Drug Rumors

“His
doctor had planned to take him off the drug, but she says her husband’s
medical surveillance fell between the cracks when the doctor left to work
somewhere else.”

In the meantime, while in Ohio, Christie was planning to
paint the garage floor and take apart, clean, and re-assemble lawn furniture. He
had become more outgoing and talkative, she said. When he suddenly left
to go to Fort Myers to visit his brother, he went to a mall and opened
a department store account, things he hadn’t done
before.

Paragraphs ten trhough twelve from the end read:

“Christie ended up at a North Fort Myers hotel. He was initially arrested for
disorderly intoxication and causing a disturbance. The
counter woman at Arby’s gave Nick a free coffee because she thought he had
Alzheimer’s disease.

Joyce says her husband couldn’t
remember her number, or his son’s. Two days later on March 27, he was
arrested again for trespassing.

This time when officers took her husband
into custody, Joyce says they locked his medications in his truck and never
retrieved them.

Drugawareness & SSRI Stories note:
Amnesia is listed as a frequent side effect to
antidepressants in the Physicians Desk Reference. Alcohol cravings are also
known to be caused by antidepressants, as is mania and
violence.

http://www.injuryboard.com/national-news/pepper-sprayed-man-dies-in-jail-what-happened-to-nick-christie-.aspx?googleid=277120

Federal Lawsuit
Pending

The widow of an Ohio man who died in police custody in Fort
Myers, Florida last March, will file a federal lawsuit for violating her
husband’s constitutional rights by failing to recognize that he was mentally
ill.

Joyce Christie, of Girard, Ohio, and her son, plan to file the
action against the Lee County Sheriff’s Office and Prison Health Services (PHS),
the private company that oversees medical care for the jail, which had taken
custody of Nicholas Christie for trespassing.

Her attorney, Nick DiCello
(IB member), of the Cleveland firm of Spangenberg, Shibley & Liber LLP, says
his firm has filed the notices required under Florida state law of an intention
to sue.

“Letters of intent to file a civil lawsuit for medical
malpractice, wrongful death, and civil rights violations, negligence, pain and
suffering have been sent,” he tells IB
News.

Christie, 62, was arrested last March after traveling from Ohio
to Fort Myers while suffering, what his widow describes as a mental breakdown
[manic reaction to medication]. Arrested twice for disorderly conduct and
trespassing, Nick Christie was pepper sprayed ten times over the course of his
43-hour custody.

Suffering from emphysema, COPD, back and heart problems,
the jail staff said his medical files were not available or immediately sought
at the time of his arrest. But DiCello says Christie gave his medical history
and list of medications to the jail days earlier during his first encounter with
law enforcement.

His medication list was found in the back pocket of his
pants when Christie’s personal effects were returned to his
widow.

What Happened To Nick
Christie?

Sometime between the time he was arrested on March 27, 2009
around 2:00 p.m., and March 31 at1:23 p.m. when he was pronounced dead, Christie
had been sprayed with ten blasts of pepper spray, also known as OC (Oleo-resin
Capsicum), which is a derivative of cayenne pepper.

The medical examiner
has ruled his death a homicide.

On January 6, the Lee County State
Attorney’s office mimicked a lengthy investigation by the Lee County Sheriff’s
Office, clearing the officers of any wrongdoing in the death.

Assistant
State Attorney Dean Plattner and Chief Investigator Kevin Smith found the
jailers did not break policy guidelines. A separate internal review of policy
was not conducted and the five corrections officers have remained on the
job.

“My blood is boiling,” Joyce Christie, 59, told the News-Press. “I knew it was going to end this way
because the corrections officers were never taken off their jobs during the
investigation.”

A Failure to
Indict

Assistant State Attorney Dean Plattner says in his memo that
in order to prove manslaughter, the office would have to prove someone showed a
“reckless disregard for human life” to the extent that they should have known it
would likely cause death or great bodily injury.

“The facts of the case
do not support this level of proof,” says the office.

Attorney DiCello
says he is shocked that the state attorney didn’t come to the conclusion there
was a crime.

“All he needs to come to a conclusion that there was
probable cause there was a crime. The local community should have been given the
opportunity to indict. They weren’t given that opportunity,” he
says.

DiCello says despite the state attorney’s conclusion, the federal
case has a different standard of review.

“They have to prove beyond a
reasonable doubt there was some type of criminal intent. We have to prove it
fell beneath the standard of care and these officers knew they were violating
this man’s constitutional rights.”

DiCello says strapping an obese,
62-year-old with a heart condition and COPD to a restraining chair, pepper

spraying him and not allowing him water to wash off should qualify.

“Case
law as a matter of law defines that conduct as a violation of constitutional
rights and affords it no protection under the law,” he says.

The standard
of care is established by the county and Prison Health Services, under contract
with Lee County for $9 million annually, one of 160 contracts PHS holds
nationwide.

Lee County, Sgt. David Valez, tells IB News the
company is NCCHC accredited and “they must maintain that high standard.” There
is no independent review by the county.

Under the contract, PHS is
responsible for conducting a medical evaluation of everyone coming into the
system.

Never Saw A Doctor

His jailers
say Nicholas Christie was combative, despite the fact that he was restrained in
a chair so he allegedly wouldn’t spit at his jailers.

But three inmates
who shared Christie’s cell block told the Fort Meyers News-Press that they thought the use
of pepper spray was excessive and that deputies ignored the victim’s pleas for
help.

“While he was sitting in the chair, they sprayed him two more
times,” said Ken Cutler. His whole head was turning purple and almost blue,” he
says, “He was gasping.”

The other inmates say the pepper spray was so
intense they were gagging in the cell block.

“He was constantly telling
them I can’t breathe and I got a heart condition,” he says.

Dr. Robert
Pfalzgraf, deputy chief medical examiner, concluded that stress caused by
restraint and pepper spray were irritants and stressors to his heart. He says
that 99 percent of the time those sprayed do not die. Christie was the 1
percent.

The medical examiner’s report indicates that the death was

caused by “hypoxic encephalopathy following resuscitation for cardiac arrest,
cardiac shock with congestive heart failure, physiologic stress following
restraint and noxious effects of oleoresin capsicum.”

A homicide does not
necessarily mean that the death was a criminal act only that it was caused by a
person or persons.

DiCello says take a look at Pepper Spray on YouTube videos to see it can down
someone for 40 minutes, even if it is washed off.

“You’ll see Marines
crying, now imagine being sprayed ten times, you’re obese, have COPD and having
a manic episode. Ten times and the last time not washed down for a half hour
strapped down so you can’t rub his eyes.”

Mental
Health Issues

Joyce Christie told IB News last June that her
husband had started showing signs of mania. He had recently retired and thought
he was going to go fishing, she said, but diverticulitis shut down his colon,
then he went into a depression after being hospitalized for COPD ( chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

Christie had quit smoking years ago, but the former boilermaker worked
around asbestos and nuclear power plants, she says.

His doctors had
prescribed Lexapro for his depression and Joyce blames the
medication for his high and low mood swings. Patients on Lexapro report

mood
swings and paranoia among a host of side effects, so it is advised patients
gradually withdraw from the drug.

His doctor had planned to take him off
the drug, but she says her husband’s medical surveillance fell between the
cracks when the doctor left to work somewhere else.

In the meantime,
while in Ohio, Christie was planning to paint the garage floor and take apart,
clean, and re-assemble lawn furniture. He had become more outgoing and
talkative, she said. When he suddenly left to go to Fort Myers to visit his
brother, he went to a mall and opened a department store account, things he
hadn’t done before.

Joyce Christie was so concerned she says she
contacted the Lee County Sheriff’s office and issue a welfare BOLO (Be On The
Lookout). Ms. Christie even had the sheriff of her home town contact Lee County
to stress the seriousness of her husband’s condition and the fact that he needed
to take his medication.

“He begged them to take Nick to the hospital.
They said he’s having a good time, he needs a few days away. All they had to do
was say ‘Let us talk to your doctor to confirm.’ They didn’t do it. Captain
Begowski told the officer, ‘If you don’t take him now, I’m going to tell you,
you’re going to be dealing with him in a couple of hours.’”

That forecast
proved true.

Christie ended up at a North Fort Myers hotel. He was
initially arrested for disorderly intoxication and causing a disturbance. The
counter woman at Arby’s gave Nick a free coffee because she thought he had
Alzheimer’s disease.

Joyce says her husband couldn’t remember her number,
or his son’s. Two days later on March 27, he was arrested again for
trespassing.

This time when officers took her husband into custody, Joyce
says they locked his medications in his truck and never retrieved
them.

Joyce frantically flew to Fort Myers March 28, but police would not
let her see Nick. She says they wouldn’t even tell him she was there. Finally,
an officer suggested she could bond him out of police custody.

When she
finally was allowed to see her husband it was too late.

He had been taken
by ambulance to Gulf Coast Hospital where Joyce says Nick’s eyes were taped shut
and he had 40 tubes taped to his body. Doctors told her he had a 10 percent
chance to live. The nurses told her when he was brought in naked that he had so
much pepper spray on him doctors had to change their gloves as they became
saturated with the orange spray.

No one in the sheriff’s office had
contacted her, and until he arrived at the hospital, Nick Christie had never
seen a doctor. Someone in the hospital, shocked by his condition, suggested she
contact an attorney.

“Nick had a life he was somebody my husband, a
father to my son. He’s somebody I miss very much. It shouldn’t have happened. He
should be here. Three weeks later I get his ashes back from Florida in a mail
truck. My husband, he was somebody, he wasn’t just a nobody,” Joyce Christie
says.

Attorney Nick DiCello says the state attorney’s report clearing the
officers will not hurt the federal case. The fact that Christie was sprayed at
least once after being restrained in a chair with a hood over his head violates
any qualified immunity defense the county and Prison Health Services may
claim.

Besides a violation of the law, DiCello is concerned about the
violation of another human being.

“Humanity has failed here. And now they
aren’t going to address the failure. Us as a people, we need to recognize we’ve
all failed and make it right, not ‘Let’s just move on from this failure.’ People
shouldn’t do this to people. Nothing could warrant the treatment and death this
guy experienced.

“A 62-yr-old retiree strapped to a chair and died. I
don’t get it.” #

“The hearing was told Gulick was
on anti-depressants and had consumed half a bottle of
Scotch.”

“But it was when he was told he was being arrested later that
evening that Gulick went ballistic.”

“Sgt. James Heafy said a tense but
overall calm situation quickly became a “life-or-death struggle” as Gulick
fought back.”

Drugawareness & SSRI Stories Note:  The
Physicians Desk Reference states that antidepressants

can cause a craving for alcohol and alcohol abuse. Also, the liver cannot metabolize the antidepressant and the
alcohol simultaneously,  thus leading to higher levels of both alcohol
and the antidepressant in the human body.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2010/01/12/12428306-qmi.html

Violent cop acted ‘superhuman’

Constable pleads guilty
to discreditable conduct at hearing
By SCOTT TAYLOR, QMI Agency

OTTAWA – A police
disciplinary hearing heard dramatic testimony yesterday about Const. Jeff
Gulick’s violent conduct in May 2008.

Gulick pleaded guilty yesterday to
discreditable conduct under the Police Services Act.

He had previously
been found guilty of assaulting a police officer, uttering threats to cause
bodily harm, escaping lawful custody and mischief after officers tried to arrest
him at his home May 22, 2008.

In an agreed statement of facts, Gulick
became violently angry after failing his use of force requalification. After
swearing at instructors, Gulick went home and, before other officers arrived,
overturned furniture, stabbed a couch and wall with a butcher knife, punched a
picture frame and fought with his wife.

The hearing was told Gulick was
on anti-depressants and had consumed half a bottle of Scotch.

But it was
when he was told he was being arrested later that evening that Gulick went
ballistic.

Sgt. James Heafy said a tense but overall calm situation
quickly became a “life-or-death struggle” as Gulick fought back.

“He
started grabbing at my right side and I could feel my holster and gunbelt being
pulled.”

Gulick threatened to kill his fellow cops as he struggled with
what Const. Michael O’Reilly said was “superhuman” strength.

Gulick was
finally overcome after being shocked with a Taser by one of four officers who
had joined the fight.

Gulick was taken to the Ottawa Hospital’s Civic
Campus emergency room, but when they arrived Gulick had shed both wrist and
ankle cuffs and bolted across Carling Ave. to the Experimental Farm, where he
once again was shot with a Taser.

O’Reilly said the situation had “gone
as sideways as it can go.”

Earlier yesterday, a female police officer
testified she feels like an outcast among fellow officers as a result of her
involvement and subsequent testimony in Gulick’s disciplinary hearing.

Sgt. Holly Watson said she’s heard “through the rumour mill” that fellow
officers support Gulick and there “was never any support for the four of us who
were assaulted (by Gulick during the arrest).”

Watson added she has
received no support from the Police Association either. She also testified that
she still worries about where Gulick is when she goes to her car after work.

Police Chief Vern White is scheduled to testify today.

But she stopped taking that medication shortly before she
hopped in Bob Johnson’s car with 8-month-old Gabriel and headed to Texas.

The baby was last seen in San Antonio in December with his 23-year-old
mother, who allegedly told Loagn McQueary, her ex-boyfriend, that she’d killed their baby.

SSRI Stories note:  Withdrawal, especially abrupt withdrawal, from any of these
medications can cause severe neuropsychiatric and physical symptoms. It is
important to withdraw extremely slowly from these drugs, often over a period of
a year or more, under the supervision of a qualified and experienced specialist,
if available. Withdrawal is sometimes more severe than the original
symptoms or problems.

http://www.kpho.com/news/22168065/detail.html

Johnson’s Grandfather Thinks She’s Lying

Bob Johnson Still Believes Baby Gabriel Is Alive

Pat McReynolds
Reporter,
KPHO.com

POSTED: 10:26 pm MST January 6, 2010
UPDATED: 6:43 am MST
January 7, 2010

TEMPE, Ariz. — Bob Johnson said his
granddaughter, Elizabeth, has always been secretive.

“If she didn’t want
you to know something, you ain’t gonna find out,” Johnson said.

He said
moving in and out of five foster homes as a child made her that way. But he said
the straight “A” student also developed an irrational temper that led to bouts
of rage.

“She should have sought professional help. She did seek help
for post partum depression and she was on medication and during that time she
seemed a lot more mellow and everything was better,” Bob Johnson said.

But she stopped taking that medication shortly before she hopped in Bob
Johnson’s car with 8-month-old Gabriel and headed to Texas.

The baby was
last seen in San Antonio in December with his 23-year-old mother, who allegedly
told Loagn McQueary, her ex-boyfriend, that she’d killed their baby.

Elizabeth Johnson was arrested last week in Florida on suspicion of
custodial interference after she didn’t show up for a custodial hearing.

“She had this cockamamie idea that she was going to change her Social
Security number and name and his Social Security number and name and run
forever,” Bob Johnson said.

Instead, in an exclusive interview with CBS
5, Elizabeth Johnson said she simply gave Gabriel to a couple she met in a park.

“I trusted them. I believe in my heart they’re good people,” said
Elizabeth Johnson on the phone from jail.

But her grandfather doesn’t
buy it. He tried to envision her scenario.

‘Oh by the way, how would you
like to have a baby, oh it’s free, yeah it’s free,’ Bob Johnson said. “That’s
hard. That’s hard to really believe, but it’s a simple story. It’s a story that
you can repeat without stumbling.”

The last time Bob Johnson saw Gabriel
was when the whole family got together for Thanksgiving. He has pictures of
Elizabeth Johnson posing with the boy’s father, Logan McQueary.

“She’s
the sweet Elizabeth,” Bob Johnson said when pointing to a picture of her
smiling.

He thinks she gave Gabriel to a family in Texas, and is lying
now so the boy will never be found. But she has threatened to harm the child,
and Bob Johnson wonders if her past and her struggles with self control
eventually got the best of her.

“It’s possible that in a moment of
anger, depression, whatever, that she carried out her threat. I don’t even want
to think about it because, what a waste. What a waste,” said Bob Johnson.

“Glass shattered over the driver, while children were on
their way home from school.”

“Robert John Alan Campbell (30) had

earlier attacked two other vehicles, frightening the occupants, including
an elderly couple.”

Paragraphs 19 and 20 read:  “He said Campbell
was unable to cope while suffering from a personality disorder brought on by
stress and depression.”

“Campbell’s medication
stopped a few weeks before the road rage outburst, but when he tried
to seek help he ran out of patience waiting in the doctor’s
surgery.”

SSRI Stories note: Withdrawal can
often be more dangerous than continuing on a medication.  Withdrawal must
be done slowly, over a period of a year or more, under the supervision of a
qualified specialist.

http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/news/Road-rage-attacker-terrified-pupils-Leicester-jailed/article-1540590-detail/article.html

Road-rage attacker who terrified pupils in Leicester is
jailed

Wednesday, November 25, 2009,
09:30

Youngsters were terrified when a road-rage driver smashed a school
bus window with a crook lock.

Glass shattered over the driver, while

children were on their way home from school.

Robert John Alan Campbell
(30) had earlier attacked two other vehicles, frightening the occupants,
including an elderly couple.

Campbell, a married dad of three, was jailed
for 16 months after admitting three counts of causing damage and one of having
an offensive weapon – the crook lock.

Janet Hall, prosecuting, told
Leicester Crown Court that Campbell, who had run out of medication for a mental
health problem, committed the offences between 3pm and 4pm, on September
18.

The first happened when a pensioner in Groby Road, Leicester, braked
suddenly at red lights.

Ms Hall said: “The defendant was behind her and
very angry, gesticulating.

“To her horror, he got out of the car and
began throwing his arms around, shouting aggressively, causing her to lock her
door and feel very intimidated.”

Her husband, who suffered from ill
health, was also in the car.

Campbell kicked the driver‘s door, causing
£1,109 damage.

A short time later, Campbell lost his temper with a
motorist coming out of the Tesco car park in Beaumont Leys,
Leicester.

The driver, who was with his girlfriend, locked the doors when
the defendant got out of his vehicle and shouted “What’s your
problem?”

The defendant wielded what looked like a baseball bat, but was
a crook lock, which he used to strike the victim’s bonnet, causing £554 of
damage.

The school bus driver, travelling from Birstall towards
Glenfield, encountered the defendant when taking a wide turn, causing Campbell
to brake.

The defendant got out and, armed with his crook lock, smashed
the driver‘s window.

When the police went to Campbell’s home in Dominion

Road, Glenfield, he said: “The crook lock I used is in the front of my
car.”

The defendant also admitted damaging a TV set at Cash Generators,
in the city centre, on July 10, following an argument with staff.

Paul
Trotter, defending, said: “He’s not a man hell bent on criminality but a man
with problems and needs his medication properly managed.”

He said
Campbell was unable to cope while suffering from a personality disorder brought
on by stress and depression.

Campbell’s medication stopped a few weeks
before the road rage outburst, but when he tried to seek help he ran out of
patience waiting in the doctor’s surgery.

His health had since greatly
improved.

Judge Sylvia De Bertodano said the incidents had particularly
frightened the “vulnerable” elderly couple and the schoolchildren.

She
said: “If you smash windows of a bus with people on it, you take the risk that
someone inside will be injured.

“It’s no thanks to you that no-one was
hurt.

“I’ve seen a psychiatric report and have heard you’ve had
difficulties with your mental health, but the disorder you’ve been suffering
from doesn’t mean I’m not required to send you to prison.

“This sort of
behaviour was quite terrifying to members of the public going about their daily
business.”

“In one case, a man
on an antidepressant wanted to die so badly that he ran into a police
officer with his car so he could knock him down, get his gun and try to shoot
himself. Breggin said the police officer
didn’t press for a lengthy jail sentence because he thought the drug had
essentially driven the man crazy.”

“He said there is

no question that antidepressants can lead to
violence.”

Are claims just an excuse?

Oklahoma experts look at antidepressants
Recent violence in Fort Hood,
Nichols Hills has some looking at links with medication

BY SONYA COLBERG
Published: November 22, 2009

• Questions
  remain
  about risk to public
• 11/22/2009 The debate over whether antidepressants play a role in suicides
  and homicides has taken twists and turns over the years. Drug company
  GlaxoSmithKline sent a…

.

SSRI Stories Note:  The Physicians Desk Reference states
that antidepressants can cause a craving for
alcohol and alcohol abuse. Also, the liver
cannot metabolize the antidepressant and the alcohol simultaneously,  thus
leading to higher levels of both alcohol and the antidepressant in the
human body.

http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/Music/2009/10/25/Songwriter-Fagan-remembers-lost-friend/UPI-64901256488994/

Songwriter Fagan remembers lost friend

Paragraph 10 reads:  “Sam Lamsdale, defending, said Hussain had
no recollection of the assault because the alcohol had reacted with
his medication.”

SSRI Stories
Note:  The Physicians Desk Reference states that antidepressants can cause a craving for alcohol and
alcohol abuse. Also, the liver cannot
metabolize the antidepressant and the alcohol simultaneously,  thus leading
to higher levels of both alcohol and the antidepressant in the human
body.

http://www.berrowsjournal.co.uk/news/4698691.Jailed__councillor_s_son_who_stole_TV_and_spat_at_policeman/

Jailed: councillor’s son who stole TV and spat at policeman

8:10am Friday 23rd October 2009

By Lauren Rogers »

THE son of a Worcester councillor has been jailed for spitting at a
police officer and stealing.

Azad Hussain – whose father is former mayor
of Worcester Coun Allah
Ditta – stole £499 of electrical goods from a woman who was renting a house
from his family.

Hussain, aged 25, claimed she owed him council tax and
said that he was seizing her belongings, including a high-definition television
and computer screen, until she paid up.

However, Worcester
Magistrates Court was told that the claim was in fact a lie. The stolen
goods have never been recovered.

Hussain, of Richmond Road, off Wyld’s
Lane, Worcester, was found guilty of the theft at a trial he failed to attend
last month. He was also found guilty of assaulting a police officer by spitting
in his face.

The attack happened in May after Hussain was found by
police lying in a front garden.

Matt Dodson, prosecuting, said he was
intoxicated. He said: “His speech was at times incomprehensible and he was
struggling to stand. He refused to leave the area.

“He was arrested
after he lunged at a passing member of the public.”

Hussain spat in the
officer’s face while on the way to the station.

Sam Lamsdale, defending,
said Hussain had no recollection of the assault because the alcohol had reacted
with his medication.

“Mr Hussain was the victim of an attack four years
ago in which he was attacked with a hammer,” she said.

“It is thought he
has since been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, panic
attacks and some psychotic behaviour.”

She said Hussain worked as an
assistant at a residential care home and was responsible for taking his sister’s
children to and from school.

Sentencing Hussain to six months in prison,
district judge Bruce Morgan said: “Community punishments have been imposed in
the past, but obviously do not work because you carry on offending.

“You
steal, you breach court orders by failing to come to court, then there is the
despicable act of spitting at a police officer.”

l Your Worcester
News was the only member of the media to attend the hearing

SSRI Stories
note:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/65563987.html

Wood could face expulsion

Wood accused of drug-related DUI, bail-jumping in third case this
year

By Patrick Marley of the Journal
Sentinel

Posted: Oct. 22, 2009

Madison ­ State Rep.
Jeff Wood (I-Chippewa Falls) was charged Thursday with driving under the
influence of prescription drugs and bail jumping – raising his chances of
becoming only the second lawmaker to be expelled from the Legislature in 161
years.

Wood’s arrest Wednesday in Tomah marked the third time in less
than a year he was picked up on suspicion of driving under the influence of
alcohol or drugs. The arrests come as lawmakers try to crack down on drunken
driving.

Before Wood’s arrest Wednesday, Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan
(D-Janesville) said he was reluctant to try to expel Wood. But he signaled his
attitude was changing in a statement Thursday.

“We must take a very hard
look at his case and determine if he is truly able to serve the people of his
district,” Sheridan said. “Rep. Wood must take responsibility and be held
accountable for his actions. . . . Rep. Wood has brought shame not only on
himself, but on the Wisconsin State Assembly.”

Gov. Jim Doyle on Thursday
told The Associated Press that Wood should resign.

“When you’re just
simply not providing the basic representation, you’ve got to acknowledge that
and step aside and allow somebody else to represent that district,” Doyle
said.

Wood, 40, was convicted of drunken driving in 1990 and
1991.

This January, he was charged in Columbia County with drunken
driving and possessing marijuana and drug paraphernalia. In September, he was

arrested in Marathon County on suspicion of driving under the influence of
anti-anxiety drugs and cold medicine. Charges in that case could be filed soon,
said Assistant District Attorney Laura Kohl.

Those two cases, as well as
Thursday’s case in Monroe County, could result in third, fourth and fifth
offenses of driving under the influence.

A fifth offense would be a
felony, which would force Wood out of the Legislature. But the three cases could
take months to resolve and stretch past the November 2010
election.

Thursday’s bail-jumping charge stems from a condition of his
bail in Columbia County that required him to maintain absolute sobriety and
barred him from committing crimes. In Columbia County, he was charged with
possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and third offense
drunken driving.

Wood’s staff was not in his Capitol office Thursday and
did not return calls.

Expulsion to be reviewed

Sheridan soon will form a
committee of three Democrats and three Republicans that will review a resolution
by Rep. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) to expel Wood. Nass introduced the resolution
in response to Wood’s Sept. 23 arrest in Marathon County.

Expelling him
would require a two-thirds vote of the Assembly.

The only lawmaker to be
expelled since Wisconsin became a state was Frank Raguse, a Milwaukee Socialist
who was removed in 1917 for refusing to retract statements his colleagues deemed
disloyal to the United States.

Wood’s attorney, Tracey Wood, said
lawmakers were acting prematurely in trying to remove the lawmaker. The Woods
are not related.

“People in our system are innocent until proven guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said. “It seems a little crazy to me to rush to
judgment.”

Blood tests will not be available for months in the two cases
where he is suspected of driving under the influence of drugs, she
said.

Wood was first elected as a Republican in 2002. He quit the party
in the summer of 2008, and in November became the first independent elected to
the Legislature since 1928.

“I’m not sure the people of the 67th
(Assembly District) are being served,” said Assembly Republican Leader Jeff
Fitzgerald of Horicon.

In September, Wood joined his colleagues in a
unanimous vote to make fourth offense driving under the influence a felony if it
occurs within five years of the third offense. Less than a week later, he was

arrested on what could be a fourth offense.

According to the complaint
filed Thursday in Monroe County Circuit Court, Wood was pulled over Wednesday
after another driver called to report she saw him weave out of his lane and into
oncoming traffic. She said he twice entered intersections on red lights, stopped
in the intersections and then backed up.

When officers pulled Wood over,
he struck the curb, drove back into traffic and then drove up onto the curb, the
complaint said. During field sobriety testing, he fell onto the back of his car
and lost his balance a second time.

A breath test showed he had no
alcohol in his system. Police found he had 55 tablets of naproxen, an
anti-inflammatory used to control pain; 22 tablets of fluoxetine, an
anti-depressant commercially known as Prozac; and 25 tablets of an
antibiotic.

He was released Thursday afternoon from the Monroe County
Jail after posting $1,000 bail in cash.

After his September arrest, Wood
said he had enrolled in an in-patient treatment program at a veterans hospital
in Minneapolis. He was later transferred to a program in Tomah, said Sheridan’s
office.

Wood was absent for Tuesday’s Assembly session, which his office
said was because he was in
treatment.

Paragraphs 20 through 23 read:  “But in 2004, they began to
notice troubling signs. Arylane Ala said her son always wore black and went on
binges with vitamins, nutritional supplements and workouts. Sometimes he
would hide, saying he heard helicopters. And he would get
extremely agitated while driving, occasionally slamming his car
into park, and running away, disappearing for hours or even
days.

In June 2005, Ala was hospitalized at the Louisville
VA Medical Center and diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which the
VA later ruled service-connected, which made him eligible for financial
benefits.

He was prescribed lithium, but his parents said he sometimes
skipped his medication. At nursing school, he highlighted passages about bipolar
disorder in his psychiatry textbook, writing “me” in the
margins.

Finally, after a fight with his fiancee that resulted in her
obtaining an emergency protective order against him, Bryan Ala went to his
parents’ home. The Alas said he promised not to do anything rash. But after they went to work on Aug. 10, 2007, he took a rifle from
under his father’s bed and ended his life.

SSRI Stories note:

Antidepressants Can Cause Bipolar Disorder to Develop.  This is
stated in many scientific studies.  Bipolar Disorder Can Contribute to
Suicide.

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20090913/NEWS01/909130330

Suicide takes growing toll among military, veterans

By Laura Ungar • lungar@courier-journal.com •
September 13, 2009

As soon as Arylane Ala walked into her house that day
in 2007, she saw blood ­ a red pool stretching from the coffee table to the
fireplace. Then she saw her youngest son face down on the floor, an antique
rifle by his side.

She didn’t approach his body, she said: “I didn’t
want to see his face … his expression.”

Four tumultuous years after
serving in the Middle East with the Kentucky Air National Guard, 25-year-old
Bryan Ala of Louisville took his life ­ part of a rising number of military
and veteran suicides as the Iraq war continues and fighting intensifies in
Afghanistan.

“Life goes on after you lose a child,” said Bryan’s father,
Rich, 60. “But sweet is never as sweet as it was. The sun’s never as bright.
I’ve got a hole in my heart that will never heal up.”

The federal
government estimates that 5,000 veterans commit suicide each year, and Dr.
Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said suicides
among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans could top combat deaths.

He made the
statement last year at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric
Association and cited a study by Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization,
showing as many as 20 percent of veterans returning from these conflicts will
suffer major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, and seven in 10 won’t
seek help from the departments of Defense or Veterans Affairs.

The toll
is also rising in the active military, with the Army reporting the most
confirmed suicides ­ 140 last year. Locally, Fort Knox reported five
confirmed suicides in 2008 and 2009. Fort Campbell reported 24 suspected or
confirmed suicides in the same period and in late May suspended regular duties
for everyone for three days so commanders could better help soldiers at
risk.

Driving these numbers are pre-existing mental illnesses,
post-traumatic stress disorder and relationship or financial problems worsened
by long or repeated deployments, say mental health experts, who also point to
the stigma against seeking help in a culture known for toughness.

Many
families and veterans organizations argue that more needs to be done to stop the
deaths. And military and Veterans Affairs officials say they are taking the
problem seriously, beefing up mental health resources and suicide prevention
programs.

“We’ve got to hit it head on,” said Maj. Gen. Donald Campbell,
Fort Knox commander.

In July, Fort Knox played host to Maj. Gen. Mark
Graham of Georgia and his wife, Carol, who told a standing-room-only crowd about
the 2003 suicide of their son Kevin, 21.

The ROTC cadet at the University
of Kentucky suffered from depression before his sister found him hanged from a
bedroom ceiling fan. The Grahams, who have made military suicide prevention a
personal cause, shared Kevin’s story before attending a ceremony dedicating a
building to their other son, Jeffrey, who was killed in action in Iraq in
2004.

“We lost two sons,” said Mark Graham, who spoke again on Aug. 21 in
Frankfort. “Both our sons died fighting different
battles.”

History of mental illness

Mental illness also proved
too strong an enemy for Bryan Ala.

Growing up, he was adventurous and
loved caving, rock-climbing, fishing and going to the shooting range with his
father, a Vietnam vet. At 18, Bryan Ala joined the Air National Guard to help
pay for college, later enrolling in the University of Louisville’s nursing
school.

Depression first struck in the summer of 2002, and Ala admitted
himself to Ten Broeck Hospital, now called The Brook. He was prescribed an
anti-depressant, his parents said, and later in the year saw a doctor at Fort
Knox who determined he was fit to stay in the Guard. He was deployed the next
year to the Middle East.

Capt. Stephanie Fields, deputy state surgeon for
the Kentucky National Guard, said soldiers are not deployed if they have been
diagnosed with depression less than three months earlier because the soldier
needs to show stability. But otherwise, she said, decisions are made on a
case-by-case basis, according to Army policy, by a treating physician who
consults with the soldier‘s commander. If they are deemed too ill to deploy, she
said, they may still be able to stay in the Guard. Fields said soldiers have two
mental health evaluations before deployment.

Rich Ala said he worried
that serving abroad might aggravate his son’s depression, but didn’t say
anything because he figured his son was an adult who could take care of himself.

Bryan Ala spent six months as a medic in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates and Qatar, where his job was to care for an air crew and help at a
military field hospital. He didn’t talk much with his family about what he saw
during his tour, beyond the different cultures and the harsh conditions of a
desert tent encampment.

Back in the United States, he served another six
months as a medic with a hospital group at the Kentucky Air National Guard base
in Louisville, and his parents said everything seemed fine.

But in 2004,
they began to notice troubling signs. Arylane Ala said her son always wore black
and went on binges with vitamins, nutritional supplements and workouts.
Sometimes he would hide, saying he heard helicopters. And he would get extremely
agitated while driving, occasionally slamming his car into park, and running
away, disappearing for hours or even days.

In June 2005, Ala was
hospitalized at the Louisville VA Medical Center and diagnosed with bipolar
disorder, which the VA later ruled service-connected, which made him eligible
for financial benefits.

He was prescribed lithium, but his parents said
he sometimes skipped his medication. At nursing school, he highlighted passages
about bipolar disorder in his psychiatry textbook, writing “me” in the
margins.

Finally, after a fight with his fiancee that resulted in her
obtaining an emergency protective order against him, Bryan Ala went to his
parents’ home. The Alas said he promised not to do anything rash. But after they
went to work on Aug. 10, 2007, he took a rifle from under his father’s bed and
ended his life.

Combat haunts vet

Psychologist Lanny Berman,
executive director of the American Association of Suicidology in Washington,
D.C., said the military generally does a good job screening out people with
severe mental conditions.

But he said many soldiers suffer pre-existing
depression or develop mental illness during or after service ­ magnifying
everyday stresses and compromising already disrupted relationships.
(4 of 4)

Berman, who serves on a federal task force to prevent military suicides,
said the Iraq and Afghanistan wars pose the particular challenges of long tours
and close-range combat, and many veterans suffer post-traumatic stress
disorder.

Army Sgt. Cecil Harris of Pikeville, Ky., was one of them.
After serving in Iraq in 2003, he was flown to Germany with respiratory
problems, severe headaches and a bacterial illness, said his mother, Sharon
Harris of Louisville.

But long after the physical healing began, she
said, his combat memories haunted him, and he was diagnosed with PTSD at the
Lexington VA hospital.

In May of this year, in the midst of a divorce, he
called his mother in Las Vegas, where she was working as a traveling nurse. He
talked about difficulties with a new medication.

On May 17, Harris, 33,
was found hanged from a beam of an apartment under construction in
Danville.

His mother recalled his last words to her:

“Promise me,
Mom, if something happens to me, that you’ll be my voice to the boys who come
back so they get better medical treatment.”

Care gets beefed up

Military and VA officials said
they are trying to do just that.

Nationally, the VA has suicide
prevention coordinators in each of its hospitals and in 2007 started a suicide
hot line for veterans that has received more than 120,000 calls. The Louisville
VA Medical Center provides mental health care and outpatient group sessions for
once-suicidal veterans.

Joe Verney, suicide prevention program manager at
Fort Campbell, said his was the first Army installation in the continental
United States to create a council of leaders from medicine, religion, behavioral
health and other disciplines, in 2007, and to hire a suicide prevention
coordinator, in 2008.

The base also contracts with 29 behavioral health
professionals available for round-the-clock, anonymous consultations, and trains
soldiers in a suicide-prevention program called “Ask, Care, Escort,” which
stresses accompanying others to help.

Fort Knox officials said they are
taking similar steps, trying to eliminate the stigma against seeking
help.

“Our Army is clearly moving in the right direction,” said Mark
Graham, who used to command Colorado’s Fort Carson. “But it’s not moving fast
enough.”

The changes come too late for the Alas, who argue that mental
health needs to be treated like physical health, with the ill getting intensive
treatment.

Arylane Ala said problems with mental health care in the
military and VA reflect problems in the larger civilian culture. “Mental health
in general … should be more readily available,” she said. “People should be
treated more frequently. Having a (psychologist) to speak with every three
months is not enough when the illness is serious.”

Two years after their
son’s death, she and her husband often visit his ashes at a cemetery near Fort
Knox, placing plastic toy soldiers nearby to symbolize his service.

“You
hope nobody goes through the loss of a child,” said Arylane Ala, her eyes
filling with tears. “Life’s not meant to be that way.”

Reporter Laura
Ungar can be reached at (502) 582-7190.

“This is a very sad case,” he
said.

“She is on medication. She was also drinking. I
understand she finds it helps her sleep.

SSRI Stories Note:  The
Physicians Desk Reference states that antidepressants

can cause a craving for alcohol and alcohol abuse. Also, the liver cannot metabolize the antidepressant and the
alcohol simultaneously,  thus leading to higher levels of both alcohol
and the antidepressant in the human body.

http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/s/2056972_mum_warned_of_jail_after_knifing_threat

Mum warned of jail after knifing threat

By Anna
Roberts
September 09, 2009

An eight-year-old girl pleaded for
her mum to stop brandishing a knife at her neighbours after the woman threatened
to stab them.

Joanne Ireson wielded the kitchen knife outside her home
in Cardigan Road, East Reading, at about 8pm on Tuesday, June 16.

The
fracas took place after Ireson’s daughter snuck off to play outside on her own
and she shouted at her to come back.

But Ireson’s concerned neighbours
got “the wrong end of the stick” and called police – causing her to threaten
them with the blade.

At Reading Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday, August
25, Ireson – of previously good character – admitted one count of possessing the
eight-inch knife in a public place and one of using violence and/or threatening
behaviour towards neighbour Daniel Thiemert.

Lauren Murphy,
prosecuting, explained the emergency services received three phone calls from
concerned people saying a woman was waving a knife about.

She said: “A
neighbour heard a person shouting and screaming. She stated Miss Ireson was
screaming at her children.”

Miss Murphy said at this point Ireson said:
“If you call the police I will stab you.”

She continued: “She [Ireson]
pushed the neighbour and she fell over. She went in the house and came back with

a knife. She said if she could not stab him she would stab herself.

“The
girl [her daughter] said, ‘Will you put the knife down?’

“Another
neighbour [Mr Thiemert] also said he heard shouting. He said he saw a glass
object being thrown at the young girl.

“He [Mr Thiemert] said, ‘I am
going to call the police’. She said, ‘Who the f*** are you?’”

At this
point Ireson punched Mr Thiemert and threw a cigarette lighter at him.

Charles Maidstone, defending, said Ireson had been depressed since the
death of her partner in February, this year.

“This is a very sad case,”
he said.

“She is on medication. She was also drinking. I understand she
finds it helps her sleep.

“This incident arose from a problem with
disciplining the children.”

He suggested neighbours had got “the wrong
end of the stick” and added Ireson was a caring mum.

Ireson, 36, was
released on unconditional bail to reappear at Reading Magistrates’ Court on
Tuesday, September 15.

District Judge Peter Crabtree said: “I take into
account what has been said about your difficult circum-stances and also that you
are a person of good character and pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity.

“Nevertheless, taking a kitchen knife out into the street is a very
serious offence.”

He said she ran the risk of a jail
term.