DON'T believe all the hype, the drug company executives insisted --
our best-selling product isn't everything it's cracked up to be.
A consultant psychiatrist, Dr Ian Pullen from Edinburgh, sat alongside
them as they spent an hour-and-a-half yesterday trying to convince me.
He wasn't there to check on their sanity; the drug in question was
Prozac and the people from Dista pharmaceuticals had decided that its
reputation as the feelgood pill of the nineties required a
damage-limitation exercise.
Prozac's see-saw reputation is on an upswing in the US because of a
book written by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, enthusiastically describing
the experiences of his patients after he started prescribing the
anti-depressant.
Three years ago Prozac was under attack over claims that it provoked
suicidal preoccupations and aggression. Dista, a subsidiary of the
American company Eli Lilly, now says this has been laid to rest after
scrutiny of the data by the US Food and Drugs Administration and
Britain's Medicines Control Agency.
No damages claims have succeeded, nor have attempts by 42 people
accused of murder or assault to cite their use of Prozac as a defence.
The anti-Prozac bandwagon has been helped along by the Church of
Scientology, which opposes all conventional psychiatric treatment; one
reason, says Dista marketing chief Gordon Taylor, is that it offers its
own, costly, form of help for troubled minds.
Now the bandwagon is hurtling in the opposite direction, and Mr
Kramer's use of Prozac in the cause of what he has termed ''cosmetic
psychopharmacology'' has raised fears that more-or-less healthy people
will use the drug to boost their egos and assertiveness.
Prozac is a relatively new type of anti-depressant which works by
sustaining the level of the chemical messenger serotonin in the brain.
There are four available, but it is Prozac that hits headlines and
appears on T-shirts in New York.
So is Mr Kramer's support in his best-seller Listening to Prozac
embarrassing Dista all the way to the bank?
''Not at all,'' said Dr Gordon Coutts, the company's medical director.
''I am sure most doctors prescribe the drug responsibly. We dissociate
ourselves from Kramer's book. His evidence is anecdotal. There is no
credible evidence that Prozac is a personality-altering drug.''
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