5:55 PM
Ovidia
Furious Seasons reports:
That is the conclusion of this paper in the BMJ, which has surprisingly received little press notice. It's accompanied by a paper on suicide among youths in the UK and an editorial by Greg Simon, a psychiatrist with Group Health Cooperative, a large HMO in Seattle.
The main paper essentially shoots down the assertions of last fall's infamous Gibbons paper, which tried to link a slight uptick in suicides in 2004 to warnings issued that year concerning suicidality and anti-depressant use. While there are a lot of apples and oranges between the British study and the Gibbons paper (which looked at the US and the Netherlands) because of cultural factors and differing time lines, the lack of a relationship between anti-depressant use and suicide rates is still an important fact and one that should be both interpreted carefully and also give anyone who cares about these issues, regardless of where they sit on anti-depressant issues, much to think about.
