The question that will save lives: Interview with Katinka Blackford Newman, founder of Antidepressant Risks

Summary

Antidepressant medications are taken by millions of people globally. A small percentage of people who take them will experience rare but dangerous adverse reactions. In this interview, Katinka Blackford Newman tells us about her personal experience of antidepressant-induced psychosis and depression and how this led her to campaign for increased awareness about side effects. She highlights a widespread lack of education and awareness about the risks associated with antidepressants and outlines why she is asking suicide prevention charities to ask callers one simple question about their medication.

About the Author

Katinka is a BBC-trained documentary film maker who lives in London. Her interest in medication safety began in 2012 when she nearly lost her life because of an adverse reaction to an antidepressant. She was hospitalised and prescribed more drugs which made her extremely ill. After a year she was taken off all the drugs and made a full recovery.

She researched the side effects of antidepressants and interviewed some of the world’s leading experts. Her best-selling book ‘The Pill That Steals Lives’ has been featured on Radio 5 Live, BBC London, Good Morning Britain, The Victoria Derbyshire Show and in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Mail and The British Journal of Psychiatry. In 2017 her research was made into a BBC Panorama programme 'A Prescription for Murder' which investigated whether an antidepressant could be the cause of one of the worst mass killings of this century.

Questions & Answers

Hi Katinka, please can you tell us about yourself and your experience of taking antidepressants?

In 2012, I was going through a divorce and as part of the process had to sell our family home. I found this quite traumatic and it was stopping me from being able to sleep, so I went to my GP to ask for sleeping tablets. He wouldn’t prescribe sleeping pills and instead gave me the antidepressant citalopram.

I soon discovered that I am one of the small but significant minority of people who have a dangerous reaction to antidepressants. Drug company data says that 1% of people will react as I did [1], but other unpublished studies suggest that 2-5% of people will have a dangerous reaction to antidepressants. After taking the citalopram I became psychotic and was hallucinating. I thought I had killed my children—I afterwards discovered that I had actually attacked myself with a knife. I also thought that everything in my life was being recorded. The hallucinations went on for four days, and I ended up being admitted to a private hospital.

By that time I had stopped taking the pills and I woke up the next day no longer psychotic. I was very confused and thought that someone had put acid in my drink. The hospital didn’t realise that it was the citalopram that had made me ill and thought I had psychotic depression, so they prescribed me antipsychotic medication and more antidepressants. If you react badly to one of these medications, it's possible that you could react badly to all of them, and what followed was a year in which I was on a lot of drugs and very unwell. I couldn’t get out of bed some of the time and now realise that I was experiencing chemical-induced suicidality. There was nothing in my outside world that would cause me to want to take my own life—things were a bit tough with the divorce, but I had been dealing with it well. My mental illness was a purely chemical response to the antidepressant. What I went through that year was indescribable. 

By the end of the year I had been given various diagnoses including treatment-resistant depression and bipolar disorder. After 12 months, my private insurance ran out and I was transferred to an NHS hospital, which turned out to be a very fortunate thing. The medication regime I was on clearly wasn’t working so the new hospital took me off all the drugs, cold turkey, with the aim of starting a different one. But after four weeks off the drugs, I was completely better and refused to take any further medications. 

At this point, I did an internet search for antidepressant side effects and came across the work of Professor David Healy. I spoke to him about what had happened to me and he told me I was lucky not to have killed myself or others while I was on the medication, because that's often what happens when people have a psychotic reaction like I did. It was the start of a journey on which I discovered I wasn’t alone—many, many people suffer terribly from the side effects of these medications. 

Why did you set up the Antidepressant Risks website?

It was my own personal experience that led me to set up the site. I started by writing a book about the issue—The Pill That Steals Lives—which was serialised in the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, and my research was made into an episode of Panorama in 2017. I also spoke on ITV’s This Morning about my experience. After this, I was inundated with messages from people who had experienced similar reactions to me, or much worse. That’s when I decided to set up the Antidepressant Risks website with Professor Healy—I went from thinking this was a unique thing that had happened to me, to realising that it was a global phenomenon.

I felt that the facts around antidepressant side effects weren’t being acknowledged in the mainstream media or amongst doctors, so I wanted to create a site that laid out and clearly expressed the risks. Most importantly, I wanted to make a platform for people who had lost relatives to antidepressant-induced suicide, or who were suffering terrible side effects themselves, to tell their stories. Many people feel that they are gaslit by the medical community, who will not accept that these side effects are happening. There are over a hundred million people in the world on antidepressants, and eight million people in the UK, so this is a really big problem. These numbers mean there are millions of people around the world suffering severe side effects from these medications.

What are the patient safety risks associated with antidepressant medications?

There are the risks of psychosis, depression and suicidality that I experienced, but violence is also a serious risk. When people have an extreme psychotic reaction, it can result in violence and in some cases homicide. Courts around the world have ruled that antidepressants have caused people to kill people close to them.[2][3] I was a witness in a UK case about a boy with no history of violence who went and assaulted someone and remembers nothing about it. The judge acquitted him after ruling that the antidepressants had caused him to carry out the assault. 

As I found out more and heard other personal stories, I realised that the issue was much wider than the kind of extreme reaction I had experienced. I started out believing that although antidepressants could have a terrible effect on some individuals, they were generally very helpful for most people that take them. But I now believe that although they can be helpful in some situations, there are lots of people for whom antidepressants don’t work at all.

For those that these medications do help, coming off them can be a big issue. There are some studies that show that 50% of people coming off antidepressants have withdrawal effects, and for half of those people, they are severe and can include suicidality and psychosis.[4] I’m in touch with one young woman who took an antidepressant for anxiety for ten years. When she came off it six months ago, she developed such bad suicidality and akathisia—a dangerous side effect that makes people so restless they can’t sit still—that she has now been sectioned. All she talks about is wanting to kill herself.

There are also sexual and emotional side-effects which 50-70% of people taking antidepressants experience.[5] These don’t always go away when someone stops taking the medication, and awareness is growing of the risk of post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. More and more people are sharing that they haven’t regained their sexuality after stopping their medication. Nobody knows exactly how prevalent these cases are, but just one Reddit support group I came across had over 11,000 people. There is one study that puts the figure at 1 in 215 cases.[6] There’s no acknowledgement of the issue in the medical community and it’s a classic example of people being told their symptoms can’t be linked to their medications.

It’s awful for people to be unable to have sex and not know how long it’s going to last. An emotional numbness and inability to experience pleasure often comes alongside sexual dysfunction and it’s really sad speaking to young people experiencing that—they just don’t have any motivation.

Are patients who are prescribed antidepressants aware of the risks?

Often doctors themselves are not aware of the risks, symptoms and side effects. Many have never heard of akathisia. The education around adverse effects is just not there—it’s not being taught to medical students or suicide prevention services. This results in patients not being told about the risks and starting on medications without informed consent. So many people tell me that their lives have been derailed by a drug that they were told was completely harmless. If the Antidepressant Risks website serves as a warning to people before they take a new medication, that can only be a good thing.

In the course of my research, I have also discovered that it’s not only antidepressants that can cause otherwise healthy people to want to take their lives—there are over 100 different medications that can cause suicidality, including antimalarial and acne medications. Patients are rarely aware of the risks of taking these drugs either.

You recently started a petition asking suicide prevention organisations to ask people about their medications. Why is this important and why isn't this question currently being asked?

I recently interviewed someone for a piece I was writing who told me he had called a suicide prevention helpline 15 times over the course of a year because he was feeling suicidal. He eventually saw a psychiatrist who recognised that his condition was induced by his medication, and he tapered off it gradually. He was furious that no one at the helpline had asked him about his medication, as it could have saved him a year of hell. It made me think that if suicide prevention services could ask that question, it would save lives. They don’t need to have the answer or give any medical advice, they just need to prompt people to think about it and read the listed potential side effects of their medication.

Our petition—The Question That Will Save Lives—has been signed by over 20,000 people in 40 different countries. That makes me think we’re onto something—this issue is important to people. Some of the comments from people who have lost relatives to medication-induced suicide or suffered themselves, are really moving. I’ve also been contacted by a number of different charities that support people affected by injury from other medications including antimalarials and acne treatment. I’m collating paragraphs from each of them and will be requesting meetings with suicide prevention charities over the next few weeks.

What key messages would you like GPs and other healthcare professionals to take on?

I would like GPs to educate themselves so they can warn patients of the potential side effects of these drugs—both the short-term, rare but serious side effects such as suicidality, and the long-term risks such as sexual dysfunction. They need to explain that if you suddenly become suicidal or develop signs of an adverse reaction, this could be down to the medication you are taking and you should seek help on that basis.

Doctors are under a phenomenal amount of pressure and don’t have the resources to deal with the current demand for mental health support, and the simplest and cheapest option is often to give people a pill. However, in my opinion, antidepressants should be used as a last resort, at the lowest possible dose and for the shortest amount of time. Patients need to be made aware of the long-term possible consequences. There is a serious risk that taking or coming off these pills will derail your life considerably.

Related reading

• Long-lasting sexual dysfunction after taking antidepressants: Lack of recognition harmful to patients
• Estimating the risk of irreversible post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) due to serotonergic antidepressants (2023)
• What you need to know about coming off antidepressants (7 December 2017)

References

1. Patient information leaflet: Fluoxetine 20 mg/5 ml Oral Solution. Pinewood Laboratories Ltd, November 2020
2. S Bosely. Prozac class drug blamed for killing. Guardian, 26 May 2001
3. A Haines. Prescription drug side-effects: How they're vastly under-reported and one man's tragic, cautionary tale. CTV News, 9 October 2021
4. M Hengartner, J Davies and J Read. Antidepressant withdrawal – the tide is finally turning. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 2020
5. A Montejo, G Llorca, J Izquierdo et al. Incidence of sexual dysfunction associated with antidepressant agents: A prospective multicenter study of 1022 outpatients. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 2001; 62: 10–21
6. J Ben-Sheetrit, Y Hermon, S Birkenfeld et al. Estimating the risk of irreversible post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) due to serotonergic antidepressants. Ann Gen Psychiatry. 2023; 22: 15