Lit Review 4 Gibbons

Gibbons, Robert D., C Hendricks Brown, Kwan Hur, Sue M Marcus, et al. (2007). Early Evidence on the Effects of Regulators' Suicidality Warnings on SSRI Prescriptions and Suicide in Children and Adolescents. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 164(9), 1356-63. Retrieved February 25, 2008, from Research Library database. (Document ID: 1329950011).

Gibbons et al. are a big promoters for SSRIs being the cause for the increase in suicide rates from 2003 to 2005 in their article, Early Evidence on the Effects of Regulators' Suicidality Warnings on SSRI Prescriptions and Suicide in Children and Adolescents. They concentrate their argument on the FDA warning, claiming that this was the cause that discouraged patients from seeking the medications that could have helped their depression. Instead these patients choose to go without the drugs in fear that they would simply make things worse.
With the use of Poisson regression analyses, they determined that there was an inverse relationship between the antidepressant sale rate and the youth suicide rate. In Europe, we see a 49% increase in youth suicide rates in 2003 to 2005 and in the US we see a 14% increase from 2003-2004, one of the largest jumps in a single year that has ever been witnessed. This, the authors argue, is all cause by the ‘black box” warning that was issued by the FDA in 2003.