By Geoff Vause
Virtually all the well-meaning suicide prevention campaigns are ignoring the elephant in the room.
People taking their own lives is a deep and lasting tragedy, and invariably leaves those close to them wondering what they could have done.
There is a common thread to many of these deaths, and it has never been properly investigated.
Medical and mental health professionals now opt for Prozac-related antidepressants for people not only with depression but also those struggling with life issues.
Opiate derivatives like oxycodone are also widely used. Troubled teens, even younger children, people in break-ups, even people in financial strife are being placed on regimes of these utterly addictive anti-depressant drugs.
Today, they are dished out like aspirin, usually without any meaningful supporting psychiatric help. The return to drug companies from these highly manipulated synthetic and opiate based drugs is enormous. Alternative treatments are carefully marginalised by legislation manipulated by giant drug companies, and frequently by health professionals themselves.
Withdrawal does not discriminate. When people stop using these drugs suddenly they are plunged into the deepest depression. It is the same for everyone.
For rural people it could be as simple as failing to receive a prescription, or to collect it. For some it could be failing to get organised to get their medication and running out.
For others, the side-effects bring extreme change to their world view as they become entrenched in a lifestyle of highly addicted dependence. They want to feel ‘normal’ and stop taking the drugs.
The lid has stayed on this aspect of suicide. That the person may have been on these drugs is a sidebar to autopsy and does not feature, of itself, in any inquest.
The fact the person was on Prozac, oxycodone or similar is accepted as part of the picture, but never as a causative factor. It is mentioned, but there has been no concerted effort by authorities to measure the links between medication and suicide.
There has been no detailed study of the medication various suicide victims may have had in common.
The wholesale dispensing of these dangerous drugs, frequently to people who don’t need them, is extremely dangerous.
The complete failure to study the wider effects, and their prevalence in suicides, is utterly irresponsible.
