INTERVIEW WITH A FATHER AFTER THE DEATH OF HIS DAUGHTER

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SEPTEMBER 3, 2005, REPRINTED FROM MAY 28, 2005. He is in his late forties. He lives in the Western US. Several years ago, his teen-aged daughter committed suicide a week after beginning a course of treatment with one of the SSRI antidepressants. This father states, "For now, I'm keeping back my name and the name of the drug my daughter took, because I'm in the process of getting together a lawsuit against the drug's manufacturer. I can tell you that it is one of the popular drugs---Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft." Q: What happened to your daughter? A: She was a very happy child, but she had a few problems come up. One of her friends at school died in an accident. And her grades slipped after that. She was sad. My wife and I talked with her, and she said she'd put things right. She'd get back to work in her courses. A school counselor told us he thought she should see a psychiatrist for help. Q: Is that what you did? A: Yes. We were naive. We thought this meant a short period of therapy. Conversation. But after two sessions, the psychistrist told us she was suffering from depression. Q: Did you accept the diagnosis? A: Yes. We misunderstood. We thought the psychistrist meant she was sad. Which she was. But this was a clinical assessment, and the doctor told us she should be on an antidepressant. We asked him for how long, and he said he would be monitoring the situation. We went along with that. Q: Did your daughter feel she should be on the drug? A: She wasn't sure, but she went along with it. Some of her friends were taking antidepressants. Q: What happened? A: On a weekend, she began to take the pills. Right away, we knew something was wrong. She seemed sedated at first. For a few hours on Saturday, she dragged herself around the house. Her eyes looked glazed. Then, by the end of the day, she was very up. Too up. She was in her room on the phone laughing and screaming. It's not something she usually does. It was out of character for her. Q: Did you do anything? A: We called the doctor. It took us a couple of hours to get through to him because he was out of the office. He told us to give her just half the dose from then on. Q: So you did that? A: Yes. And by Sunday afternoon, she seemed all right. She was her normal self, more or less. She went out to a touch football game, and then she came home with a friend. They sat on the porch and talked. But that night, she had a nightmare. I found her about 2 in the morning in the kitchen, making herself a sandwich. She told me about the dream. It was very vivid. She said it wasn't like other nightmares. I calmed her down. She took a shower, put on her pajamas, and came back into the kitchen. We talked about school for awhile, and then she went back to bed. The next day she went off to school. My wife works, so neither of us saw her again until early that night. She was sitting on the living room floor with a lot of old Christmas cards spread out there. She was looking at the pictures on the cards and reading the notes inside. She said to my wife, "Why is everybody so excited about Christmas?" We thought that was an odd remark, because there she was with all the old cards, looking at them. She seemed a bit distracted. I asked her why she was looking at the cards, and she said, "I'm just thinking about all the people." She said she needed to be more sympathetic to people. She stood up and said, "That's my problem. I'm not sympathetic enough." I went into our bedroom and called the psychiatrist. Again, it took me a while to get through to him. He said nothing was wrong, just to keep her on the half-dose. I explained that she was acting out of character, and he said it was all right, she was just going through something. That night, the three of us [father, mother, daughter] were at home. We sat in the living room and talked. My daughter said several things that seemed strange. Out of context or out of character. She talked about next spring, and the flowers coming back into bloom. She said she wanted to plant lots of flowers in the beds at the front of the house. Before this, she had never taken an interest in flowers or gardening. She said that flowers were "messengers." The next day, I stayed home from work and I kept my daughter out of school. I wanted to be with her. I suspected the drug was causing her to act out of character. I didn't like it. It made me nervous. It seemed that she was high and slightly out of control. This was Tuesday. She wanted to go to school---but then she changed her mind, and she became engaged by the idea that everybody should take down all the signs on billboards around town. She said they were a blight on the landscape. She told me she was going to start a committee at school and urge parents to join in. Q: To take down the billboards. A: Yes. For her, this was way out of character. She had never shown any interest in this sort of thing. But it was more than that. She had this messianic look in her eye. She was suddenly on a mission. By the middle of the afternoon, she'd forgetten about the whole thing and was in her room studying. At one point, she came out and told me she could concentrate very well, better than she'd ever been able to before. She was moving right through her homework. Then she had a snack and went back [to her room.] An hour later, I knocked on her door. There was no answer. I went in and she was asleep under the covers. I stood there for a few minutes and watched her. Her arm started twitching, and her face took on a look. She was grimacing. I sat by her bed for about half an hour. She calmed down. The twitching stopped. So I went out, left the door open, and called my wife at work. We talked for a few minutes. We were worried. I went into the bathroom and took the medicine bottle out of the cabinet. I counted out the pills. I knew how many were in the bottle to begin with. I wanted to make sure she was taking the right amount. Q: Was she? A: Yes. When she woke up, she seemed fine. The rest of the day everything was all right. On Wednesday, I took her to school. She came home at about four that afternoon. My wife was there. She'd come home early from work to check up on her. Everything seemed pretty normal. Q: Normal? A: She was not feeling sad. She wasn't high, she wasn't sad. She wasn't doing anything strange. She was okay. But again, that night, I found her, late, in the kitchen. She'd had another nightmare. She was sweating. She was upset. I told her we were going to go to the doctor the next day. That was her next appointment. We'd get it all straightened out. Q: Did you tell her you thought she was having a reaction to the drug? A: Yes, and she understood. She realized that the drug could be causing her nightmares. So the following day, she and I and my wife all went to the doctor's office. I had her tell the doctor everything that had been happening to her. He took notes. He said that the drug could be causing these reactions. He said, though, that with the half-dose, it would smooth out. We should give it another week, and if there were still problems, he might cut the dose further or switch her to another drug. I asked him if the half-dose she was currently taking was average for a girl her age and weight. He said that the full dose was completely proper for her, and the half-dose was "cautious." We felt reassured. My daughter said she didn't want to have any more of those nightmares, and the doctor told her they would probably go away very soon. The next day, everything was okay, and that night she slept through without any problems. My wife dropped her off at school. That was the last time we saw her alive. Q: What happened? A: I'm not going to go into details, because...it has to do with the suit. All I can tell you is, she committed suicide. My wife and I---our lives have never been the same. We have had our girl torn away from us, and there is nothing we can do. She's gone. We're still here, but it'll never be the same. I don't want to talk about this anymore. I just want people to know they should never trust these drugs or the doctors who prescribe them. I don't care how sane it sounds. Don't trust them.