Alarm at soaring use of 'happy pills'

Maria Bradshaw's son Toran Henry took his life after using fluoxetine. Photo / David White

The number of children and teenagers taking Prozac-style anti-depressants has soared to almost 11,000, despite medical safety warnings that young people using the drugs are more likely to think or act in a suicidal way.

Green Party health spokeswoman Sue Kedgley is calling on the Government's drug safety agency Medsafe to follow the United States and put warning labels on the drugs so people know the risks.

But Medsafe senior adviser Dr Susan Kenyon said the agency had no plans to change its present advice, which restricted warnings to its website rather than drug packets.

Figures obtained by the Green Party from Pharmac show prescriptions of antidepressants known as Selective Seretonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) to under-18-year-olds increased by 31 per cent in four years, from 8332 in 2006 to 10,941 in 2010.

Last year, 1855 prescriptions were written for children under 13, a 20 per cent increase from 2006.

Most prescriptions were for fluoxetine hydrochloride, best known under its commercial brand name Prozac but subsidised by Pharmac through a generic brand called Fluox.

The total number of SSRI prescriptions rose 25 per cent from 616,661 to 772,915, more than half the total of 1,350,174 million prescriptions for all antidepressants.

SSRIs - nicknamed "happy pills" - are controversial because large-scale studies have shown increases of suicidality (which includes suicidal thinking and suicide attempts) among children and adolescents who take the drugs for depression.

A study by the US Food and Drug Administration showed a 4 per cent risk for SSRIs and other antidepressants, compared with 2 per cent for patients given a placebo.

Medsafe, which warns of the risk on its website, adds that SSRIs are not approved for the treatment of depression among children and adolescents, so patients or their parents must give consent to using the drug.

Ms Kedgley said she could not understand why Medsafe and the Government allowed psychiatrists to carry on prescribing the drug to children and teenagers, when their own advice warned against it.

European countries required warning labels on such drugs and the Food and Drug Administration in the United States required a "black box warning", the most serious label available for a prescription medicine.

Arguments over the role of antidepressants in suicide featured in last year's inquest into the death of Toran Henry, who took his life after using fluoxetine.

His mother, Maria Bradshaw, publicly blamed mental health professionals for allowing him to take the drug and mix it with alcohol.

Auckland coroner Murray Jamieson criticised the 17-year-old's care by Marinoto Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services as deficient, including their lack of advice on fluoxetine's side effects.

However, he did not make any finding on whether taking the drug contributed to Toran's death.

Some psychiatrists told the inquest that fluoxetine helped to treat depression and that depression itself, rather than the drug, was a more likely cause of suicide.

In 2009 Wellington woman Jude Pinkerton told the Weekend Herald she had tried to take her own life after using paroxetine hydrochloride, another SSRI drug.

Nine people contacted the newspaper to report similar experiences after reading her story.

Antidepressants*

Number of prescriptions last year

2652
For children (under 13)

13,792
For children and adolescents (under 18)

1,350,174
All ages

* All types