“Antidepressant use is not associated with an increased risk of suicide, according to a recent US study.

The findings, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, are in contrast to previous reports suggesting that use of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) may increase suicidal tendencies.

Dr Arif Khan, from the Northwest Clinic Research Center in Bellevue, Washington, and colleagues reached their conclusions after reviewing suicide data from US Food and Drug Administration summary reports. ”

As you know, I have taken a strong stand against what I have considered the irresponsible attacks on the medications for supposedly promoting suicide (or violence), which have often led to high-profile lawsuits with national press coverage. Among other consequences, patients suffering from antidepressant-responsive conditions become more reluctant to take the most suitable medications for their distress.

The use of the medications is in fact associated with suicide and other adverse outcomes. However, it is not the fault of the drugs but rather the conditions of modern medical treatment, with inadequate supervision of the potentially suicidal patient by prescribers who are often not trained well enough and do not have enough time to sit with their antidepressant patients. As I often rail against, this is partly the fault of pharmaceutical companies’ targeting doctors outside the psychiatric field to do the prescribing themselves without referring their patients to specialized mental health practitioners, persuading them how easy the SSRIs are to use, which is a recipe for disaster. Some patients on antidepressants become suicidal as they improve; others because they do not improve; and still others as a result of the agitating side effect of these medications can sometimes cause, akathisia. Still others are at risk because a psychosis concomitant with the depression goes unrecognized or untreated, and some may have altogether different unrecognized psychiatric or neuropsychiatric disorders mistakenly assumed to be antidepressant-responsive.

The chances of any of these being recognized and addressed appropriately are tremendously diminished if the patient is not under the care of a practitoner who has the time to sit with a patient, the skill to create an alliance that will allow the patient to reveal their inner life with frankness, diagnostic expertise and sophistication in assessing and managing psychiatric medication tolerability and efficacy, as well as the very specific proficiency to assess suicidality.

“Networks that mask the identity of users appear to be becoming more popular since the music industry threatened to sue individuals.” New Scientist

“Two different strains of HIV infecting the same woman swapped genes to form a new virus – it is bad news for vaccine researchers.” New Scientist

“Long-range US strategies to destroy enemy missiles in their vulnerable launch phase are unlikely ever to work, says an expert panel.” New Scientist

A true man of letters.

Keep the Global Ideal Alive, says Todd Gitlin: “Instead of shouting ‘US Out,’ those who opposed Washington’s unilateral war must get serious about creating an international vision of their own.” Mother Jones

“After father objected to possible for-profit use, son’s tissues sent to mortuary in boxes.” Austin American-Statesman [via Daily Rotten]

“UN May Be Asked to Help: Attackers firing guns and rocket-propelled grenades killed a U.S. soldier in Baghdad on Saturday as Washington considered asking the United Nations to help restore order in Iraq and contain a guerrilla insurgency.” Reuters

“British Prime Minister Tony Blair will appear on television on Sunday to face accusations his government hounded an expert on Iraqi weapons to suicide.

Dr David Kelly, a defense ministry biologist and former U.N. arms inspector, was found dead on Friday with his wrist slashed after being sucked reluctantly into a dispute over whether officials hyped intelligence on Iraq to justify war.” Reuters

“Though the Republican Party prides itself on being a champion of state sovereignty, one need only mention phrases like ‘medical marijuana’ or ‘drug law reform’ to see how quickly the Administration of George W. Bush becomes hostile to the notion of the autonomy of states. The latest–and perhaps most egregious–example of this enmity is about to become manifest via a new appointment: that of veteran Justice Department official Karen Tandy, soon to be new chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration.” — Jason Vest, The Nation [via walker]

…And How!

“The sergeant at the 2nd Battle Combat Team Headquarters pulled me aside in the corridor. ‘I’ve got my own ‘Most Wanted’ list,’ he told me.

He was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime.

‘The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz,’ he said.” ABC News

Related: Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV

“It was the end of the world,” said one officer Thursday. “It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers.” San Francisco Chronicle

Fox News hits a new lowest common denominator: Thanks to Adam for sending me this eloquent diatribe by Hal Crowther which, although it starts out being about Fox and Murdoch, ends up about alot more. You should read it all, but I can’t resist bulleting his most quotable rantlets, blithely taking them out of context for you:

• ” It’s the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people — an effusive flattery that intensifies when they ask “the people” to swallow something exceptionally inedible.”
  
• ” The wondrous blessing God bestowed on (the) great chroniclers of contagious stupidity — (Gustave Flaubert,) Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It’s easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch’s outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.”
  
• ” Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North.”
  
• “…Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem — in fact, the serious problem – is that Fox isn’t kidding, and brownshirts aren’t funny.”
  
• ” If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists — they’re mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.”
  
• ” But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll… I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.”
  
• ” Murdoch’s repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he’s softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it’s hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that’s consuming us.”
  
• “Is it sheer coincidence that the president’s stage manager, Greg Jenkins — responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty — was recently a producer at Fox News?

  If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal.”
  

• “Fox is not what it seems to be. It’s not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It’s a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled “Commander-in-chief” and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.”
  
• “On the wall above my bed of pain, two familiar quotations: “The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time” — Albert Einstein; and “Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.” — George Santayana.

  It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow citizens “idiots.” (Unless they’re liberals — “We all agree that liberals are stupid,” writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately, the PC wordworks has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word “retarded.” It’s “intellectually disabled,” and we have it just in time. How else could we describe a majority that accepts the logic of “supporting the troops”? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me, once the soldiers are “locked and cocked” I owe them not only my prayers for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me. ”
  

• ” When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When a Fox TV show for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been the funeral of reason.”
  
• ‘There’s a chilling suspicion that major architects of our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser Richard Perle, known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness: “If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, (my italics) our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” ‘
  
• “…I believe that the split between liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared to the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me, for a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe in literal, biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject Charles Darwin? He didn’t need to add that creationists, science-annihilating cretins, have now recruited President Bush, who assures fundamentalists he “has doubts” about evolution. Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest is beside the point. He knows his constituency.”
  
• “Novelist Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when he urged me to ignore all the polls — if the government has intimidated most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the polls are credible?”
  

And finally:

• ” Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the Bush-Fox disinformation campaign — like Saddam’s missing uranium and his 25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the presidential election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is wrong, as I fear, it’s going to be a long, sandy century for the United States of America, for our children and grandchildren and all those sweet singing children yet unborn.”
  

Related: Atlanta freelance writer and columnist Marc Schultz on how reading Crowther’s screed got him into a very contemporary sort of trouble. When Adam pointed me to the Crowther piece, he wondered whether Crowther is going to end up in Guantanamo.

Another take on why this four-year-old story is now suddenly big news. Brendan O’Neill says the Democrats could have ripped apart the uranium story more than six months ago, in time to divert the course of war… but they weren’t potential Presidential candidates then. Furthermore, evenn if the Niger connection hadn’t already been thoroughly discredited at the time of the SotU, experts were vocal about their doubts that Iraq could do anything to enrich uranium even if they obtained any. Given that few of the Democratic opposition (an oxymoron?) took any kind of principled stand against the war, the

…retrospective focus on the uranium claims is a cover for their own cowardice over Iraq, for their failure to take a principled stand against the war. Opposition politicians are grubbing about for something with which to beat the Bushies, as they clearly have no politics or principles with which to do the job. This sorry excuse for political opposition helps to explain why doubts about the uranium are everywhere, months after they first originated – and why someone like Senator John Edwards, who voted for war in the House of Representatives, can now get off on lecturing Bush about the ‘enormous failure’ in Iraq. The antis’ cynical approach – flagging up Bush and Blair’s lies instead of positing a principled alternative – can only harm political life in the long run. sp!ked

O’Neill acknowledges that the cheap shot is so opportune because of the squirrelly defensiveness and blame-shifting the proponents of war are doing on the issue:

Bush blames the CIA, while the CIA blames Britain’s MI6 for starting the story in the first place; MI6 is standing by its intelligence, though Tony Blair is apparently planning to ‘blame France for the uranium row’; and Niger, from where Saddam allegedly tried to buy the uranium in 1999, is said to be deeply upset ‘at suggestions that it would consider selling uranium to Iraq’

and concludes:

Those who launched the war in Iraq are now washing their hands of responsibility, defensively backtracking over the pre-war ‘evidence’.

It wasn’t the uranium story that caused these tensions within and between the Bush and Blair governments. Rather, the uranium spat has further exposed the defensive nature of Bush and Blair’s war, and its failure to unite the American and British elites behind any sense of common purpose.

As postwar Iraq spins further out of control, politicians and journalists in the West squabble over 16 words in Bush’s State of the Union address, and who is responsible for putting them there. This is about much more than a bullshit story about African uranium. The uranium spat is more like a sign of our unprincipled times.

Photo 5: Behind the Scenes: “Working at his desk in the Oval Office, President Bush reviews the State of the Union address line-by-line and word-by-word.” [thanks, walker]