Letters from Generation Rx
a
film by Kevin P. Miller
©2017 Kola
Films LLC
Letters from Generation RX—Complete
Opens with
haunting music as shots of Rocky Mountains are revealed;
Autumn: I’ve had to renegotiate that memory over and over and
over again.
(old Church
in the middle of nowhere as musical chant begins)
Autumn: …gravel spitting and water flying and kids screaming…
(photo of
Autumn as youngster)
Autumn: It was the summer after I turned
eight …
(long shot
reveals rural road as 1990 Ford Bronco appears)
Autumn: We never really knew what toy
expect from Mom. During a particularly bad swing, she went through some really
desperate days .. and she put us all in the Bronco and took us for a drive down
to the river.
(soulful
chant continues as low angle of Bronco speeds by)
Autumn: Before we got to the river, she
was just purely robotic. She decided it was time for all of us .. to die. “It’s time to die; we’re all gonna feel better soon; We’re all gonna feel better soon…
we’ll all feel better soon…”
(soulful
chant increases as Bronco takes hard turn down a dirt road)
Autumn: When something like killing all six
of her children made sense enough to put the kids in the Bronco and drive into
the river—I see it.
(Bronco heads
down muddy road, swerving as it increases speed)
Autumn: My memories of that moment are
really in black and white
(rear shot of
Bronco revealing river; quick-cut of various angles of Bronco hitting the river
at full speed)
Autumn: I’m not sure I ever met my Mom again after that point
(soulful
chant increases as camera shifts from water level to underwater; then title:
LETTERS FROM GENERATION RX as bubbles float upward)
2 seconds
under black, then new music starts, amid sounds of ocean waves - video reveals
waves violently lashing a minivan)
News voice: ...a strange story out of Florida
this morning, where the mother of three children drove into the ocean off of
Daytona Beach …
News: The pregnant mom spoke of demons before driving into
the Atlantic...
Newsvoice: Police say they’ve never seen anything like this ..
(cut to
Newburgh, NY news video from Associated Press)
AP Reporter: The tiny city of Newburgh NY is trying to come to
grips with the deaths of 3 young children who died when their mother drove them
into the Hudson River. . .
Nicholas Valentine, Mayor, Newburgh, NY: “we are talking about a tragedy in
this city that is probably second-to-none…”
AP Reporter: It all unfolded at this boat ramp
Tuesday evening
Fire Chief, Newburgh, NY: …any effort to locate the vehicle,
difficult at best...it was not floating—it was underwater.
Reporter SOT: among the victims are 2-year old Lance Pierre and his
11-month old sister.
Tilda:
Perhaps we should take nothing for granted: not our loves, nor our lives —
our families
or friends — even our sanity. One minute, all is well …
the next, we’re plunged into darkness, unable to process what is
real — and what is madness.
(bronco hits
water - splash sfx)
Tilda: Autumn Stringham (String-um) realized this all-too-young.
Autumn: It was the summer after I turned eight.
Tilda: She should not be alive—and she knows
it.
Autumn: That was the moment that shattered trust. How do you
trust anybody after that?
Tilda: Forced
to confront a mystery beyond her comprehension, she spent decades haunted …
in search of
answers … in pursuit of peace.
Autumn:. . .when something like killing all six of her children
made sense enough to put the kids in the Bronco and drive into the river—I see it:
gravel spitting and water flying and kids screaming. Somehow she managed to dig
it up to back out of that—and that’s an
incredible victory for somebody in that state of mind. There are other mothers
who don’t win that battle.
Tilda: In
exchange for this redemption, there was a price, however …
Autumn:
(fighting to
regain composure) …and it’s taken me thirty years....to be able to find the
beautiful side of that memory. . .
Tilda: Autumn’s mom did eventually die by suicide — alone on a
country road. Tony Stephan was now widowed — with eight children at home.
Tony Stephan: I’m laying in bed at night in my room
listening to a house full of mourning; and it just shattered the whole family.
It just shattered the children, it shattered me.
Tilda: It has
become so commonplace—these irrational acts and horrific deeds—that we’ve almost become numb to it. We’ve seen them in schools and public spaces .. in homes
and churches. They’re all over the news. Try as
we might to understand them, we can’t. Try as we
might to ignore them .. they call to us still.
Andy Downing (Parent): We called the paramedics, they tried feverishly to
revive her. And I was trying to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but I
knew something was wrong because her body was cold.
Tilda: It’s
2004. Andy Downing’s world has just been shattered;
his daughter, a victim of an unimaginable act of violence. But it was how this 11-year old girl died that truly horrified the
world:
Candace Downing home video: Hello, I’m
Candace Downing
Tilda: … Candace .. hanged herself.
Mathy Downing (Parent): When Candace first died, we asked ourselves, ‘how could we not know that she was unhappy?’
Tilda: The Downing’s didn’t realize it
at the time, of course, but her case was not a rare event. No …
Candace … was far from alone.
Nancy McCartney (Parent): He texted us .. and said, “Mom, I love you and I will see you soon.” He texted his dad, and said, “I’ll call work
soon. I love you and I will see you soon.” Texted his brother, and said, “I love you Hayden. I will see you soon” - and then he hanged himself.
Rhonda Carlin (Parent): She started on this drug somewhere in January. And
these things make you unafraid. They make you do things you wouldn’t do normally. They make you able to put a rope around
your neck and hang yourself.
Linda Hurcombe (Parent): Caitlin died at home and we found her, and she’d probably had been dead for maybe at the most five
minutes when we found her. She’d hanged
herself in the guest bedroom upstairs.
Kristina Gehrki (Parent): It really is like a perfect murder
mystery novel. I mean, it’s almost like
killing somebody with an icicle and it melts and the weapon is gone.
Tilda: They
were still dizzy from death .. traumatized and broken .. when they solved the
mystery. The drugs responsible, they say, are called SSRIs .. and they’re among the bestselling drugs in the world.
Rhonda: It was a sample pack. . .of
Paxil.
Nancy: Cipralex
Mathy: Sertraline, which is Zoloft
Kristina: (clip6-18:32): the
maximum dose of Zoloft legally allowed
Linda: There was one thing in her system
in the coroner’s report: a therapeutic dose of
fluoxetine hydrochloride.
Tilda: SSRIs
are better known as antidepressants.
intercut
Zoloft TV ad—
Tilda:
Psychiatric drugs like SSRIs have been defended with religious zeal by their
believers — and damned by others as some of the
most dangerous drugs on the planet.
Distinguishing
truth from fiction has been a challenge, and this has placed the public in the
unenviable position of deconstructing the scientific and medical dogma on
their own, in the midst of a 30-year social experiment. As Director of the
National Institutes of Mental Health, Thomas Insel has been at the center of a
storm of contradictions about the use of these drugs.
Thomas Insel, MD: I think that we have to be very humble about this
right now, because we’ve often been so
self-congratulatory, because we have, after all, many people feel, made great
strides. The numbers don’t really
support that.
Tilda: Dr. Insel’s candor is sure to shock and upset many - on all
sides of the debate. The word “failure”
is one few
have dared to utter.
Insel: Fundamentally,“why have we failed here?”
Why has the
suicide rate not come down? Why have the measures, disability, whatever those
might be, why have those continued to go up instead of down? All of the numbers
are going in the wrong direction, so where, where have we failed? What’s gone wrong here?
Tilda: The answers, according to Insel,
run contrary to the standard arguments put forth by mental health
professionals.
Insel: A lot of people say it’s because of stigma and access. The fact is that actually
more people are getting more treatment than ever before, so it’s hard for me to quite believe that. I would just
submit that from the NIMH perspective, the answer about why we’ve failed is a little more disruptive. And that answer
is that we don’t know enough.
Tilda: To
hear the Director of the NIMH say now that all of the exultations about
psychotropics - from the media, from academia, from the profession, from
governments — were
not merited —
is
unsettling. After billions of prescriptions and hundreds of billions of dollars
in drug company profits — how did this occur?
Insel: I think that our field has going
off track here by devoting so much of its resources over the last 20 to 30
years, both publicly and privately, just trying to understand how the drugs
work. If the drugs were truly curative, if it was like trying to understand how
insulin helps somebody with diabetes, that might be defensible. But you’ve got medications here that—at most—reduce some of the symptoms of mood disorders, of psychotic
disorders. They don’t, in any sense, provide a cure.
Tilda: This
change of heart contradicts what we’ve been told
about psychiatric drugs for a generation now — and raises serious questions about
how and why these drugs have been dispensed so indiscriminately to millions.
Jeri Oler (Patient): I was massively drugged. I tried drug after drug. I
did what they told me to do. I used to take tranquilizers, benzodiazepines…that’s all i did was pop pills all day.
Nicole Monkman (Patient): They just kept handing me pills. “Here, let’s try this,” “Let’s try this,”
“Let’s try this.” And I felt like a walking pharmaceutical company,
really. And nothing was working. I was drugged out. I was a nonexistent person. I had a heartbeat
and that’s really all that I had.
Melissa Binstock (Patient): I was just sort of given these pills and said, “Swallow this. Take that. Chew this.” And I was never told: “Well, you might experience these side-effects,”
or “This actually might not work.” It was like they were just was given to me as like a
panacea like, “This is going to fix your Tourette’s. This is going to fix your OCD.
This is going to fix everything and everything is going to be all better.”
Really, as an
8 or 9-year-old, I really believed that, until I began really experiencing all
those horrible side-effects that eventually changed me into not even a person,
but like a monster. I was horrible.
Terence Young
(Author
and Member of Canadian Parliament): Doctors, to a large degree, have abandoned
their Hippocratic oath, which is to do no harm. That is, it’s like a pill for every ill. They are knee jerk
prescribers, many of them. In fact, it has been shown that the average doctor
will make a decision to prescribe a drug within 19 seconds of seeing a patient.
GARY GREENBERG, Ph.D (Author and Psychotherapist):
Using antidepressants, or any of the psychiatric drugs is simply not
understood, it’s not explained, it’s not dwelt upon. I think they’re in a different class of drug from most of the drugs
we take for our other ailments.
Tilda: In the
80s and 90s, SSRIs were the first in a class of new mental health potions
heralded as “wonder drugs” and “miracle cures.” They were extolled as “safe and effective” solutions for the age-old problem
of depression — and were marketed as such. Thus began an aggressive
march towards a new era in Psychiatry, one which boasted chemicals for the
mental health conditions that had dogged humankind for millennia. Thirty years later,
however, the window on that era, and its bold
proclamations, appears to be closing.
Gary Greenberg: What are we doing? I mean,
especially when it comes to children, we don’t really know how the drugs work, we don’t know whether they work, we don’t know whether they’re neurotoxic, and so that means we’re in the middle of a public health experiment that’s been going on for the last 50-60 years—and more
intensively for the last 30 years. And it could be that 100 years from now,
they’ll look back at us like we look at
the Romans who poisoned themselves with their lead pipes, saying, “look at some of the effects of the widespread use of these drugs. Look
at what these people did.”
Irving Kirsch (Author and Psychologist):
My prediction—I don’t think I’ll live to see it—but my prediction is, that some
day, we will look back at the antidepressant era and have the view of
prescribing antidepressants that now we have of bloodletting.
Tilda: Irving
Kirsch rocked psychiatry with an
appearance on 60 Minutes and an explosive book, The Emperor’s
New Drugs.
Three times
he tested the data on SSRIs — three times, he verified that
prescription antidepressants were no better than taking a sugar pill. Still, he
was under fire from critics who vowed to prove him wrong.
Kirsch: People started doing other studies.
They said, “well maybe you did your statistics
wrong.” Critics, opponents, they took our data an re-did it.
The FDA has done its own meta-analysis, looking at all of the antidepressants
they’ve ever approved. They got the same
result. Everybody gets the same result.
(at end, show
FDA Meta-analysis graphic with FDA HHS logo)
Robert
Whitaker (Author, Journalist, Pulitzer
Finalist): I was a
believer in this story. I wrote stories about how psychiatric disorders are
caused by chemical imbalances—these fix them. I can remember
writing a story about depression screening day. “Isn’t that a good thing? Go get screened.” So I was a believer in a story of psychiatry as a
story of progress. We were learning about the brain, we were learning about the
biological underpinnings of these disorders, and we had drugs that fixed those
biological problems. That is what I believed as a science writer. So I was
stunned—when you actually go to the research, it’s not there. The whole story starts falling
apart.
Tilda: As the
war of words over psychotropics intensified in the new century, journalist
Robert Whitaker weighed in with Anatomy of An Epidemic —
and quickly
found he, too, had a target on his back.
Pundits said
Whitaker would have “blood on his hands” if people stopped taking their
medications as a result of his book.
Yet, when the Director of NIMH was
asked to evaluate Whitaker’s analysis of
the science behind psychiatric drugs, Dr. Insel said this:
THOMAS INSEL, Dir., NIMH: I will take one piece of what he said to heart—and I think
it’s an important one. And his comment
is just to observe that in spite of this enormous increase in the use of
antidepressants, antipsychotics, and other neuroleptic or psychotropic
medications, which is that broad class, over the last 2 to 3 decades—it’s been difficult to demonstrate a commensurate
decrease in morbidity, that is, disability or mortality, measured by suicide.
Now, in other areas of medicine, if you increase the use of your medication
twofold, threefold, sixfold, you will see—we have seen, reductions in
morbidity and mortality.
ADD “SHAKER”
SFX for Pills
video
Now, we can
argue about whether in those people that get the right medication at the right
dose for the right duration, there really have been lives saved. There are been
reductions in disability and every one of us has seen people who have done
beautifully, and whose lives have been saved by the use of medication. But at a
population level, his observation needs to be taken very seriously.
Julia Rucklidge (Professor of Clinical Psychology,
University of Canterbury): In the immediate, it could make a huge difference. You
could have someone going from being psychotic to being non-psychotic, which is
a pretty amazing change in behavior. But what I think what we need to recognize
that what’s happened over the last 50 years
is that they haven’t shown to be as good as we thought
they were.
Barry Turner (Senior lecturer in science, media
law, & public administration, University of Lincoln - UK): All of these drugs are known to
create benefit for people. All I am concerned about is that they have an
informed choice. If the public wants to take Prozac, if the public wants to
take Paxil, they should have the opportunity to do so. But they should do so in
an informed way.
Tilda: Yet, in the case of psychiatric
drugs, “informed choice” is a bit of a misnomer. . .and
finding the path of least risk can be daunting. In this vacuum, millions have
been harmed, simply due to a lack of knowledge.
Joanna Moncrief (Academic psychiatrist and author
of The Bitterest Pills -UK): Psychiatrists’ knowledge and training in the area
of psychopharmacology is completely inadequate, in my view. And this is partly
because of the focus on the disease-centered model. Psychiatrists have been so
obsessed with what disease different drugs treat, they haven’t looked at the drugs as drugs, and they haven’t understood all of the harmful effects the drugs can
produce.
Julia Rucklidge:
It’s time for us to stop and reflect on this and say, “Okay. Where are we at with the use of medications?” It serves a purpose, it’s got a
place, but we need to also stop and recognize that there is a cost to this and
that there are people who are struggling for other reasons now because of the
side effects associated with these medications.
Nicole Monkman (patient): I was on Seroquel, Lithium,
Clonazepam, Imipramine; I’ve tried
every antidepressant, every mood stabilizer, every antipsychotic,
Benzodiazepines. I mean, do they tell you that it’s six days or something very minute for those
Benzodiazepines, because they’re so
addictive? They don’t tell you that. Then, they say in
two weeks, “your anxiety is higher so here are
some more pills.” You try coming off that stuff. It’s worse than,
they say, than coming off of heroin. It’s hell—it’s hell.
Melissa Binstock (patient): One of my best friends is bipolar,
and she has been medicated her entire life until about three or four years ago.
And we talk about it. We have horror stories—we swap them, you know. [Laughter].
It’s almost a competition like whose
could be worse? I’ve got some pretty awful stories,
but so does she. And I feel it’s pretty
common among people that have grown up being on pills.
Jennifer
Kinzie (Mental
Health Counselor): My first main position in my field, the human services field
was in a group home, and these youths were on 5, 6, 7 medications. They would
be on Risperdal and Seroquel, they would be on Paxil and Zoloft—it was just
an incredible amount of poly-pharmacy that took place. So I can have empathy
for those who don’t “get it,” because I didn’t get it.
Tilda: Too
many times, injured parties say, they were greeted not by empathy—but by apathy instead. They report being ignored
by the regulatory agencies, law enforcement, elected officials, and worst of
all, by their doctors and the medical community as a whole.
LEAVE SLIGHT SPACE - TOO TIGHT
Victims of
violence, suicide, and a host of other serious adverse effects were dismissed
as anecdotes — and told that their experiences were attributable to the disease—not the drug.
David Healy,
MD (Psychiatrist,
psychopharmacologist, scientist, and author): When I treat you and put you on a
pill, let’s say you turn blue, and then we halt the pill and you turn back to your
normal color. And then we put you on the pill again and you turn blue again.
Until very recently, everyone would agree that that was a convincing
demonstration that this pill caused at least you to turn blue. Now we
are told that that’s an anecdote. It didn’t happen.
Tilda: While the drug companies ruthlessly
defended their magic bullets in the Courts and through the Press, they were, in
effect, stigmatising people who were harmed by using them. The long lens of
history has revealed that the troubling effects of these chemicals were well-known - years before FDA and other regulatory
bodies actually approved SSRIs.
cg: FDA PROZAC HEARINGS, 1991
Pallie Carnes: This is hard for me because I tried to commit
suicide in front of my five children
Irene Dotson: I attacked him with a kitchen knife
Debra Douglas: I took the 9mm automatic, sat down on the bed and
put the gun to my head.
Tucker
Moneymaker: After being on Prozac for 21 days, my wife shot and
killed both of these two boys right here
Pallie Carnes: Eli Lilly calls Prozac the wonder drug and I wonder
why? Thinking back on how this drug
affected me, does a wonder drug rob you of a conscience? Does a wonder drug
make you forget the difference between right and wrong?
Peter Breggin,
MD (psychiatrist and author): In the early 1990’s this issue had reached a peak, “Was Prozac Causing Violence and Suicide?” But what
happened was that their psychopharmacology committee, almost everybody on the
committee worked for the drug companies. So the conflicts of interest was so
enormous that the FDA had to give them all letters forgiving them of their
conflicts of interest so they couldn’t be sued.
cg: 1993
Kevin P. Miller to FDA Chief (1993): What about your concern
regarding Prozac? It is very well documented: 28,000 adverse events, 1600
suicides associated with that drug.
Michael R. Taylor,
Deputy Director, FDA: Well, drugs that go through our very rigorous testing
and review process are very well understood chemicals. And drugs are recognized
to have both risks and benefits, that’s why they go through a rigorous evaluation, and when
those products are put out on the market, we have a good scientific
understanding of both the risks and benefits. That’s laid out in very detailed labeling that physicians
then use to decide whether to prescribe those products to their patients. Side
effects are part of pharmaceuticals—that’s recognized, and that’s why we’re so
carefully scientifically.
Peter Breggin,
MD: Well, nothing could be further from
the truth that “the chemical is well understood” or that the FDA was careful.
Actually, what the FDA was careful about was to consciously cover-up every
really dangerous adverse effect of Prozac.
FDA employee: Kevin, this wasn’t on the list of things we were supposed to talk about
(interrupted by other FDA employee)
Michael R.
Taylor: Why don’t you turn the camera off so we can talk?
Breggin, MD: They did nothing, absolutely
nothing. Meanwhile, Eli Lilly was busily hiding everything they could about the
increased rates of suicidality.
Karen Barth
Menzies: It was a
matter of how do we cover it up? How do we hide it? Every step of the process,
towards approval and marketing thereafter, was designed to hide and mislead the
public and physicians about the suicide side effect.
Andy Vickery (Attorney and Patient Advocate):
Leigh Thompson, the chief scientist at Lilly writes in February 7, 1990, that
he had a conversation with Dr. Paul Leber at
6:15 in the
morning. (show document with digital typing
sfx) Now, think
about that. You work for the United States government, the taxpayers of the
United States government, and your job is to be my watchdog. Do you think I’m going to call you at 6:15 in the morning?
And oh, by
the way, if you want to send me something, I’ve got this special back line over
here at the FDA. Send it through backchannels, you know, so other people don’t get it…just feed me this info on the QT. It’s
extraordinary.
Tilda: Lilly’s own secret files implicate the FDAs Paul Leber,
Robert Temple and Thomas Laughren as being complicit in a scheme to whitewash
the dark facts about Prozac.
Karen Barth
Menzies (atty): There
are some very
telling documents that show the cozy relationship between FDA officials and Eli
Lilly in those early years, in the early 1990s. Lilly employees or Lilly personnel
referring to certain members of FDA as “our friend” in the FDA. “They’re our defender.”
They were
working hard to get over this suicide issue and they referred to the suicide
issue as “a public relations problem.”
MUSIC BRIDGE: “COMMON
SENSE”
Tilda: By
1997, Prozac had become America’s most
reported drug to Medwatch, with over 39,000 serious adverse-effect events on
file. Since only 1% of the actual number of events are reported through
MedWatch, this means that nearly four million people in the US alone had
already reported experiencing mania, anxiety, agitation, hostility,
hallucinations, suicidal ideations, and more.
Breggin, MD : when you’re working on these things and you find this out, you
think to yourself “what what kind of world are we
living in?” That there’s so much
sleight-of-hand and manipulation and fraud going on—to deceive
the American public and the world from the fact that drugs are causing people
to kill other people and to kill themselves. It is astonishing.
Tilda: Eli
Lilly has been called “The House That Prozac Built.” Before the drug was introduced, Lilly reported earnings of $600 million
annually. Prozac changed Lilly’s fortunes —
and the
company banked at least $21 billion dollars in profits from the drug
over the life of their patent.
music ramps
up; fade to
black, title appears:
Sara, Brennan, and God’s Coroner
MUSIC: ANJA SINGS: “I GUESS IT HAPPENED ON PURPOSE…BUT LATELY THINGS HAVE BEEN GETTING QUITE INTENSE…”
Terence
Young, Member of
Parliament, Ontario, Canada: When I say to some people, “prescriptions drugs are the fourth
leading cause of death in our society,” that seems to be the dividing
line. There’s some people who already know it’s true, who have read about it and understand it. Then
there’s others who think, “Oh, that’s a myth. That can’t be true.”
They simply
can’t conceive of that, so they stop
listening.
Tilda:
Terence Young is a Member of Parliament in Canada, serving Oakville, Ontario,
just outside of Toronto. After a prescription drug caused the death of his
daughter Vanessa, he founded an advocacy group, Drug Safety Canada.
Terence: Vanessa collapsed in front of me.
Her heart had stopped, basically as she stood up to go upstairs. When you lose
a child your world is upside down. I was thrown into a study of medicine, of
medical jargon, of how the health care system works and when it doesn’t work. And I didn’t ask for it, but it was my way of dealing with the
loss of Vanessa. It was, in a sense, my way of grieving. It started the day she
died.
Tilda: For
five years, Young investigated the practices of the medical and drug industries.
And in doing so, he says, he realized how Pharma’s influence had permeated every construct of modern
society.
Terence: They find a way to create a
financial interest in every institution in our society that we rely on for
critical thought. They have money in our universities, in our colleges, in our
hospital boards, in the media — and they almost always win.
Tilda: The
loss of his daughter—coupled with the shocking truths he uncovered through
his medical research — led him to write “Death By Prescription” and become one of Canada’s most ardent proponents of “informed
choice.”
Terence Young: Glaxo SmithKline just paid the largest fine in the
history of the United States related to fraud and criminal acts for a drug
company. They paid 3 billion dollars for illegal marketing of Paxil, Wellbutrin
and Avandia—Paxil and Avandia both having been
drugs that caused a lot of deaths due to adverse drug reactions. And they paid
it in cash.
SUICIDE 2
MUSIC
James Cole (Deputy US Attorney General):
This action constitutes the largest healthcare settlement in United States
history.
Terence
Young: It was in
their business plan. Because those three drugs, in the years involved sold $25
billion dollars’ worth. And the drugs are marked up
in the thousands of percent.
Carmen Ortiz (U.S. Attorney-Massachusetts):
GSK distributed Paxil with false and misleading labeling. What GSK did was
encourage the use of Paxil for children who are dealing with depression with
false messages about safety and effectiveness.
Daniel
Levinson (Inspector
General, Health and Human Services): This unlawful promotion put
children at risk of taking drugs that were unproven to be effective for them,
and have been shown to increase the risk of suicide.
Tilda: These
fraudulent practices were locked away for decades —
protected by
institutions and doctors and the drug companies themselves. Psychiatric and
scientific ethics were cast aside in exchange for profits - no one went to jail
- and real people paid the price.
fade to black
Nancy
McCartney: Brennan wore
his heart on his sleeve. He just adored social situations. He loved to sing
from a very young age, music was part of our life and part of what he adored.
To the point where one of the nicest memories we have, was he was at Peggy’s Cove with his aunt Meryl and decided at the gift
shop that he would sing “Danny Boy” to all the senior citizens on the
bus tour there. He just broke out into song and had his own little audience at
Peggy’s Cove.
music: “Oh, Danny Boy. . .oh, Danny boy. . .”
Shaun McCartney: Yeah, what I miss most about
Brennan is when he came in, he’d always give
me a hug. “Hey dad, how’re you doing?”
Give me a
hug. I still think to this day that he’s going to walk through the door. We were driving, not
too long ago, and it was Nancy, myself and our other son Hayden — and I looked in the back seat and
Hayden was sleeping and I looked to see if Brennan was there. Just out of
habit, to see if he was sleeping too.
Nancy: I saw Brennan walk out of this
house, he was very robotic.
(a dreamlike
reenactment - blurry - medium shot of Brennan murmuring as he puts his coat and
hat on) -Nancy:
“Brennan, where you going?” - “It’s okay mom, I just got to go.” Puts on his winter coat. “Brennan,
it’s hot out today.” - “It’s okay mom, I just got to go.” Puts on his winter hat. I said, “Brennan, it’s hot out today you won’t need that.” - “It’s okay mom, I just got to go.” I said, “well, I need you here for a minute.” - “No, it’s okay mom, I just got to go.”
That’s all he could say to me, and this was a child who was
very articulate, who was so verbose that sometimes you would just say “okay, okay, enough, enough already.”
Tilda: Four
days prior, Brennan went to the family doctor with a chest cold and
inexplicably came home with a sample pack of the antidepressant Cipralex. At
the time of his disappearance, he was exhibiting the classic signs of
Akathisia.
Shaun: When Brennan went missing I drove
the roads for hours just north of here. And I did every side road, every
conservation area, every laneway looking for him. One of the things that he
didn’t have was a great sense of
direction. I thought maybe he had gone for a hike in the bush and got turned around
and couldn’t find his way out, and I went
looking for him. That’s what was going through my mind
the whole time.
Nancy: He texted us and said, “Mom, I’m
sorry. I’m sorry I was mad about the cat. “I love you and I will see you soon.”
He texted his
dad, and said, “I’ll call work soon. I love you and I
will see you soon.” Texted his brother, and said, “I love you Hayden. I will see you soon” — and then he hanged himself.
Shaun: When Brennan went missing, I had
no concern about him having taken his life. None. None whatsoever. Because it
would have been the farthest thing from my mind that that happened. And it wasn’t until I was standing at the door and the coroner and
six other people walked up to the door, that I knew Brennan had passed.
Nancy: We’ve lost part of our hearts and they say “there’s no greater pain than losing your
child.” And I believe it. I let him go out the
door and that was the last time I saw him alive. And he bought his rope from a
local store and drove to a conservation area .. texted us .. and then hanged
himself. That’s when hell started.
Shaun: For me, after that point in time,
as a parent, I struggled with it greatly. I looked for signs for things that I
missed. Things that I should have seen, that was my responsibility as a parent.
Tilda: All of Brennan’s teachers, friends and teammates struggled too. “Why was there no sign?” they asked. “Some warning?” But none came.
Nancy:
Brennan’s friends, his teachers, were all
saying, “how come we didn’t know? We were out for dinner with
him on Saturday night. Why didn’t he talk to us?” For them, they all felt they had let him down, when in
fact, it was the drug that caused his suicide.
Tilda: Before
long, other teens across the Canadian province of Ontario were dying, just like
Brennan did. For Terence Young, the problem hit close to home again, when
friends and constituents faced the same horror he and the McCartney’s
had.
Terence: My wife called my son Hart to the
phone and we heard him say a few words and he banged the phone down and ran
upstairs, obviously quite upset. We went to him and said, “What happened?” He said, “Sara Carlin hanged herself.” And we met Sara, who was 18 years
old just a few weeks before on our back deck, they were part of
the same social group in Oakville. They’d play guitar and sing songs and do karaoke.
Sara karaoke clip
Terence: Because of my own research the
first thing I thought about when an otherwise healthy young person dies is, “Was a prescription drug involved?” And of course it was. In fact,
there is no doubt in my mind that Paxil — and withdrawing from Paxil was the
cause of Sara Carlin’s demise, her suicide.
Rhonda Carlin: She started on this drug somewhere in January. And
these things make you unafraid. They make you do things you wouldn’t do normally. They make you able to put a rope around
your neck and hang yourself.
Terence: A young woman hanging herself is an
extremely rare thing to happen. She went home one Saturday night at two o’clock in the morning, took off her makeup and hanged
herself in her parents basement.
Neil Carlin: I reached out to Terence at one
point because I was in contact with the Coroner’s office. I was starting to put the pieces together.
It wasn’t until after Sara’s death that we actually started to connect the dots.
We’re bereaved fathers, we have a
great connection and with Terence’s help, we
got the inquest.
Rhonda: The doctors wouldn’t talk to us after. We fought hard for an inquest
because we needed to understand, and after Sara had died,
then we started doing research on the drug. That’s when we really found out about the drug. That’s the first time that we realized that Paxil, one of
the side effects was suicidal thinking.
Neil: Everyone told us it’s not going to happen—“You’ll never get
an inquest on a prescription drug.” So it goes to show you what a
couple of Dads can do.
Terence: I worked with Sara’s dad, Neil. We pushed very hard to get an inquest. I
asked as Chair of Drug Safety Canada to be party to that inquest and I
was turned down. But the coroner did allow me to be an expert witness on drug
communications, which I did.
Rhonda: There’s a videotape of the coroner’s counsel saying on the very first day of the inquest,
“We will show that Paxil did not play a part in Sara
Carlin’s death.” Well, the whole point of the inquest was to see whether
or not antidepressants played a part in Sara’s death!
Michael
Blain, Attorney representing Ontario Coroner’s Office:
Courts
acknowledge that this medication can increase thoughts of suicide in particular
patients, but they don’t think the medication played a
role in Sara Carlin’s death.
Tilda: The
Coroner in Ontario resisted every request by the Carlins to get the truth about
the death of their daughter — but the Carlins were willing to
risk everything to get it.
Rhonda: We basically mortgaged our home
to the hilt to try and get some answers, but to me, it was worth it to have
that doctor up on the stand and the question was asked, our lawyer asked him, “Did you tell Sara that Paxil might cause her to want to kill herself?”
And he said, “No, I didn’t.” “Why didn’t you tell her that?” “Because,” he said, “she wouldn’t have taken
it.” “Did you tell her parents?”
“No.” “Did you tell anybody?” “No.”
Neil: Coroners see the suicides; investigate
the suicides. Coroners don’t want to do
anything. Coroners are medical doctors. The coroners are the first line of
defense for the industry.
Tilda: And at the inquest, the odds were
stacked against the Carlins.
Rhonda: The jury, I think, was very
courageous. But they were specifically instructed by the coroner that they
couldn’t actually find Paxil as a cause.
TERENCE: The jury made 12 key
recommendations and six of them—these were detailed recommendations
to prevent similar deaths—six of them were aimed at the drug industry and the
drug company. So if they didn’t think that
Paxil caused or played a critical role in Sara Carlin’s death, they certainly wouldn’t have put six recommendations aimed at the pharmaceutical industry
in their decision.
Tilda: As was
the case with Sara Carlin, any questions about possible links between the
antidepressant Cipralex and Brennan McCartney’s sudden death were quickly rebuffed
by the Ontario Coroner’s office.
Nancy McCartney: We met with the coroner privately about a month
afterwards and at that meeting it was just sort of niggling in the back of our
minds: Is it possible that this medication, the only new thing in Brennan’s life, is it possible that this
could have caused his death? The coroner, the investigating coroner, quickly said
no. . .
Shaun McCartney: My thing is, they won’t even consider it. So I’m saying to myself, if that happened to our son, how
many other people haven’t they documented, haven’t they tracked? They’re saying statistically that not that many people are
on the drug.
Shaun: And they’re saying, they haven’t recorded it. Nobody’s recorded that. If we hadn’t kept pressing and kept pushing that envelope with
the coroner’s office, none of this would be
documented. None of it.
Nancy: Before Brennan’s death, I would have said, “Oh, no, they are doing their best,” and we feel very let down by them.
They have not looked at Brennan’s death
objectively, and Brennan doesn’t have the
justice that he needs.
Rhonda Carlin: It took me a year to get the strength to write to the
Chief Coroner. I said, “It came to my attention that you, in fact, had the
cause of death changed.” I
said, “How can the coroner’s office have such a lack of
transparency?” I received a letter back basically
telling me that it was criminal offense to meddle with the jury. If I didn’t stop meddling I would be charged and put in jail.
Terence: I believe where we are right now,
those of us who understand the true risks and have been trying to warn others
and make change, we’re at the bleeding edge. Not the
leading edge, because the leading edge hasn’t even started yet. We’re at the bleeding edge, we’re the ones they think who have sort of lost it. I
know drug reps have been telling people in Ontario for years, “oh this poor guy lost his daughter, he’s lost his mind, he’s exaggerating stuff.” Then there’s others that
realize I’m not exaggerating. In fact, the
evidence backs it up. My book has 200 footnotes. It’s totally evidence based. I’ve never been challenged. I’ve never been threatened with a lawsuit. The hurdle is
trying to get people to believe that is something so unbelievable.
RHONDA:
I’m gathering my strength. I have
both letters, and I didn’t meddle, but
it came to my attention and I know it happened. I guess I’m to the point now where I am so beaten down—if you want
to put me in jail, go ahead.
Nancy: Our mission, per se, is to be
vocal about this, because if it saves one life, then it’s all worth it. As much as it, every time we talk about
it, it re-traumatizes us, makes us relive the experience. But it is what
Brennan would have wanted us to do.
end with
Danny Boy and pastoral view of Ontario lake
HEALTH CANADA
Rx DRUG ABUSE AD: “Last year, over 80,000 Canadian kids used Prescription
drugs to get high, even though it can be very dangerous. Talk with your kids
about prescription drug abuse.”
LEAVE 1-2 SECONDS MORE SPACE BEFORE TITLE:
“UNDER SIEGE”
KPM: “Were you 240lbs of fury?”
Joe Stephan: Oh Goodness, yes. And I was not easy to deal with.
Tony Stephan: My son Joseph at that time was 15
years of age. Extremely ill.
Joe Stephan: It didn’t matter what it was
Tony Stephan: very very violent
Joe Stephan: the drop of a pin would set me
off
Tony Stephan: You could actually say he would
be everything a schoolyard shooting was made of.
Sfx:
911-where’s your emergency?
Tony Stephan: he was diagnosed with bipolar
effective disorder 1
SFX: engine
noise from Bronco -video of
Bronco
accelerating -
Tilda: In the years after Debbie Stephan
drove the family’s 1990 Bronco into a raging river
with her children inside, the mental states of both Autumn Stringham and her
brother Joseph Stephan deteriorated.
Tony Stephan (father):They didn’t understand
what their Mother was going through, that would take her to that point where
she would be prepared to remove herself from this life—but all the
children with her.
Tilda:
Whether the cause was genetics or sheer trauma, they both were diagnosed with
bipolar disorder … just like their Mom.
Tony Stephan: I was very very down. You begin to lose hope because
there’s no joy in life at all. There’s no happiness to be found. And that was the state of
our family.
Tilda: Joseph, in particular, seemed
headed for disaster.
Autumn: He was just a sweetheart, but,
boy, when he hit puberty, he really went over, and became incredibly manic and
incredibly violent in his mania. He was scary. My dad was scared.
Tony Stephan: Joseph was medicated with lithium. I believe he was
taking 750 milligrams of lithium and he was up to 900 milligrams of lithium for
a period of time to try and control it. . .
Joe Stephan: Was I having huge mood swings? Yeah, that stuff
definitely started. I’d been through a lot of pain with
the death of my mother and various events that happened in my life. After my
mother had committed suicide, I was the most violent person that i knew of. I
used to wander the streets at night and I’d go pick fights with the local people and I had this
aluminum bat I’d found and I beat it against the
curb. It was jagged and torn up—and that was my weapon of choice. I’m lucky I never touched anybody with that thing, but
that’s where it was headed. It wouldn’t have been very long before something actually
happened.
end with Joe
-filmed from behind- yelling “Hey, get back here…” -
Tony Stephan: My children were already saying to me, “Come on dad. You’ve got to get
him out of the house. He’s going to
kill somebody. You’ve got to do
something, Dad.” It didn’t matter what
we threw at this situation, it wasn’t going to
get better — and I’m going to
lose him to a suicide, or he’s going to
have to be institutionalized.
Tilda: A
thousand miles away, Autumn was also struggling —desperately. Now married with a
child, she, too, was caught in the grip of her mother’s
madness.
Autumn Stringham: At that point in my life, I just
felt like everything was ashes. I’d just lost
my mom to suicide. My diagnosis had been upgraded, so now I was “rapid-cycling bipolar one with schizophrenic tendencies,” which was –
it seemed
really dark, like I wasn’t going to
get over that. And so I had actually planned to commit suicide.
Tilda: With
one child ingesting a five-drug cocktail and contemplating suicide and the
other engulfed by violent thoughts, Tony Stephan’s family was under siege.
Tony Stephan: My daughter at the same time had
been in and out of the psych ward, struggling with the same issues as her
mother—and her brother—and was on five different
medications. She had been through major
medication changes. It wasn’t working. At
the very, very best, it wasn’t
working. So, I was left in a terrible
state, a terrible state where I had to find an answer, because you see, my
family was literally coming unglued before my eyes. I was going to lose my
family.
Tilda: Beset
by grief and confused by the cruelty of his circumstances, he began to look for
answers .. some way out of this madness.
Autumn: Sheer and utter desperation.
Tilda: It was
a journey that would reshape his life — forever.
Autumn: He started studying everything that
he could about bipolar and recognizing a lot of the patterns that he’d seen with my mom in all the years that they’ve been married, and I think it really helped him to
see that the needed to do something about it.
Tilda: Do
something — but what? The experts had all weighed in: both his
children were spiraling into the same orbit as their Mom — and there seemed little hope he
could save them. But Stephan resolved to find an answer — and prevent
any further suicides in his family.
cg:
O’ What a Tangled Web We Weave
Nicole Monkman: I was at the bottom of a pit. I had many different
psychiatrists, many different hospitals, many facilities that I had to go to.
And they just kept handing me pills. I wouldn’t call it “angst,” I would just clearly call it hell. How could such a
beautiful thing of life, giving birth, cause such trauma?
Sonya: I just remember being very
unhappy, very sad and hopeless. I never
thought it would end and just saw no way to get out of it.
Jeri Oler: The drugs made me completely
emotionless; they made me not care; I didn’t care about anything around me. The only thing i saw
was my pain and the drugs made me numb to anything else.
Melissa Binstock: I was diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome. So, um, in order to treat the Tourette
Syndrome, I was put on medications.
When I was
little, I would just have these really violent mood swings and panic attacks,
insomnia, hypersomnia; there were periods where I couldn’t eat, there were periods I would eat too much. So,
all of these really confusing things were happening to me and I, at that time,
didn’t realize that it was because of
the medication that I was going through all these horrible changes.
Cathy
Binstock (mother): I will probably never get over the
horrible guilt and the horrible – I think that part of her childhood
was stolen from her.
MB: They began to basically just force
me to take the medication which made me feel as though I had been betrayed by
absolutely everybody, because I felt as though they were giving me these toxic
things that were making me sick and violent and horrible.
Cathy B: I didn’t know by her not wanting to take the medicine that
she was really trying to say to me “You know what? This isn’t working”
but what
eight year old can verbalize that? The psychiatrist kept saying to me “She needs this. She has to have this” and the psychiatrist was our family friend and I trusted him.
MB:
(4:20) They
completely put their faith in this particular psychiatrist who I don’t think had my best interests in mind at all.
Nicole: My doctor decided that electric
shock therapy would be good because I was “drug-resistant.” We had tried for almost a year. He
just kept saying, “We’ll try more drugs. We’ll give you this. We’ll do this – more shock therapy.” Well, really? How much more can my
body take? I was 100 pounds and dying. I literally was dying.
LEAVE SLIGHT SPACE
Sonya: my psychiatrist decided that
electric shock would be the next step, so I did a series of eight sessions of
that.
SLIGHT SPACE
The ECT was a
horrible experience. I loved going to school and learning—I had to drop
out of school. I really couldn’t do the
things in life that I’d always done and wanted to do.
Jeri: For about 16 years, I was
hospitalized every year for about three months. Finally in the last five years
of my illness, I said, “No more. If you ever take me to the hospital again, I
will kill myself.”
Melissa: When my mom would call him, sort of
frantic, “Melissa’s having a reaction,” or “Melissa’s having an episode of violence,”
or “Melissa’s hurting
herself,” he would say, “Make her take the medication!”
Cathy B: The Psychiatrist said “If she doesn’t listen, and
she doesn’t want to take the medication, you
just call 911 and go over and visit the psych hospital because that’s where she’ll go.”
Melissa: Gosh, I’ve got a list of like 20 different medications I was
on by the time I was about 11. We just had bags and bags full of pills and
pills, in massive doses that no child should have been prescribed.
Bob Binstock (father): It got to the point where they
prescribed Haldol where I got really more concerned than ever.
Melissa: My mom and my sister basically found
me in the game room sitting on the floor completely zoned-out. I just remember
this feeling of, "I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die."
music break: Anja Øyen Vister
“…and if she falls, there will be no
one there to catch her .. when she falls, there will be no one there to catch
her .. and Hold On to ..”
Cathy Binstock (mother): Melissa ended up in the emergency
room. She had a very serious psychotic reaction.
Melissa: I was like, “Oh, this is it, I've completely gone
crazy. This is insane. I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what I'm
doing anymore.”
Cathy
Binstock: I called my
pediatrician and he was there in ten minutes and he said to the nurse, “Get her off of that shit.” That’s what he said.
Melissa: It was a very very low point, and
was often the case that I would contemplate suicide just because i didn’t know who i was anymore and all these side effects
that i as experiencing were so scary.
Cathy: You don’t give a 9-year kid Haldol.
Anja Øyen Vister music carries out for 5-7
seconds…
Tilda: As
millions filled their psychotropic prescriptions — most without anything resembling sound medical advice — other dark
and troubling events kept occurring .. without a whisper of warning.
Andy Vickery (Attorney): If you’re thinking about taking a psychoactive drug, bear in
mind that the pill you’re taking may look little, but it
is designed to alter the chemistry of your brain in a way that’s specifically intended to affect your mood and your
behavior; to affect the very chemical, serotonin, that affects judgment, and
aggression. So you’re taking something that can turn
you into a monster.
GARY GREENBERG (Author and Psychotherapist):These drugs have been sold as the equivalent of insulin
for diabetes or aspirin for a headache. The problem is, when you’re told that, you don’t quite grasp that what you’re really doing is you’re changing your consciousness. You’re changing the way your mind works.
Andy Vickery: It’s hard for any of us to accept the notion that a drug
could make me do something—really anything that I don’t want to do, but particularly something that’s completely contrary to my personality and my morals
and my values. You know, it could make me kill someone.
(audio sfx) Phone rings: “911, where’s your emergency?
Woman: There’s been a student shot at Westside
Middle School.
911 Operator: There’s been what?
Woman: a student shot at Westside Middle
School
911 Operator: ok.
Woman: we need an ambulance as soon as possible
911 operator: do you know who done the shooting
Woman: no, we do not….
Robert
Whitaker (Journalist
and Author): Every
time we get one of these horrible killings, mass murder, some will take
advantage of that to say, “look, we need
more forced treatment.”
What we
really need to investigate is what role are psychiatric drugs playing in such
mass killings? Are people coming off drugs? Are they on the drugs and
experiencing akathisia? And there’s plenty of
evidence in the research literature in the way that psychiatric drugs can
actually lend themselves to violent actions. One, You can have this
inner-agitation.
Two, Coming
off, you can have a worsening of symptoms, and the third part is, these drugs
can diminish frontal lobe activity, the very part of the brain that when you
get a really bad idea like taking a gun and going into a school—that’s the part of
your brain that’s supposed to kick in and say, “that’s a really evil idea —
don’t do it.” But these drugs will diminish that activity.
Terence Young (Member of Parliament, Canada): Every time there is some bizarre
act of violence in the United States or Canada, like a school shooting or mass
shooting, it is so difficult to find any mention if the shooter was on
antipsychotics or antidepressant drugs.
And yet in
every case I’ve been able to find, the person
who was shooting was either on an antidepressant drug or had recently withdrawn
from an antidepressant drug. And so there is some real correlation which no one
is properly investigating.
Robert Whitaker: Why have we never had a good investigation—why? Because obviously, if we found there was an
association—time and time again—that would be another thing that would really crimp
this commercial activity. Which tells you there are powers-that-be who don’t want that question investigated.
fade to black under cacophony of
news reports and audio - for 2-6 seconds - as it finally fades, we hear:
Kevin P. Miller: What are some of the things in the profession — in the treatment of these mental
health conditions that you think are working exceedingly well right now?
Gary
Greenberg: Uh, well, I’m not sure if
there are any. I mean, there’s nothing in
the literature that would indicate that any kind of mental illness is
responsive to any particular treatment with any kind of “strong signal.”
Tilda: As
part of the research for his book called “The Book of Woe,” Gary Greenberg was imbedded with
psychiatrists as they debated the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders—the DSM-5.
Greenberg: All along, it’s been clear that the DSM is essentially a work of
fiction. It’s the way psychiatrists have of
saying, “If there are mental disorders, if
they exist in nature the way that illnesses like Diabetes exist, then these are
what they are.” Changing the
way we understand ourselves, is intimately related to the development of the
DSM.
Lisa
Cosgrove, Ph.D (Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Boston; co-author, Psychiatry Under the
Influence): The DSM is often referred to as
the Bible of psychiatric disorders. It is the quintessential diagnostic
instrument. Over 400,000 mental health professionals in the United States use
the DSM, and in order to get 3rd party reimbursement, one has to
have a DSM diagnosis. So the DSM is extremely instrumental.
Gary
Greenberg: …and so, when anyone from the outside questions it — or someone from the inside
questions it too directly, the usual thing is to repudiate them.
Tilda: In 2005,
two respected academics, Lisa Cosgrove of UMass-Boston and Sheldon Krimsky of
Tufts, released their investigation into conflicts-of-interest between DSM-4
panel members and the pharmaceutical industry.
LISA COSGROVE: I think the data really speak for
themselves. The strongest statistics include the panel members for the mood
disorders and schizophrenia and psychotic disorders. A hundred percent of those
panel members and yes—that’s right—every single
panel member has financial associations with the pharmaceutical industry.
Wall St/Stock
exchange/Pharma logos
And if you
look at it in terms of the sheer amount of money, the antidepressant market and
the antipsychotic market are the fourth and fifth leading therapy classes of
drugs with annual sales of 20 billion and 14 billion respectively.
Sheldon
Krimsky, Ph.D (Tufts
University): You know, the argument is “well we’re getting the best people; the
best people are consulting for the industry,” and therefore, the concept of
disinterestedness is completely destroyed. And it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you set up the system
so that you permit people with conflictual relationships to be on committees
whose decisions will have financial impacts on an industry, then the whole
thing is running on its own cycle of self-interest.
LISA COSGROVE: The problem is that they could
leverage their prestigious position on the DSM into very lucrative consulting
contracts and really influence prescribing habits.
NEED MORE AUDIO SPACE
So there are
170 DSM panel members. That is the total inclusive of all the working groups.
Of those 170 panel members, 56 percent had at least one financial association
with a pharmaceutical company.
Tilda:
Embedded with the new DSM-5 working committee, Gary Greenberg found himself
caught in a firefight of words and passions over the future of psychiatry.
Greenberg: When the DSM is revised, there are
fights, and in this case, intense fights, because there was an attempt on the
part of the American Psychiatric Association to finally come up with “the DSM to end all DSMs.”
Jeffrey
Lieberman, (fmr.
Pres. of American Psychiatric Association): Now you can’t expect to revise a staple like the DSM for the first
time in 20 years without experiencing some glitches, and believe me, we had
more than our share.
Greenberg: It was like being in the middle
of a war…
Jeffrey Lieberman: But the APA kept our composure—rallied when attacked by our enemies, and occasionally
by our friends, too, to make the DSM a resounding success.
Greenberg: and, uh, it didn’t work. They failed and they found it very difficult
to walk back from all the promises that they’d made. And the people that took them on weren’t the Scientologists—they were psychiatrists. One of them, in fact, had
written the last DSM.
begin music, “Kaval Siri”
Tilda: This
political infighting left millions of consumers with psychiatric diagnoses in
limbo. The DSM decision-makers may not considered that. . .but their actions
over the last 30 years have reverberated . . . in sad and profound ways.
Kevin P.
Miller: Pretend
that I’m the Glaxo CEO. What would you
like to say to me?
David Carmichael: [Long Pause-then Laughter-then sigh] - total=22
seconds
Tilda: For
David Carmichael, there are good reasons why this is is not an easy question to
answer.
Gillian
Carmichael: My Dad and I
have always been really close. Both my parents did everything for my brother
and I. If there was a sport we wanted to pick up, or if there was something we
wanted to do, we did everything. My dad built my brother a half pipe in our
backyard and it was like a professionally–built half pipe. This thing was phenomenal. We had
kids from all over the neighborhood come there to ride it because it was huge.
David
Carmichael: There’s nothing more exhilarating than being a Dad. In
everything I’ve ever done, it was magical
moments. Our daughter, Gillian was born in 1990, and our son, Ian was born in
1992. And both my wife and I took a nurturing approach to parenting. They didn’t get everything they wanted, but they certainly had a
lot of opportunity when they were young. It was wonderful.
Gillian: My brother got into dirt jumping
as well, so my Dad built my brother a dirt jump at our cottage. My brother
would just spend hours out there and he loved it. . .
David: I remember the deliveries like
they were yesterday. I remember the snowstorm I had to get through when Ian was
being delivered in 1992. It was December the 14th that’s when Ian was born. I got a call at the organization
I was working at, got home, got in the car. He was [laughter] rushed right in the delivery room.
It was a very quick delivery. Gillian took over 20 hours. Ian was very quick.
Gillian: We were the ideal family on the
block and I had a lot of friends who just would continuously tell me that that
we were a perfect family.
Tilda: The
Carmichael’s perfect family began to unhinge
shortly after David began taking Paxil.
David: I really didn’t know very much about mental illness until when I was
45 years old, and I had my first major depression. And I was treated with Paxil
and in fact, when I look back on it now, there’s no question I was a manic when I was on Paxil for
the first time. That was the very first time that I ever even looked at the
issues around drugs—and side effects of drugs.
Gillian: Well, I noticed that there was a
big difference before he was taking the medication and then while he was taking
the medication. I remember him snapping on me about something very small and I
remember him spending so much time at his office. I remember him being more
quiet and not being himself and looking stressed out — and just looking different.
David: When I went to the doctor I was prescribed
Paxil. And I had gained a fair bit of weight, i had sexual dysfunction issues,
and my resting heart rate was higher. And there was just this tremendous
discomfort with being on that particular drug. It really made me wonder, “should I be on it?”
Tilda: Like
so many who tumbled into the world of antidepressants without forethought,
David Carmichael did so unaware of the potential dangers.
David: When I was on Paxil, we had no
idea it could trigger delusions,
none of that
was out in the public domain. For so many years, I just assumed my doctor knew
best. I learned about the side effects the hard way.
Paxil Ad— RE: SIDE FX
Gillian: When everything happened, I had
just finished Grade 8 and for my friends, who knew my father, they just knew that
something was wrong, because they knew who my dad was. And you just would never
in a million years think that he would do something that he did.
begin “Kaval Siri”
David (with red eyes): Yes, parenting was
a high priority of mine to be the best parent possible. And to have it end this
way—it was pretty devastating.
Tilda: David
Carmichael had been on 60mg of Paxil for two weeks when he and Ian set out for
one of their favorite father-son activities: a BMX bike competition in London,
Ontario.
“Kaval Siri” as b-roll of some awesome jump
silhouetted by the sun - dissolves into bright sun - then WHITE with screams of
joy trailing off..
Kim Crespi: What I’ve learned in this journey is that i no longer
END KAVAL SVIRI
take for
granted—even one breath. Things get reduced
to the minutes—and you know you have the strength
for that minute.
video: Crespi girls singing, “it’s a whole new world…”
Kim: David and I were friends in
college. We were both accounting majors. David was that funny, brilliant guy
that you always wanted in your group.
Peter Tonon: David was a guy you’d want to be around. That’s about the best way to explain it. When you met him,
he was gregarious, he was open, he was funny; he was very witty.
Jessica
Crespi: My dad was
a very caring Father; very funny, too. He’d wake me up singing whatever group i was into at the
time: it was Spice Girls when I was little…
Kim Crespi: He’s a brilliant auditor. Auditing for a major
corporation is stressful and there’s a lot of things that go with it if you do the right
thing.
Peter Tonon: David was a guy, like any of us,
had his challenges in life — we all do. Especially in a big financial company,
there’s stresses in our work; we have
kids to raise, bills to pay.
Kim: We went to the psychiatrist in
early 2006 and he said, “well, what
about Prozac?”
David Crespi: You have a chemical imbalance.
Let’s put you on Prozac.
Kim Crespi: It’s the standard of care. It’s what they do. . .
David Crespi: It’s almost a marketing strategy that works, you know? “It’s not my fault. I have a disease.”
Tilda: Within
days of ingesting Prozac, David Crespi became troubled.
Jessica Crespi: Towards the end of just talking
back and forth and he said, “Do you ever
feel like life is too dark to go on?”
David Crespi: It’s crazy. It’s not the way i think. Those thoughts aren’t natural to me.
Kim Crespi: I recall a few events from the
day before that would suggest that he was going psychotic. David was jumping
out of the bed and walking around a throw rug and hitting each corner and then
jumping back into bed. And I’m going “what are you doing?” He goes, “it just feels good.” Well, now i attribute that to
akathisia.
intercut
police band radio crosstalk
Kim Crespi: Our tragedy was January 20, 2006.
On that day, I took all the kids to school, left to go get my haircut, left the
girls in the LOVING CARE of their father; they wanted to spend time with him.
When I came back into the neighborhood after being gone for an hour-fifteen
minutes, I saw a police barricade, and I saw some of my very concerned
neighbors coming towards me.
INSERT POLICE CAR WITH FLASHING LIGHTS - OR, TAKE THE SAME CLIP OF THEIR
HOUSE - AND RUN IT IN REVERSE!
The police
officer asked my name and i said my name
and he said “we’re going to need you in this house”
sfx: sound of
phone dialing: and then “911, where’s your emergency?”
(911-Call)
911 Dispatch: Police Department
David Crespi: Yes. i just killed my two
daughters.
911 Dispatch: You just what?
David Crespi: i just killed my two daughters.
Kim Crespi: I called my Dad in California and
I made sure my stepmom was there, and i said, “Dad, I have to tell you something
really hard. I’m in the back of a police car and i’ve been told that David killed Sam
and Tess.”
David Crespi
911 call:
911 Operator: What did you do to them?
David Crespi: I stabbed them
911 Operator: You stabbed them?
David Crespi: Yeah.
911 Operator: How many times did you stab them
David Crespi: I don’t know.
911: Keep
talking to me, because you sound a little bit tired
David Crespi: This is for real
911 Operator: Oh, I know it’s for real, Sir. Everybody is on their way, okay?
INSERT “SUICIDE1”
BY VICKI
Kim Crespi: And Cathy, my stepmom adored Sam
and Tess—as we all did—and she started wailing. And I could hear her on the
speakerphone and my Dad goes, “Honey, Dave would not do that. David is not like that. You’re mistaken.” And I said, “I wish I were, but I’m in the back of a squad car…”
SFX of siren sounding. view from the back seat of the
police car looking forward as the siren wails.
Tilda: The
Crespi children were escorted from school by the Police and were told nothing
until Kim arrived at the station.
Kim Crespi: They really thought that their dad
had killed himself.
LEAVE TINY AUDIO SPACE-TOO TIGHT
Jessica
Crespi: (teary-eyed) My Mom came in and told us, “they’re telling me that Dad killed your
sisters.” We had to use the language “they’re telling me” because we couldn’t believe that is what actually happened.
Kim Crespi: The idea of him killing Tess and
Sam was so foreign, but they knew something had happened. And that’s how the whole thing started. . .
David Crespi: I went to the doctor and i can
remember saying “I’m afraid I may hurt someone.” And she said, “You’re too compassionate to do that.
That’s just the depression talking.” NEVER was anybody saying, “the medicine can do this.”
Kim Crespi: Psychosis—the drug—killed our
daughters.
David Crespi:
Who I am was
chemically altered.
Jessica
Crespi: My Dad in his
right mind wouldn't have done anything like this.
David Crespi: I can remember this battle of “these thoughts aren’t real.”
Kim Crespi: Because when you have a complete
psychotic break like that, and you kill two of your most treasured people in
your life—people that every other day—every other day he would have died for them.
David Crespi: What I did was done on a cocktail
of legal drugs.
Kim Crespi: We were doing what the doctors
told us to do. We were being responsible.
David Crespi: Just because something’s legal doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Kim Crespi: I suspect anybody hearing my
story will go, “yeah, that’s not going to happen to me,” but it could. If it happened to
us, it could happen to anyone. .
Begin “Kaval Siri”
again -
David Crespi: But I know for certain, I know
what caused the death of my daughters. I know it was the pills.
Kim Crespi: And for all of that, we’re serving two consecutive life sentences.
music; cell
door sfx; - return to b-roll silhouette of bmx biker in the glare of the sun.
screams of laughter as we see the slo-mo shot of the silhouette then turn to
black
David
Carmichael: On July 31st,
2004, I had been on Paxil for three weeks. . .and I took Ian to a hotel room in
London, Ontario.
B-roll-out-of-focus hotel barely evident
David: At 3:00 in the morning, thinking
that he had permanent brain damage, that he was in living hell, he was going to
kill my daughter, Gillian, and he was going to harm other kids, and my wife was
going to have a nervous breakdown—which were my
five delusions—I strangled him, and I sat with his
body for six hours until I called the police at 9:00 in the morning, very
calmly saying that I’d committed homicide and opened the
door for them, and then I was arrested and charged with first degree murder.
When the police came in and arrested me, they asked me why didn’t I run. I said,
“I wanted to stay with my son. He’s in a better place now. He was in
living hell.” And I stayed with him as long as
possible.
Tilda: For 14
long days, David Carmichael was psychotic - and suffered drug withdrawals in
his jail cell .. before awakening to the ultimate terror.
David
Carmichael: The psychosis
lasted for two weeks and after I came out of my psychosis a couple of weeks
after everything happened, I was devastated. I cried for three days in
segregation at the London Middlesex Detention Centre. I could not believe what
I had done.
Tilda: Ian
was laid to rest by David’s family. It
would be months before DNA tests indicated that Carmichael’s body was unable to metabolize the Paxil he’d ingested — and that the drug was the likely
cause of this unthinkable act. Dr. Peter Breggin says he’s seen it all before.
Peter Breggin, MD (Psychiatrist and Author): Many people do not have the array
of enzymes in their livers to properly destroy SSRI drugs when they get in the
bloodstream. So the drugs pass through the liver, and they don’t get metabolized, meaning they don’t get broken down. You might get the equivalent of a
10 mg dose of an SSRI, but in your blood it is 30 or 40 mg. And there are
studies correlating the violence with the lack of the enzyme for these drugs.
David
Carmichael: The public
has no understanding of how Paxil or other SSRI could trigger a homicidal
psychotic episode—and they may not care, but there is
evidence based on DNA that Paxil did cause me to kill my son, Ian. It’s something that I have to live with. Even when I’m out in the public, my stigma is off the chart
compared to the stigma around mental illnesses. But if people beat me up
emotionally when I’m out there, that’s fine. They’ll never beat me up as much as I beat myself up for a
long time.
VO: For her part, Gillian—who was only 14 when the tragedy occurred—says she grew up the day she grasped what had really happened to her father.
Gillian
Carmichael: I realized
who he was before, who he was during the period of time that he was taking the
medication, and I realized that they were two different people.
Tilda: David
credits Gillian as the reason he did not take his own life while in prison.
David: There were several times when I was
either in jail or in a psychiatric hospital where I felt like taking my own
life. What kept me going was my daughter, Gillian. I had one line and it was, “I’m a good dad. I’m going to be a dad again.” And that was my hope. And I know
Gillian, whatever she was doing, wherever she was, was thinking that she wanted
her dad back in her life too.
Gillian: How can I not accept him back? He’s an amazing man. He’s my father and I love him.
Tilda: David Carmichael was found “not criminally responsible” for his son’s death — as two psychiatrists—one working for the defense and one for the
prosecution, both agreed that he was psychotic at the time of the tragedy.
David: The public is not going to care
about this (motioning to
himself crying). There’s no empathy for me, but I think, I’ll tell you what … the pain will never go away.
Gillian: Ian was just an amazing person and
he was an amazing brother. And he was an amazing friend and amazing son. He
just had so much life. [tears up] yeah.. sorry…
Kevin P. Miller: Pretend that I’m the Glaxo CEO. What would you
like to say to me?
David
Carmichael: [Long pause
- 22 seconds]
David: If you’re the GlaxoSmithKline CEO, I would like to encourage
you to be more honest with the Canadian public. And if there are serious side
effects to any one of your drugs, it’s not just about sending out notices to health care
professionals that many have never read. You’ve got to go directly to consumers and make them aware
of some of these dangers. That’s a
responsibility that you have as a drug company.
fade to black…
under black—confusing mix of voices under black.
Then—very, very slowly BEGIN revealing
video—little-by-little—as if it were like a video of the
sun rising. begin cacophony of 1991 Prozac hearing testimonials under black
Pallie Carnes: I was only put on it for weight loss. WEIGHT LOSS!
Susan Williams: My sister did commit suicide in
front of Lindsay
Debra Douglas: That gun, I later learned, was
loaded with hollow-point bullets and I shudder to think what could have
happened…
Mike Donnelly: The only way to have peace and
serenity again was to die
Robin Schott: Do all of you want to take this
drug? Do all of you want to walk around humiliated for the rest of your life…
Tilda:
Thirteen years had passed since the dramatic 1991 FDA-Prozac hearings. By 2004,
The British government had virtually banned SSRIs for children and young
adults, in light of the real risk of suicide and violence. But in America, the
U.S. FDA remained unconvinced—and demanded
more studies. This was welcome news at Pfizer, GSK, and The House That Prozac Built.
Dr. Bob Temple, Food and Drug Administration: We didn’t know what the results would be. We had no idea, but
we thought getting as right an answer as possible was the right thing to do.
David Healy, MD: In 1983, nine years before the
launch of Zoloft in the United States, 21 years before the FDA required Pfizer
to put a black box warning on it, Pfizer had done a healthy volunteer trial on
Zoloft in Leeds in the UK. They recruited 12 women to this trial. Half of them
were to be given Zoloft, the other half were given a placebo. The trial was due
to run for two weeks but stopped after a week because every single woman taking
Zoloft had become anxious, apprehensive, agitated. One or two had begun to
voice thoughts about harming others — all of the things that led FDA to
put a black box warning on this drug 21 years later—were there in ’83. What was more, Pfizer looked at this trial and
wrote down, “Zoloft has caused this problem.”
Tilda: For
Mathy Downing—and thousands like her—the earth-shattering epiphanies came weeks too late.
Mathy: Ironically, it happens that the
doctor that approved Zoloft as an antidepressant for children—Tom Laughren—ironically, I know this man. I’ve known him for quite a while because both of his
daughters attended school with my daughters for eight years. . .
Tilda: For
over 20 years, Thomas Laughren was head of FDAs psychopharmacology
division.
Mathy: I had no idea he worked at FDA
until I saw him on the FDA panel three weeks after Candace died. I sat there
with my husband and we listened for eight hours while person after person
basically told our story. I went up to speak with him when the meeting was over
and I said, “Where can I find information about
those contraindications?” And he told me he would give me a list of people for
me to talk to—and then I never spoke to him
again. I mean, he’s a father of two of my daughters’ friends. I really did think he
would follow through and help me gain the information I needed, but he didn’t.
Tilda: As
fate would have it, yet another FDA hearing on SSRIs and violence was held in
September 2004. In one brief, emotionally-charged moment, Mathy Downing stepped
up the microphone.
Mathy: And when I spoke at the FDA
hearings on September 13, I addressed him personally.
Tilda: After
months of grieving—and too-few answers, Mathy Downing
finally let loose.
Mathy: The blood of these children are
on your hands. (gasps from
crowd)
Peter Breggin, MD - I remember seeing Mathy Downing
stand up at the hearing and
confront Laughren and the other FDA panel members and say “the blood of my daughter is on your hands.” And she was right.
Tilda: Later,
Mathy Downing learned that Thomas Laughren had been in the thick of the SSRI
controversy since well before the 1991 Prozac hearings.
KAREN BARTH
MENZIES (Attorney and
Patient Advocate): Some of the senior officials at FDA, some of the people we find as the
original culprits—the problem at FDA, are Dr. Bob
Temple; Thomas Laughren is horribly guilty. All these same individuals were
involved back in the early 90s when this risk was being raised and identified,
and rather than pursuing safety concerns or requiring drug companies to do more
to determine if this is a serious risk, they looked the other way.
Tilda:
Laughren left FDA in 2012 and started a new business, dedicated to helping drug
companies get FDA approval for their drugs. But he was not alone at the
intersection of public service and personal profit.
DANIEL CASEY,
MD (from 1991 Prozac Hearings): I do not find from the evidence
today that there is credible evidence to support a conclusion that
antidepressant medications cause the emergence or intensification of
suicidality and/or other violent behaviors…
Tilda: When
Dr. Daniel Casey resurfaced—nine years
after the 1991 Prozac hearings he chaired—he did so as a paid expert witness for Pfizer.
Attorney Andy Vickery conducted the deposition.
Vickery deposition: You were the Chairman of that committee for several
years, right?
Dr. Casey: Yes.
Vickery
interview: The
chairman of that committee who is moderating it in a public building in a
public place was wearing a bullet proof vest
Vickery deposition: Dr. Casey, did you wear a bulletproof vest to that
forum?
Dr. Casey deposition: (startled) Yes.
Vickery deposition: Had you ever worn one prior?
Dr. Casey: No.
Vickery deposition: Have you ever worn one since?
Dr. Casey deposition: No
Vickery
interview: ….because he thought one of the family members of the
people being harmed by Prozac would shoot him.
Vickery
deposition: You
certainly did not believe it was the folks on the Eli Lilly side of the coin,
did you?
Dr. Casey deposition: (smirks, then quickly changes
expression) No
Vickery interview:
No conflict
of interest?
Vickery deposition: …and yet that would not effect your objectivity. Is
that your testimony?
Casey: Yes.
Tilda: Others, like Harvard University’s influential Dr. Joseph Biederman (Bead-err-Min) also seem to display an unnerving
indifference to their conflicts-of-interest. Here, Biederman was being deposed
as a key “thought-leader” — one of those most responsible for
spreading the off-label use of the antipsychotic Risperdal to millions of
teens.
Attorney deposition: Professor, what rank are you?
Biederman: Full Professor
Attorney deposition: What’s after that?
Biederman: God.
Attorney: Did you say
‘God?’
Biederman: Yeah.
SLATE:
Text: Dr. Biederman earned more than $1.6
million from drug makers for promoting antipsychotics as a mainline treatment
for pediatric bipolar disorder. Even after withholding the depth of his financial conflicts-of-interest from Congressional investigators,
Biederman was never penalized for his ethics
violations.
fade to
black. LEAVE 2-3
SECONDS
- Then title
appears:
Netherworld
Kristina
Gehrki: She had
beautiful blue eyes. . .she was very smart, artistic-incredibly artistic. .
.was very inquisitive. . .she seemed to root for the underdog, and would try to
help people who were maybe less fortunate .. that quality of caring
about others and caring about the world at large. It was with her until the
night before she died.
Tilda: There’s no doubt that Natalie Gehrki was a creative spirit … an artist. Her mind wandered with
thoughts of Bukowski and Oscar Wilde .. often with inspired optimism and an endearing
childlike innocence. But there was also confusion .. and yes, darkness. .
.visits to a netherworld Natalie couldn’t understand.
“Drowning”
Scene: Natalie is hit with water in the
face as the vision shifts to drowning…with water violently whipping
around her.
ACTRESS as Natalie: “The memories of everything I’ve ever done wrong since the
beginning of my own moral recognition come flooding in all at once like high
tide .. and the cold water wakes me from a dream. I suddenly realize I’ve forgotten how to swim, but the
waves pay no mind and pull at my useless body. Reality burns just as bad as
saltwater. First it’s in my eyes, then it’s in my mouth, trickling down into my lungs, filling
me to capacity. Painful memories anchor me. . .and the sea is getting rougher
and there is no more shore. Waves whip from every direction, and the ocean is
merciless and I cannot breathe.
LEAVE PREGNANT PAUSE
I am drowning
.. please help.”
(natalie descends underwater, arms aloft as bubbles rise towards camera)
How did I forget how to swim?
LEAVE PREGNANT PAUSE
How do I remember?”
Lennon song, “How?”
(by Anja):
How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?
How can I go forward when I don’t know which way to turn?
How can I go forward into something
I’m not sure of?
Oh no, oh no…
Tilda: Born
with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, Natalie was prescribed a strong drug called
Methotrexate - a cancer drug - to combat it. On doctors’ advice, she began using antidepressants in the 5th
grade. The year was 2005, and Natalie was only 11—the same age as Candace Downing when she was diagnosed
with ‘text anxiety’ and prescribed Zoloft.
Kristina: One day, I walked into Natalie’s room. . . she wasn’t showing any emotion and she was very monotone with
me. And she said,
ACTRESS as
Natalie: ”Mom, Sometimes I think about killing
myself, but I know I can’t, so I won’t.”
Kristina: And I said, “oh my God, Natalie, why?”
ACTRESS as Natalie: In my mind, it made complete sense at the time.
Tilda:
Kristina rushed Natalie to the hospital. When she was admitted, no one there
mentioned that the side effects likely stemmed from the Prozac she was given.
Instead, they supplemented the Prozac with Benadryl and the antipsychotic,
Risperdal.
ACTRESS as Natalie: (Harleigh05 @ 1:26): I cried uncontrollably as a male
staff member put a hospital wristband over my wrist. He prescribed me
Risperdal, a powerful anti-psychotic, which of course, I knew nothing about.
But I had to do what he told me to, so I took it.
Kristina: In the hospital, she was asked to
write down her feelings: I wish I could stop thinking about wanting to kill
myself. . . I hate my mom, I hate my dad, I hate my brother, I hate my house, I
hate my life. And I don’t know why.
(Harleigh06 @ 47 sec -which is take 3): I don’t trust modern medicine or
psychiatrists at all. My textbook psychiatrist continued to tell me every
time I cried and begged to be released: “If you really want to go, you have
to listen and follow everything I say.”
Tilda:
Throughout Natalie’s teen years, her online diary
complained of a lack of sleep, in between ruminations on the human existence .
. . her existence.
(Harleigh13 @
2:24) “My secrets build up inside of me like the tsunami wave
my brother and I saw on TV once. The secrets are ready to crash over, ready to
destroy. I will not let them.
Kristina: When you give a person a drug, and
you don’t tell them about any of the side
effects, and they get side fx. . .they are going to attribute them to
themselves or their underlying condition.
(Harleigh13 @
59 sec): “every day i’m breathing is a small miracle”
Kristina: She attributed all her side effects
to herself.
(Harleigh14 @
2:11 sec): “I wish I could figure out how I
feel about who I really am.”
Tilda: In
2012, Natalie was switched to Zoloft—and by November, her doctor increased the dose from
100mg to 150mg — unbeknownst to the Gehrki’s.
(Harleigh14) at
59seconds: “Picturing myself in the future is an impossible concept
for my mind to comprehend. It’s like trying to explain colors to someone born blind. I
just can’t do it.”
Tilda: In February
of 2013, without seeing her patient, the doctor increased Natalie’s dose—over the
phone—from 150mg to 200mg—the maximum dose legally allowed. Four days later, on
the afternoon of February 6th, Natalie was struggling:
(Harleigh08)
at 1:40 seconds: I keep coughing up blood. I’m not hungry. It’s time for me to take my meds.
Tilda: …and the world was closing in….
Kristina: in my daughter’s last months, weeks, days, hours, she had a chemical
imbalance in her brain—and it was
prescribed for her
(Harleigh07)
at 2:15 seconds: I was different before, and now I have changed -
chemically, maybe: neurologically, who knows?
Kristina: . . .she did not have a chemical
imbalance before she took the prescription. . .but she certainly had a chemical
imbalance when she died. . .
(Harleigh09)
at 1:51 seconds: The silence grows around me in petals, warm and
burgundy, wrapping a thorny fence. . .Do I cry, scream out, beg?
Lennon song: How can we go forward into
something we’re not sure of?
Kristina: This is a poisoning, this is not a “traditional suicide”
— and we ought
not call it such, because by using that very word we create a false reality. because
it is not only disrespectful to the victim and their families, but to call it
that also plays into the hands of the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors.
Because by
using that very word, we create a false reality.
(Harleigh11)
at 10 seconds: I’m very sorry. I have failed. But it’s okay, I’ll be much happier this way. Bury
my body under a tree, somewhere deep in the woods. Take care of Gypsy for me.
Move on—I’m not worth mourning.
Kristina: I fear for other Natalie’s out there, and I almost beg people, “Don’t be me. Don’t be our family.” … Because (chokes up) Our daughter is gone. And she
wanted life. She deserved to live. And she’s not here anymore.
close out
with music. . .
fade to black
CG (on black)
appears:
“One joy scatters a hundred griefs.”
-Chinese saying
Tilda: IN A
REMOTE TOWN IN WESTERN CANADA, the Stephan (Steff-enn) family was facing a life and death
struggle in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Two of Debbie Stephan’s children were exhibiting the same symptoms that had
ultimately claimed her life: Joseph was becoming frighteningly violent — and his sister Autumn was
succumbing to severe bipolar, with its mercurial mood swings. Their father,
Tony Stephan, was desperate — and searching for any way to save his children, when
drug after drug failed. The answer came from what seemed the unlikeliest of
places: micronutrients - mainly minerals.
Joseph
Stephan: I remember
the earlier days of doing the testing with nutrients and different things. I
think they were trying to reduce some liquid mineral thing so you didn’t have to drink a whole cup; maybe just an ounce. And
I don’t think it worked very good, and it
smelled funny. I remember the smell and can still taste it in the back of my
throat. (smirks) I think they burned it—I’m not
sure.
Tony Stephan: At first it didn’t work. It did not work.
Joseph
Stephan: I just
remember I was out camping and I had a little bottle of—I call it rust water— it was the color of rust, and I was
supposed to drink a little ounce of that every day, a couple of times. And so I
would be doing that. I mean, it was so experimental that I didn’t really understand what we were doing.
Tony Stephan: We put him on a cocktail that
contained vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and amino acids.
Autumn
Stringham: I was
absolutely livid when i found out that he had taken Joseph off of his medication, and I said some terrible
things to him. I told him it was on his head—the next suicide in this family was going to be his
fault.
Tony Stephan: I remember about six weeks into
this program that we sat together on the couch and he said “where was I? what happened to me?
why was i so angry all of the time?” I said, “Don’t go there, you don’t have to. Live the day now. You’re here. Be in the present.”
Joseph: It was like one day waking
up and like a fog had completely lifted, and that was amazing. It was a very
real turning point in my life.
Tilda: With
Joseph on the mend, Tony Stephan then turned his attention to his daughter
Autumn, who had been in and out of psych wards.
Autumn
Stringham: I ended up
in my dad’s custody and he has a friend who
was a male psych nurse who decided to hang around the house a lot and honestly,
I look back on it now, I think that they were waiting for a moment when they
would have legal justification to force me to go on this micronutrient stuff.
At that time, it was this crazy concoction with liquids and powders, and pills
and things and I had said no, and my husband had said, “No. We’re not doing that.” My psychiatrist said, “No.” In fact, he said, “Don’t rock the boat. You will die. Do
not go off of this medication.” And I was on that five-drug
cocktail at that time. So, I had absolutely no intention of doing what my dad
had already started with my brother Joseph—no intention.
Tony Stephan: I won’t say that I forced her to do it because that
doesn’t sound politically correct (smirks), but I constrained her to
do it. And she just didn’t believe
that this was going to work at all. And I said, “Just keep taking your medications.
I don’t care. You know how to take your meds.
Take this with it. Just keep taking it.”
Autumn
Stringham: So they
waited until I had a little med breakthrough and I went rummaging for a knife,
and there was some screaming involved, and he and this friend of his who
happened to be a psychiatric nurse, stuffed me with a bunch of Ativan and put
me to bed. And then, while I was still really nicely sedated, began force
feeding me the concoctions.
Bonnie
Kaplan, Ph.D (Professor,
Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary): Back in 1996, when I first met
Autumn Stringam, it was the first day I also met her father Tony Stephan. She
was sitting there in front of us, completely normal, very bright, very
articulate, very charming young woman, doing very well on vitamins and
minerals, but she had lived through this horrible, horrible period and could
remember it so vividly. It was very impressive. You knew that you were hearing
a true story, and I think that that has come through consistently with Autumn.
Autumn
Stringham: I recognize
that a huge percentage of people with bipolar commit suicide and it just as
easily could have been me, and isn’t, because something really beautiful happened in my
life. And I have to acknowledge that that’s not just mine to take and run away with, but that
there’s a lot of good that can be done in
the world, knowing what I know now.
Dr. Bonnie
Kaplan: These were
just three people from Southern Alberta, who believed that they had “fixed” two children in Tony’s family and they did it with vitamins and minerals
off the shelf. And they just desperately wanted a scientist somewhere to take
them seriously and do some research.
Tilda: When
Stephan and Truehope approached Dr. Kaplan in 1996, she was the Director of
Behavioural Research for the University of Calgary. As a scientist, she was
highly skeptical—and thought the notion of utilising
minerals for mental illness was simply preposterous.
Tony Stephan: I think Bonnie, when we first met
her, she kind of thought that we were flaky because all of a sudden, you have
these two strange dudes coming from Southern Alberta and they’ve got this idea that you can take people suffering
with these intractable, incurable mental disorders and change them and bring
them around, when all along, science hasn’t been able to do that.
Dr. Kaplan: And I thought, “Well, that’s impossible. You can’t do that. There’s no way it would have that effect.” But I think that line of thought is
reflective of our lack of education about nutrition, and the fact that blood is
bathing the neurons in our brain every minute of every day, bringing oxygen and—what? Micronutrients to make those brain cells
work.
Tilda:
Stephan and his co-founder created a non-profit called Truehope—and after years of experimentation, they developed a
mineral-based formula called Empower Plus. Intrigued by Autumn and Joseph’s successful transformations, Dr. Kaplan and others
continued studying the formula for bipolar disorder, ADHD, and depression.
Kaplan (TV clip: 2001): Some people call this a ‘micronutrient sledgehammer,’
because it’s all of the vitamins, and a very
long list of dietary minerals. The patients in this sample got much better, in
fact more than 50% better. Quite a few of them were more than 75% better.
Autumn
Stringham: He wasn’t trying to build an empire when he set out to save me
and Joe. It was not a deliberate act. He’s not a formulator. It was a conversation that led to
an idea that led to an answer and that’s all he was ever in it for. And he’s faced so much opposition for doing the right thing.
He’s faced a lot of opposition for
that and I think it’s changed the course of his whole
life.
Tilda: As it
has with Dr. Kaplan. When she first presented her findings about the Truehope
mineral-vitamin-combination to the Canadian Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting in 2001, she — and the company — were immediately under attack.
Dr. Kaplan: When I went to graduate school,
they did not prepare me to be personally attacked for just doing objective
research. That was a little shocking. We took a lot of arrows for about five
years especially, longer for the Truehope people, but it was very, very tough.
Tony: When you try and investigate a
new paradigm, the resistance is incredible. I watched Dr. Kaplan go through
this. We had major resistance form Health Canada shutting down trials. Here,
the Alberta government had provided $554,000 so that she could continue the
work. Health Canada came in and swathed the trial. They destroyed it.
COMMON SENSE
music bed
Tilda: Health
Canada not only shut down Dr. Kaplan’s scientific investigation into micronutrients and
mental health,
START WIDE ON STUDY—ZOOM INTO “THIS STUDY HAS BEEN TERMINATED”
they ordered
Truehope to stop manufacturing Empower Plus. When the company refused, they
seized the product at the US-Canadian border — and banned it for sale in Canada.
Tony: Why? We’re talking about vitamins and minerals here.
Robert
Whitaker (Pulitzer
Prize finalist): Well, what that tells you is that anything that cha llenges commercial
interests, such as micronutrients might be a good thing to do, boy, there are
powerful forces behind a commercial story—and they will come forth.
Tilda: When
Truehope fought back through the Courts—and won—it wasn’t long thereafter that Health Canada mobilized the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police to conduct a guns-drawn raid at the Truehope
offices in Alberta.
Ian Stewart: Health Canada spent $2 million to
prosecute Truehope for charges—had they been
found guilty—would have amounted to a $375 fine.
They lost— Health Canada
lost, but all of those costs to defend ourselves were not recouped from Health
Canada.
Tilda:
Despite Pharma’s falsified science—and billion-dollar fines for fraudulent marketing
BLACK HEALTH
CANADA LOGO W/ PINK FLAG
— and in spite of millions who were harmed by
psychiatric drugs—Health Canada decided that it was this tiny non-profit that needed to be shown the full
might of the Canadian government.
Bonnie
Kaplan: There has
been a huge bias against nutrition research. Who’s triggering that? Who – what is the political agenda that
is continually bombarding us with the message that taking vitamins and minerals
might not be a good thing? I don’t get that.
The result is that there is a lot of bias against people who’s saying “Not only should we take them, we should be studying it
more and we should see whether or not there’s treatment benefit from vitamins
and minerals.”
Julia Rucklidge (TedX talk at 55sec): What I’m going to talk about today may sound as radical as hand
washing sounded to a mid-19th century doctor—and yet it is equally as scientific.
It is the simple idea that optimizing nutrition is a safe and viable way to
avoid, treat or lessen mental illness.
Tilda: After
nearly two decades of wrangling with Health Canada—and three-quarters of a million dollars in court costs
and legal fees for Truehope, researchers Bonnie Kaplan, Julia Rucklidge, and
others continue to investigate the use of nutrients as a primary treatment for
mental health. Yet the road has been anything but easy.
Rucklidge: I was very aware of how many
people were incredibly skeptical about this work. I was trained as a scientist
and we need to evaluate the evidence. What has astounded me is the obstacles
that we faced in order to try to answer what, I think, a very important
question for our community.
Bonnie Kaplan: I think there are two things
about the Truehope formula that are really special. One is that it’s broad spectrum—not just vitamins but both vitamins and dietary
minerals.
Another
aspect of looking at the weight of the science is to look at replication,
replication not within the same laboratory, not in the same hands but when
other people say
CHANGE BACK TO CAM1
“Aha, I’m getting the same result.” So, it’s very important that the use of broad-spectrum
formulas is being replicated in multiple countries, in New Zealand, in the
United States, in Canada, with different formulations, in the UK, in Holland,
in Australia, that is extremely important.
Fristad: What people get concerned about is
if a company is trying to simply market their ware without enough science
behind it; people become very skeptical, very quickly.
So what I
would say in favor of Truehope, is that none of us who are investigating the
product have any financial ties to the company whatsoever,
FRISTAD STUDY
and then they
have absolutely no ties whatsoever in how we publish our findings. So they have
no authority over what we write, where we publish it, where we submit it, etc.
Rucklidge: There have been times where I’ve been at absolute despair and say, “Why am I doing this?” Because I have gone through so
many obstacles to be able to run the studies that I do. Some of the obstacles I’ve come across have shocked me. It’s not fair for me to say them on camera of what kinds
of things that I’ve had to deal with from members of
my community.
KPM: Have you been betrayed?
Julia R: Yes…uh-huh…yep.
KPM: Is this, dare I say, ‘dangerous’ work for you to embark on?
Mary Fristad: Well, I wouldn’t have started my career this way. That might have
ended my career.
Kaplan: Would I do it again? I don’t know if I would have the energy to deal with Health
Canada again.
Mary Fristad: It is understandable that people
would have questions, I would simply ask that people then be open-minded to the
results as the science evolves.
Tilda: In reality, though, Truehope—and nutrition research in general—is in danger of becoming extinct. Despite being the
most studied dietary supplement in the world, good scientists often fear the
political consequences of studying nutrition’s effects on the brain.
Rucklidge: It makes perfect logic to me that
we should investigate other options. If someone comes along and has some intriguing
data that shows that symptoms can be controlled by another method that may not
come along with so many risks, then I think it’s in our place as scientists to study it.
Kaplan: I happen to think that medications
are very important— especially in
acute crises. But, to me they’re the
supplement. I believe that it would be more beneficial to a lot of people
especially developing children, to be treated first with everything
psychosocial, family therapy, etcetera, and nutritional, which is not going to
cause any long term harm, and that that should be primary intervention.
Tilda: For people who have become well
utilising vitamins and minerals—after
suffering from the fog of pharmaceuticals—they cannot conceive ever going back.
Nicole: I found out about Truehope after
having my last child. It was the darkest hours of my life, days, months and it
ended up being two years. I have a huge amount of gratitude that I need to send
to Truehope, the whole, entire program of it. It kind of makes me emotional.
They changed my life. For so many other people, they’re changing lives every day. If we, as parents, as
mothers, as fathers, as brothers, as sisters, can just take a look at that…
Sonya: In the fall of 1996, we contacted
Dr. Kolb and he told us about Tony Stephan and Truehope. We had been looking
for some alternatives. We’d given
everything the psychiatrist had suggested, we gave it all a try. Nothing was
working. We felt there must be something else. I think here’s a product that worked for me. It helped me. There
are no side effects. I’m a
functioning part of society. I’m not on the
floor in a ball crying all the time. I mean, that was my life before. I can
contribute to the wellbeing of my own family and my community and, hopefully,
society. And Truehope has helped. Maybe, it’s not for everybody but the option needs to be there.
Jeri: You know, they always talk about
the placebo effect. I don’t think a
placebo effect last 11 years, but if it does, bring it on. I’ll keep it. (laughs)
Autumn: I don't want to be
giving people false hope that everything about their mental illness is going to
turn around, flip a switch, and tada – a magic pill. That’s not the case, but my goodness, just stopping the hallucinations, just
that would’ve been enough to keep me on it the
rest of my life because that was huge. It took me two more months to get off
the rest of my medication and I’d say the better
part of the year before I felt like I was just really stable.
There are going to be people who want to say that I’m just trying to make a lot of money off of a big made-up
story, but my mother’s dead in the ground. Her dad’s dead. We all know how that happened. She had a
prescription, and there’s some things you just can’t argue with. I’m not dead. I’ve got four healthy kids and a great
marriage. And that’s something I didn’t expect would ever happen with me.
EPILOGUE
TILDA: The
lesson of a generation's worth of psychiatric experiments is that regulators
didn't protect the public; doctors didn't protect their patients; journalists
refused to ask the tough questions; the pharmaceutical companies played the
system and profited handsomely; and millions suffered, died, became addicts, or
were otherwise harmed.
END w EARLIER MELISSA B-ROLL WALKING BY THE CAMERA IN SLO-MO;
Melissa: You know, a
lot of times parents think that their eight- or nine-year-old just won't
understand; it's just easier to just give them the medications. But not telling
your kid why they're taking the medication or what the medication is supposed
to do can be really harmful. Having that kernel of knowledge that these things
that I was experiencing weren't me but were caused by a medication, I think
would've saved a lot of pain. A lot of pain.
Bob B: We’ve been thru a
lot. And she stopped taking the drugs and a new kid came forward. Straight A’s at the Univ.
of St. Thomas; summa cum laude; valedictorian; Unbelievable. Here is this child
that i was afraid would never get out of her bedroom is now doing what she’s doing. (chokes
up) So, it’s a great thing
that i have a kid who has the tenacity and the ability to tell us what she
needed. And I’m afraid there
are a lot of kids who aren’t like that, and they’re going to be
in a stupor—or worse.
Tilda: These
are stories of those who have fallen —
and of those
who have somehow survived. Many lost sons and daughters .. brothers and sisters
… and their tragedies forced these private people out of
the shadows. They wanted answers—and were not
interested in the politics of medicine. If the truth had been afforded us
decades ago, millions would have been spared similar fates.
Linda
Hurcombe: These are
very primitive things, missing your children.
You miss their warmth and their smell and their lovely, lovely presence.
VOX: Perhaps change is coming, albeit
too slowly. But until it occurs, we should take nothing for granted: not our
loves .. nor our lives .. or the gift of our families and friends. As these Letters From Generation Rx have taught us .. there is peril
in the conventional wisdom of treating so many people .. so indiscriminately ..
with such powerful, life-changing drugs.
Shaun
McCartney: If somebody
said to me that Brennan could come back to life and I’d never see him again, but I know that he could live
his life, the biggest loss for me, is the wonderful life he could have had. He
would have been a great dad. He was a great friend to everybody. If that’s what it took, then I would do that in a second.
Tilda: As
they mourn Every birthday, every holiday; every anniversary of a loved one's
death, their only prayer is to stop this from happening .. to anyone else.
-fin-
EPILOGUE-Slates
After
15 years of political infighting, MP Terence Young’s legislation, Bill
C-17 passed unanimously in November 2014. Named Vanessa’s Law after Mr. Young’s daughter, the law
gives the Health Minister the power to recall unsafe drugs, requires
mandatory adverse reaction reporting throughout Canada, and provides an online
public registry with all clinical trial data about pharmaceutical drugs. Bill
C-17 also demands greater transparency from Health Canada — Canada’s version of the FDA.
Robert
Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic appeared on the New
York Times bestseller’s list for the first time in April of
2015. Whitaker was honored by the Investigative Reporters and Editors
Association with their 2010 Book Award for Best Investigative Journalism for
Anatomy of an Epidemic.
Autumn
Stephan Stringham’s
story about her family’s battle with mental illness, A
Promise of Hope was published by Harper-Collins Canada. Within months, it
became a Canadian bestseller.
David Crespi is still in prison for the drug-induced deaths of his daughters. His wife Kim is committed to freeing him.