BMJ 1995;311:55 (1 July)

Letters

Study is based on unproved assumptions

EDITOR,--John A Henry and colleagues draw several familiar conclusions from their study of suicide and antidepressants.1 They argue that their data "provide a useful guide to the relative toxicities of drugs and an indication of the needs for prescribing policy" and suggest that a considerable number of suicides could be prevented by a switch to routine prescribing of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. This opinion is not always expressed in such restrained terms--as the accompanying editorial reminds us2--and yet it is based on two unproved assumptions. The first is that relative mortality due to overdose is the same as relative toxicity in overdose. The second is that suicidal patients prescribed a non-toxic drug will not seek an alternative means of killing themselves.

Since the data on relative mortality due to an overdose of antidepressants do not come from randomised trials they could reflect differences between patients prescribed different antidepressants rather . . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

Relative mortality from overdose of antidepressants
John A Henry, Carol A Alexander, and Ersin K Sener
BMJ 1995 310: 221-224. [Abstract] [Full Text]

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