After Combat, Victims of an Inner War

Sgt. Jacob Blaylock flipped on the video camera he had set up in a trailer at the Tallil military base, southeast of Baghdad.

He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew the smoke upward.

“Hey, it’s Jackie,” he said. “It’s the 20th of April. We go home in six days. I lost two good friends on the 14th. I’m having a hard time dealing with it.”

For almost a year, the soldiers of the 1451st Transportation Company had been escorting trucks full of gasoline, building materials and other supplies along Iraq’s dark, dangerous highways. There had been injuries, but no one had died.

Their luck evaporated less than two weeks before they were to return home, in the spring of 2007. A scout truck driving at the front of a convoy late at night hit a homemade bomb buried in the asphalt. Two soldiers, Sgt. Brandon Wallace and Sgt. Joshua Schmit, were killed.

The deaths stunned the unit, part of the North Carolina National Guard. The two men were popular and respected — “big personalities,” as one soldier put it. Sergeant Blaylock, who was close to both men, seemed especially shaken. Sometime earlier, feeling the strain of riding the gunner position in the exposed front truck, he had switched places with Sergeant Wallace, moving to a Humvee at the rear.

READ MORE @ NY TIMES

U.S. Army suicides rise 13 percent

The number of U.S. Army suicides increased again last year amid the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

An army official said Thursday that 115 troops committed suicide in 2007, an increase of almost 13 percent over the previous year's 102. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because a full report on the deaths was not being released until later.

About a quarter of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

The 115 confirmed deaths among active duty soldiers and National Guard and Reserve troops that had been activated was a lower number than previously feared. Preliminary figures released in January showed as many as 121 troops might have killed themselves, but some of the deaths were still under investigation then and have been attributed since to other causes, the officials said.

READ MORE @ INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

The Increasing Use Of Antidepressants: Some Reasons For Concern

Two articles in the March issue of the European Journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics raise serious concern about the increasing use of antidepressant medications. In the first article, David Healy and collaborators (University of Cardiff) formulate a critique of many studies which try to support the use of antidepressants on the basis of variations in suicide rates.

The Authors compare suicide rates in the Nordic countries with autopsy and ill-defined death rates, and antidepressant sales, during the period 1961 through to 2003, finding a close correlation between suicide rates and both autopsy and ill-defined death rates.The Authors conclude that the role of autopsies and other factors in the registration of a death as a suicide appear to need further clarification.

In another article Mojtabai and collaborators analyze the increase in antidepressant medication in the US in the past decade in two US general population surveys.

READ MORE @ MEDICAL NEWS TODAY

Reported suicides – more than 80 percent got psychiatric drugs, well over 50 percent got antidepressants

Health care providers in Sweden are per a new law required to report all suicides committed in health care and up to four weeks after last health care visit. The reports are sent to the National Board of Health and Welfare for investigation.

367 suicides were reported per this law for 2006.

Data gotten via FOIA requests show: More than 80 percent of persons committing suicide were “treated” with psychiatric drugs; in well over 50 percent of the cases the persons got antidepressants, in more than 60 neuroleptics or antidepressants.

This information has been concealed by senior (psychiatric) officials at the National Board of Health and Welfare. It was contrary to the best interests of Big Pharma and biological psychiatrists. It blew the myths of antidepressants and neuroleptics as suicide protecting drugs to pieces. It would also have hurt the career of many medical journalists to take up this subject; journalists who for years have made their living by writing marketing articles about new antidepressant drugs. So nothing has been written about this in major media in Sweden.

READ MORE @ TRANSWORLDNEWS

It's premature to blame FDA for suicide rise

The front page headline in the Washington Post was alarming: "Youth suicides increased as antidepressant use fell." A new study argued that a record increase in youth suicides in 2004 may have been the unintended consequence of federal warnings that antidepressants such as Prozac can trigger suicidal thoughts in children. Media outlets across the country reported the painful irony that the Food and Drug Administration's attempt to prevent suicides seemed to have increased them by discouraging doctors from properly treating depressed young people.

"We may have inadvertently created a problem," lamented Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, to the Post earlier this month.

But a closer look at the numbers suggests that the suicide fears are at least premature, if not baseless, say people who specialize in health statistics.

READ MORE @ BOSTON GLOBE