I often wonder how different the SSRI antidepressant story might have been if the @FDA had acted differently in 1991. At the time of the 1991 FDA hearing on the emergence of suicide and violence with antidepressants, Prozac had the HIGHEST number of adverse-event reports submitted to the FDA’s National Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting System, according to Alan Gelberg, then Acting Chief of the Surveillance and Data Processing Branch at CDER. Then listen to the conflict-of-interest waivers read at the beginning of the hearing for committee members with financial ties involving antidepressant manufacturers. 😳 The advisory committee ultimately voted unanimously, 10-0, that the evidence did not support a conclusion that antidepressants caused the emergence or intensification of suicidality or violent behavior. I still wonder if they listened to the families who came forward and told their stories during the open public hearing. WHAT IF the FDA did their job and had required warnings in 1991? WHAT IF doctors and patients had been alerted to these potential serious harms from the beginning? Would antidepressants have been prescribed so freely over the next 35 years? We’ll never know. But here we are today, 35 years later, living with the consequences of an overmedicalized culture and decades of widespread antidepressant prescribing. Watch the conflict-of-interest waivers and the final vote from the 1991 FDA hearing. 👇