Suicide

Suicide

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Story goes here... AN expression of true love or raw hatred, of purest faith or mortal sin, of courageous loyalty or selfish cowardice: The act of suicide has meant many things to many people through history, from the fifth-century Christian martyrs to the Samurais’ hara-kiri to more recent literary divas, Hemingway, Plath, Sexton.
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Jonathan Player for The New York Times

UNKNOWABLE The poet A. Alvarez called suicide “a closed world with its own irresistible logic.”

But now the shadow of suicide has slipped into the corridors of modern medicine as a potential drug side effect, where it is creating a scientific debate as divisive and confounding as any religious clash.

And the shadow is likely to deepen.

After a years-long debate about whether antidepressant drugs like Prozac and Paxil increase the risk of suicide in some people, the Food and Drug Administration in recent days reported that other drugs, including medications used to treat epilepsy, also appear to increase the remote risk of suicide. The agency has been evaluating suicide risk in a variety of medicines, and more such reports — and more headlines — are expected.

Many doctors who treat epilepsy patients said they were bewildered by the recent reports and concerned that regulators were scaring patients away from valuable medications based on limited evidence. On the other side, critics of the agency have charged that the reports were long overdue.

For veterans of the debate over the side effects of drugs, it all had a familiar odor. “Here it comes again,” said Ronald Maris, a professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine and a forensic scientist who works as a paid expert for plaintiffs’ lawyers. “It looks like this is headed down the same road.”

In short, consumers and patients may be in for a Pandora’s box of exasperating, drawn out public debates over suicide risk, if not lurid court cases — with little chance

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10 months, 2 Weeks, 2 days, 18 hours, 13 minutes ago

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