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Kim Witczak's avatar

An amazing year and am grateful for all your work. I have been doing drug safety advocacy work for over 20 years. I never intended to do this work but after my healthy husband with no history of depression or any other mental health issues hung himself shorty after being prescribed antidepressant Zoloft off label for insomnia, I jumped into action. We had no idea the history of antidepressants starting in 1991 FDA hearing on Prozac and association with violence and suicide - 12 years before my husband’s death.

This became my mission to use Woody story to help get FDA blackbox suicide warnings added to antidepressants. Ultimately they were added in 2004 and extended to young adults to age 24 in 2006. I also had a huge wrongful death failure to warn lawsuit against Pfizer. My attorneys at Baum Hedlund paves the way in the antidepressant litigation and we got internal company documents made public showing the drug companies, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Glaxo and the FDA officials knew about the risk and failed to tell doctors and the public.

I think the story about antidepressants is extremely important to keep telling. Mental health as a result of the pandemic is getting worse. Antidepressants prescriptions are skyrocketing, suicides and violence acts keep increasing.

If interested, here is one of my substacks about the back story of the 2006 FDA antidepressants hearings. Since the FDA wouldn’t allow safety experts and those with critical knowledge to have more than 3 minutes to speak during open public hearing, I put together a press conference the day before to give the press and the public an opportunity to hear from experts the FDA didn’t want heard.

https://open.substack.com/pub/acceptablecollateraldamage/p/september-is-suicide-awareness-month?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Again, thank you for shining a bright light on what’s been going on for long time in the medical industrial complex. We need more people, like you, doing the hard right, not the easy wrong.

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Susan Maccora's avatar

I would love to honour your work with a subscription but as a pensioner and Australian, with the conversion from Aussie dollar, I'm just going to have to keep sending you good vibes and sincere thanks for all your work. Cheers and best wishes for 2024.

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