From Joe Terrence Gray
The evidence for self-destructive behaviour triggered by psychotropic drugs is well documented (3 July, p 36). Moreover, the interaction of these compounds with additional “environmental insults” is poorly, if at all, understood.
My programme Green Blood Red Tears broadcast by Kentucky Educational Television in 2000 documents the pandemic of farmer suicides and the unrecognised dangers of the prescribing by American rural doctors of the antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to stressed-out and overworked farmers, especially those whose neurotransmitter mechanism has been compromised by pesticide absorption.
Studies in the UK by Robert Davies and Ghouse Ahmed at Rydon House, Taunton, Somerset, reveal the perils of overprescribing SSRIs to individuals exposed to sheep dip.
Separately, David Overstreet of the North Carolina School of Medicine and Hermona Soreq of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have shown how organophosphate exposure causes depression and changes cholinergic gene expression in the brain. In the 1980s, Martin Teicher and colleagues at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and Lorann Stallones, now at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, documented suicide impulses following the administration of psychotropic drugs and increases in successful suicides in communities growing pesticide-intensive cash crops.
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Thankfully, organophosphates are beginning to be regulated in the US, but the fundamental scientific research and epidemiological studies necessary to explain how these deadly reactions happen are stymied. For more information on my film, visit www.cinestream.info
Middletown, Kentucky, US
