
Young people on antidepressants more likely to commit violent crime - 001sky
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11866077/Antidepressants-raise-risk-of-committing-violent-crime.html
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phren0logy
This not a reasonable conclusion based on the available data.

There was no comparison to a similarly depressed or anxious group who were not
prescribed medication.

Also, due to the "criminalization of mental illness," many
children/adolescents come to the attention of the mental health system due to
violent behavior, so there is a strong selection bias for those who are
aggressive to enter treatment vs those who suffer in silence. Further,
depression/anxiety are also risk factors for drug/alcohol use, which are well
established as contributors to violence, and those don't appear to be
controlled for with a comparison group either.

It's possible (though in my view unlikely) that SSRIs could meaningfully
increase the risk of violence, but this is not a study that can make that
conclusion.

Source: I'm an MD, board certified in general, child, and forensic psychiatry
who works with mentally ill offenders.

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001sky
Link to original article.

[http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030372)

there is a section on 'data', of which here is one sample

 _The data submitted by GlaxoSmithKline on paroxetine for review by the
Committee on Safety of Medicines Expert Working Group are described as a
complete set of data from all placebo-controlled trials of this drug [5]. The
use of this dataset thus involves no selection by the authors, and any
selection bias there might have been on the part of the company seems unlikely
to have increased the size of the problem. Data from placebo-controlled trials
of sertraline in children are also presented, as these also offer a complete
dataset, so minimising any selection bias._

