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Miller Place RockyPointPatch Local Voices
12/11/2012
by Long Island Attorney Paul A. Lauto, Esq.
The drug industry in the U.S. is a multi-billion dollar business. Many blame the rising cost of health insurance in part, on the over prescription and over use of medications. Unfortunately, the ramifications of our use or overuse of prescription medications is far reaching and goes beyond an increase in the cost of health insurance. This was perhaps never more clear, than it was in the case of Joseph Mazella.
A NY jury highlighted the dangers associated with anti-depressant drugs, by awarding 1.5 million to the family of Joseph Mazella who committed suicide in Sept, 2009. Mazella was a 51 year old father, teacher and coach, who had been taking Paxil (20mg) for over 10 years as prescribed by Dr. William Beals. Upon feeling anxious and depressed, Mazella telephoned Dr. Beals for help. Instead of having Mazella come into the office for an evaluation, Dr. Beals elected over the phone to increase Mazella’s Paxil dosage to 40 mg and added the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. In one month’s time Mazella was found at home by his wife, dead from an apparent suicide.
The jury found Dr. Beals negligent in reportedly prescribing Paxil over the phone to Mazella for 10 years without in office evaluations, in failing to properly warn of the serious risks associated with Paxil, in doubling the paxil dose and adding a second drug over the phone so as not to interrupt his vacation and abandoning Mazella during his decline. The NYS department of health has charged Dr. Beals with alleged negligence in prescribing psychiatric drugs to many of his other patients, he has reportedly been disciplined for personal alcohol and drug abuse and is now serving a 5 year probation from the practice of medicine.
obit in Syracuse Post Standard on September 14, 2009
http://blogs.lawyers.com/2012/12/antidepressant-caused-suicide/
Lawyers.com
Antidepressant Caused Coach’s Suicide, Jury Finds
Posted December 6, 2012 in Jury Awards Medical Malpractice by Sylvia Hsieh
Over three years after the death of a beloved Syracuse, N.Y. high school basketball coach, Joseph Mazella, a jury decided that a doctor who prescribed Paxil and other antidepressants to him over the phone must pay $1.5 million to Mazella’s widow.
Since 2007, the makers of Paxil and other antidepressants were ordered by the Food and Drug Administration to add warnings that the drugs increase suicidal thinking.
Janice Mazella had just gotten out of the shower one morning when she found her husband’s body in the garage.
While he gave no hint he was suicidal, Mazella had been prescribed anti-depressants and had complained of side effects, telling his wife that he felt like his head was on fire.
Dr. William Beals had been prescribing Paxil to Mazella for a decade by filling prescriptions over the phone whenever Mazella called to say he was running low on his medications.
Once, after Mazella had an anxiety attack, Beals doubled his dosage of Paxil and prescribed Zyprexa over the phone. When Mazella went to the hospital with heart problems, another doctor put him on a lower dose of Paxil. Soon after, the Mazellas had an office visit with Dr. Beals for the first time in 10 years. According to Janice, Dr. Beals was furious that they had gone to the hospital and “exposed his treatment,” and told them to leave.
Beals is on probation with the state health department for filling prescriptions without seeing his patients and for abusing drugs and alcohol himself.
When Mazella was hospitalized, a third doctor switched him from Paxil to three other medications but never followed up.
“When he got out of the hospital, that’s when it got worse, when his head was burning,” Janice said. “He said it felt like he had hot poison going through his veins. It felt so awful from the inside.”
Her attorney, Ernest DelDuchetto, argued that Beals was negligent in prescribing Paxil without seeing his patient, for not warning the Mazellas about the suicidal side effects and for abandoning Mazella without any follow-up.
A jury found Beals to blame for causing Mazella’s suicide and awarded Janice and their three children $1.5 million.
“It was comforting to see a jury agree with our proposition that these drugs are not panaceas for all sadness,” DelDuchetto said.
Janice said she hopes the verdict will help others who are prescribed antidepressants.
“It’s just what the medical community does – medicate, medicate, medicate,” she said. “I hope through this that people are aware, so they can step it up and question and do more than I did and Joe did, so this doesn’t happen to them. If this can save another person, that’s what I want to happen.”