FDA HEARINGS 2004: PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGIC DRUGS ADVISORY COMMITTEE WITH THE PEDIATRIC SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE ANTI-INFECTIVE DRUGS ADVISORY COMMITTEE
DR.PINE: Thank you.
The next speaker is Dawn Jeronowitz.
The next speaker is Dawn Jeronowitz.
JERONOWITZ: I would like to thank myself for the miracle of my being here today. In 2001, healthy, thirty-one and with no troubled history, I went to a doctor concerned about pain in my finger.
Finding nothing broken, his diagnosis was anxiety. He prescribed an SSRI for one year. Upon intake, I became high, high developed into euphoria, euphoria intensified to grandiose, until mania overtook me.
I lived delusions, paranoia, insomnia; endured radical, obsessive, irrational antics; fly-on crazy. Oblivious, other people noticed.
Within weeks, having lost 22 pounds, I was taken into police custody after running and screaming through the neighborhood. I kicked out the police car window barefoot, then dove through the shattered glass.
The emergency room described, “Impaired, disheveled, impulsive, combative, threatening, depersonalization, derealization, acute psychosis.”
Held in four-point restraints, I was committed to a mental crisis facility. Days after my release, law enforcement came again when I myself called 911 twelve times repeatedly. Police arrived to find me locked in the house, razor in hand, screaming to kill myself while begging police to do it for me.
I was forced into total appendage restraint position. Again, I was committed to a mental crisis facility for suicidal ideation. My words on an antidepressant, “I will sacrifice my living breath and return to the sea of my Mother Earth, drown, car off bridge. Drugs? Death.”
“Prescription suicide” is simple: A delusion manifested to actualize an escape from madness. Optimum because induced insanity is so horrific that living as such is more petrifying than death itself — comparatively, a relief.
Make no medicinal mistake, SSRIs are hardcore, mind-altering legal drugs — overprescribed, addictive, and deadly.
Unlike illegal drugs, however, prescription high does not subside, rather it swells higher to toxic levels masking itself in diagnosis while deflecting culpability. To end it: withdrawal, suicide.
Victimized, I filed a lawsuit against a pharmaceutical manufacturer mass marketing such a treatment knowingly, criminally failing to warn doctors, patients and the FDA of lethal consequence and poor efficacy.
Offered a settlement and gag order, I am able to speak today because I rejected that proposal. My case continues onward. I stand before you the powers that be giving you my experience. Now alerted and informed, I trust the policies you produce will be epic. I appreciate your time. Thank you.
(Applause.)