(NaturalNews) The damaging effects of America's most popular class of pharmaceutical drugs, antidepressants, are highlighted in a new study out of Harvard University. Researchers there found that suicides, particularly among teens, have risen dramatically in recent years, despite U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirements that antidepressants carry the strictest "black box" warnings about the potential for deadly side effects.

The study found that, since the FDA black box warnings were applied back in 2003 and 2004, the number of attempted suicides among adolescents has risen by nearly 22 percent. Among those between the ages of 18 and 29, attempted suicides rose a shocking 33.7 percent, a figure that the mainstream media is now blaming on a corresponding 31 percent decrease in antidepressant use during the same time.

Published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the Harvard study looked at insurance claims data from 11 different companies, analyzing the number of drug poisonings that may have been associated with suicide attempts. Based on this data, Christine Lu, an instructor at Harvard's Pilgrim Health Care Institute and lead author of the study, determined that suicide rates jumped among young people who had been taking antidepressants.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some 11 percent of Americans over the age of 12 were taking antidepressants between 2005 and 2008, just a few years after the FDA issued warnings that antidepressant use among children, adolescents and adults could lead to suicidal thinking and behavior. Now, it is clear that this is precisely the case, especially when individuals suddenly stop taking the deadly drugs.

Antidepressants are deadly and should be avoided

Not surprisingly, the findings of this study are being perverted to suggest that the FDA warnings themselves, rather than antidepressant drugs, are responsible for the increase in suicides. But it is clear both from the warnings as they are written and the drugs as they are known to function in the brain that antidepressant drugs are dangerous and cause many who use them to suffer brain abnormalities that could lead to suicide and potentially even homicide.

"It's a stretch to say that the people that are committing suicide or the increase in suicide attempts has to do with the prescription of antidepressants," stated Marc Stone, a senior medical reviewer at the FDA, to Bloomberg in defense of the warnings. "There's absolutely nothing in the study to say that these are the people who would have been prescribed the antidepressants if it weren't for the warnings."

Stone has adamantly denied suggestions made by the media and even the study's authors that the FDA is somehow responsible for this increase in suicides, simply because it issued appropriate warnings to the public about their dangers. Antidepressants are known to induce chemical changes in the brain that oftentimes lead to pronounced increases in violent thoughts and behaviors. Such changes may include genetic mutations in the CYP450 gene family that result in major metabolic disturbances.

"SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] are one of the most addictive drugs known" to man, stated one Bloomberg commenter. "[They] are several times more addictive than nicotine, heroin, cocaine, or even meth. This is an ideal situation for pharmaceutical companies, but not for patients."

Sources for this article include:

http://www.fiercepharma.com

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://www.bloomberg.com

http://www.fda.gov

http://science.naturalnews.com