Thomas Ban, David Healy and Edward Shorter: The History Committee of CINP: Past, Present and Future
PREAMBLE
The History Committee of CINP: Past, Present and Future by Thomas Ban, David Healy and Edward Shorter was first published in the “Spring 1999” issue of the CINP Newsletter. It reviews the story of the Committee from the time it was established in 1986 to 1998 and the documentation of the history of CINP and neuropsychopharmacology from the mid-1950s to the late 1990s, in the following publications: Thirty Years of CINP – A Brief History of the Collegium Internationale Neuro-Psychopharmacologium (Ban and Hippius, 1988), Psychopharmacology in Perspective (Ban and Hippius, 1992), Towards CINP – From the Paris Colloquium Through the Milan Symposium (Ban and Hippius, 1994) and A History of the CINP (Ban and Ray, 1996) that includes Early Year-From the Inaugural Meeting to the Third Congress in Munich (Ban, Ray and Hippius, 1996) and The Rise of Psychopharmacology and the Story of CINP (Ban, Healy and Shorter, 1998). Subsequently, the documentation of the history of the field and CINP continued until 2006 with the publication of The Triumph of Psychopharmacology and the Story of CINP (Ban, Healy and Shorter, 2000), From Psychopharmacology to Neuropsychopharmacology in the 1980s and The Story of CINP As Told in Autobiography (Ban, Healy and Shorter, 2002), Reflections on Twentieth–Century Psychopharmacology (Ban, Healy and Shorter, 2004) and The Neurotransmitter Era in Neuropsychopharmacology (Ban and Ucha Udabe, 2006).
Thomas A. Ban
Barry Blackwell: The Baby and The Bath Water
Leonardo Tondo’s reply to Bruno Mueller-Oerlinghausen’s comment on Tondo’s comment on Edward Shorter’s comment
Following Bruno Müller-Oerlinghausen’s comment I would like to report that in all my patients with bipolar and major depressive disorders (n=3284) over a period of 16.9 years I found that the rate of suicidal ideation was 37.5%, of suicidal attempt of any kind was 22.8% and of suicide was 2.79% Many of these 3284 patients were suicidal at the time of admission but only a very few developed suicidal ideation during treatments. Most of the patients who did were on antidepressants,
I don’t think it is the case that I am convinced a prior that there is no association between antidepressants treatment and suicide, as Mueller-Oerlinghausen suggests. I have not done as yet the necessary analyses on my data to present my findings but can already say that we are dealing with a minuscule percentage of cases in which there was an association between suicide and antidepressant treatment. I wonder whether it would be cost effective to remove antidepressants from our armamentarium of treatment because of their potential to increase suicidal risk.
With consideration of the possibility that antidepressants may play a role in the development of suicidal ideation or in the passage from it toward an act, in my practice a patient who in any way represents suicidal risk on the basis of biological, genetic or clinical considerations would not receive any antidepressant, not even accompanied by other medications, such as benzodiazepines to alleviate the risk as suggested, in 2018 by Stübner, Grohman, Greil and their associates on the basis of findings in their multicenter drug surveillance project. (Reference if already published or no reference is fine). Whether it is the result of this caution, I don’t know, but I have recorded only one suicide under my care in the last 20 years and the patient was taking lithium and no antidepressants.
Reference:
Stübner S, Grohmann R, Greil W, Zhang X, Müller-Oerlinghausen B, Bleich S, Rüther E, Möller HJ, Engel R, Falkai P, Toto S, Kasper S, NeyaziA.Suicidal Ideation and Suicidal Behavior as Rare Adverse Events of Antidepressant Medication: Current Report from the AMSP Multicenter Drug Safety Surveillance Project.Int J Neuropsychopharmacol. 2018; 21: 814 -21.
December 6, 2018