Your Psych Meds Can Kill You, Large-Scale Study Shows

Lisa Franchi April 17, 2014

In Britain and US, psychiatric drugs make up a bigger proportion of all prescriptions costs. Statistics from a number of countries have shown that many classes of drugs are being prescribed more and more, including antidepressants, antipsychotics and stimulants. But are these drugs safe? Unfortunately, they are not. In fact, they can even kill you – a new study suggests.

Using data from the prescription records of primary care doctors, the study compared 34,727 patients prescribed with anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) or hypnotic (sleep) drugs to 69,418 people who were not prescribed with these drugs. Over 90 per cent of the prescribed drugs were benzodiazepines or Z-drugs like Xanax, Valium, Lunesta, Ambien and many more.

Over the average 7.6-year follow-up period, for every 100 people followed there were about 4 more deaths in the prescription drug group than in the control group. The results remained the same even when the researchers took into account other factors like sex, age at study entry, sleep disorders, anxiety disorders, other psychiatric disorders, medical morbidity, and prescriptions for non-study drugs.

They also found that the more prescription drugs a person took, the greater their chance of death increased.

Such findings were published in the British Medical Journal.

Drug dangers are real

The potential dangers of psychiatric drugs to physical and mental health, including anxiety, sleep, and depression have long been documented. Previous studies have shown that people prescribed these medicines have more than six times the risk of hospitalisation due to traffic accident in the two weeks after the prescription is first filled. In an article reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, even at modest doses, treatment with benzodiazepines appears to increase the risk of hip fracture. The use of these medications have also been linked to higher risks of seizure, birth defects, heart rate variability, suicide, and even cancer.

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100,000-Person Study Shows That Your Psych Meds Can Kill You