Seroxat Panorama 4.7 million prescriptions but the BBC only received 1374 emails

An estimated 4.4m people recently watched “Secrets of Seroxat” (Panorama, BBC-TV), a 50-minute

programme about paroxetine, an SSRI antidepressant for which UK general practitioners wrote an estimated
4.7m prescriptions in 2001. The programme attracted a record response, including some 65,000
telephone calls, 124,000 website hits, and 1,374 emails.We systematically analysed the contents of these
emails, and in this paper consider how they might help clinicians and their patients, as well as providing
an indispensable element in pharmacovigilance and post-marketing drug surveillance.
Following publication of an extensive review [1], one of us (CM) has also managed a website
(ADWEB) on which user problems relating to paroxetine and other SSRI antidepressants have been
widely discussed, both editorially and in unmoderated ‘discussion boards’. For comparison we also examined 862 emails posted to this website before the Panorama broadcast (13 October 2002). These
emails came from one major ‘thread’ of an interactive (user to user) discussion on ADWEB, about problems
of paroxetine withdrawal [2].
Together with MIND (National Association of Mental Health), Panorama later developed a questionnaire
that was sent to those who had emailed the programme (excluding reports of suicide, which were
followed up individually). Replies to this questionnaire were analysed separately; the results were reported

to the Medicines Control Agency (MCA).
Most of this evidence has been posted on the Internet, inviting further examination and critical analysis
[3]. Based partly on this feedback, a follow-up Panorama programme is provisionally scheduled for
May 2003.