Seroxat Panorama = BBC Propaganda - what real people say about distortion of the truth

Right now, BBC1 and Panorama are running an opinion piece against


Paroxetine ('Seroxat' 'Paxil'). It's very destructive stuff:

GlaxoSmithKline publicity material voiced-over in sombre tones about
the mood changes in the first few weeks of use... as I write, there's
tear-jerking propaganda footage about some young man (North-of-England
scenes, books on the bedroom shelf, sad tones describing his ambition
to be a musician) all leading up to the dreadful evil of
antidepressants and the tragedy of a young life lost.

https://groups.google.com/group/uk.politics.misc/browse_thread/thread/56648ce8d1c32d22/96b278dc9e886023?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=Shelley+Jofre

Doubtless we'll see some pro-forma statement by GSK - lit to make them
look like the villains the viewers now know them to be - bracketed by
interviews with heroic defenders of the public against the evils of

Big Business.


Paroxetine's overprescribed. Some of that's due to GSK promoting the
drug for profit.



It's an SSRI - that means it'll take weeks to work, and it'll have
horrible side effects. Among other problems, the patient will be
emotionally vulnerable. Cruelly, the initial lifting of depression may
give them sufficient deciosion-making ability and resolve to kill
themselves.


Sometimes the side effects are too severe to continue.


It's beneficial, but rarely effects a complete 'cure' on its own:
advanced countries prescribe antidepressants alongside therapy. Many
GP's in England don't.


Sometimes it doesn't work at all, no matter what you do.


Some people are cured of depression, or helped through an episode of
it, with the help of Paroxetine. A disease serious enough to justify
using a drug with terrible side effects - far worse than any
Paroxtine's - because people die with this disease. Others wish they
could. Many lose decades of a life to the disease and never have the
things that smug propagandists with TV production budgets take for
granted.


Some of the truth will make it into the programme. Some of it won't.
Some things that might, in a court of law, be defensible as 'true'
will be presented so as to lie by distorting public perceptions.


Maybe there was a time when TV documentaries were about the
presentation of fact: that time is now gone. Journalism is about
stories, and about presenting a case - one particular point of view -
and occasionally some words of disagreement to give 'balance'. Facts

and footage are accessories to the story and serve to reinforce the
message to the viewer.



If Paxil - or antidepressants in general - becomes harder to obtain,
some of us will die. Remember that, when you encounter people whose
perception of the truth has been distorted by the BBC tonight. One of
them might be your GP. Another might be a lay member of the local NHS
trust. Others will be people you thought you trusted with the
knowledge that you were on a medication: now they know, because they
heard it on the BBC, that you are pill-popping to feed an imaginary
illness, grasping at the excuse of an invented condition and the false
salvation invented by Glaxo's advertising copywriters.


Lotus