Next on the agenda is Millie, here she is.
Millie, as I'm sure you're all aware, is the founder of April,
and she's worked for many years tirelessly to bring adverse drug reactions,
particularly psychiatric address drug reactions into the public eye.
And Millie's going to talk to us today about the patient's experiences as a force for change.
Thank you, thank you very much Joanna.
Well, I know how most of you will be feeling, many of you are bereaved like I am,
and I think that Claire was very brave, and thank you very much for speaking about your experience, because...
APPLAUSE
If there's one thing I want to do, I wanted to do when I founded April,
it was to draw attention to the psychiatric side effects of non-psychiatric drugs and anesthetics,
because my own daughter Karen became paranoid one week after having her wisdom teeth removed.
And I found she'd been given flagell also, metronidosol.
I was always suspicious of that and the corticosteroids.
I don't think it's just the anesthetics, it's the painkillers and other drugs that are used at the same time.
And we do need research into this and I really want to thank Dr Anita Holdcroft, because she has been amazing.
When I first heard Anita on Radio 4 in one man's medicine, the programme was,
when she was talking about genetics and I contacted her,
the field that Anita was in wasn't so much psychiatric side effects or long-term effects of anesthetics,
but as you can see from her talk and if you weren't here, I will be able to send you the copies of the slides.
She has found quite a few links to the drugs used.
I just want to give you a few experiences that I've been told of recently.
A gentleman had a hip operation, he came round from the anesthetic, he thought people were trying to kill him.
He threw a television through the hospital window, he stabbed himself with a needle,
he managed to knock his daughter or hit her, he was raging through the hospital.
The really serious thing, that was the serious thing, but even more serious, was that the consultant, the nurses wrote on the notes,
that when the consultant was contacted, he had said, lock him up in a room and let him get on with it.
And I think one of the main things we must try and do is get medical education to include how a doctor or a consultant or a nurse
should deal with a sudden psychiatric adverse effect.
And as Anita said to me as well, the families go through so much, they think they've lost their relative.
This family said, when they found my website, they were so relieved because they realised this could be a transient adverse reaction,
whereas at first they thought it was forever, they lost their father.
He's okay now, he did end up with kidney failure, which could have been partly what was happening.
And we did have another case of, I just want to talk about the medical profession,
not recognising the adverse psychiatric effects and not knowing what to do.
A young girl contacted me who had taken the drug Dianet,
which I've done a lot of work on trying to get the labelling changed
because so many people suffer from depression when they take Dianet.
This girl had cut her wrist so deeply when she tried to kill herself last time
and she'd done this several times over several years that she still has problems with her carpal tunnel.
And she said then, she read the article that was in the Guardian about the campaign I had about Dianet.
She came off the drug and she said, I haven't had a suicidal thought since.
So for all that time, no doctor had ever said to her, come off Dianet.
I was talking to Dr Dwyer down here and he was saying how I didn't realise it was ever licensed for contraception.
It has the highest risk of deep vein thrombosis of any of the so-called pills.
It's really only licensed for acne.
And I have got hundreds of emails from girls suffering depression on this drug.
So how can I use all this experience that comes to me?
I know it's not done in a clinically controlled, randomised trial or whatever you call it,
but it's people's own experience.
So I took it up with the MHRA, they did listen in the end, they did do some sort of inquiry
and they have changed the labelling.
But it took a long time, it took 10 years.
And I think that's too long.
Now I phoned up Sarah Walk, who's now Sarah Morgan at the MHRA,
head of one of the pharmacovigilant sections, I think the signalling section.
And she said to me, I want to speak to Professor David Healy about adding,
about withdrawal to the SSR information in the BNF.
So they are listening, I don't know why she told me that.
I did suggest she should email Dr Healy or Professor Healy.
But I do want to ask the BNF and I want everyone to support me in this,
the professionals please as well.
I think the BNF do have a list of drugs that can affect the liver and the kidneys.
I do think there should be a list of drugs that cause psychiatric side effects.
I knew this several years ago because a young man came back from abroad,
he'd been water surfing, he'd taken an anti-malarial drug.
I don't believe it was alarium, I think it was chloroquine,
the very average one that people take.
He was very disturbed when he came back, he went into a psychiatric unit.
I read this in the newspapers and sadly he hung himself in the grounds of this unit.
And I rang the unit and I spoke to a nurse and I said,
what would have helped you when this boy came in?
He said if I had a dictionary of drugs that cause psychiatric side effects,
particularly risk of suicide.
So what we need to do is actually get the message out.
I think this conference helps and I want you all to please make sure that you spread the word
and contact your local PCTs, contact the MHRA, the General Medical Council,
whoever, Department of Health, anybody you know,
and do ask them to please sign post which drugs may cause these problems
and also Dr Halliday, Simon Maxwell, all the people who are concerned about medical education.
We need much more time.
John Meddland, whose parents are here today, who was a medical student,
told his father shortly before he killed himself,
whose father didn't know this was going to happen.
He was on the drug arctitane, he told his father,
we only had two hours on adverse drug reactions during five years of medical education.
That's not enough. Thank you very much.
