Dr. Clare Gerada ~ "Stop it"
Antidepressants work, they are not placebo, they are not addictive. Emphatic from @ClareGerada on #r4today. Dangerous to suggest otherwise.— louis appleby (@ProfLAppleby) March 10, 2018
What followed were some jaw-dropping tweets from, Clare Gerada, the person Appleby was promoting.
Who is Clare Gerada?
Clare Gerada is one-half of a psych drug promotion pair. She's married to Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist and professor of psychological medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Gerada was the chairperson of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners from 2010 to 2013. She is also a partner in the Hurley Group which runs a number of GP practices and walk-in centers across London. She was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2000 Birthday Honours "for service to medicine and to drug misusers"
Nice.
Now let's take a look at Clare's attempts to stifle conversation about the side effects surrounding 'antidepressants'.
First up to tweet opposition to her views was Australian Army Major Stuart McCarthy. He joined the Australian Army in 1988 and in 1999 deployed to Bougainville, Papua New Guinea where he served as commander of a multi-national patrol in the Peace Monitoring Group.
Towards the end of McCarthy’s Bougainville deployment, he became a subject in an unethical drug trial for the antimalarial drug tafenoquine. In 2001, he spent six months as the deputy force engineer in the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea. While there he was prescribed mefloquine and experienced a variety of adverse drug effects including depression.
Despite recurrent major depression and other debilitating neurological symptoms that he now realises are the result of the undiagnosed neurotoxic brain injury he sustained in 2001, McCarthy served in the Army for 16 additional years.
His full bio is at the foot of this blog post.
McCarthy's April 16th tweet to Gerada asked her three questions. The resulting twitter exchange was priceless despite that Gerada's "responses" were dreadfully predictable.
Click on Twitter images to enlarge.
Undeterred, Major McCarthy pressed Gerada for some answers. Once again, she tried to silence the respected veteran:
I then tweeted Gerada a question asking if she would concede that, for some, they (drugs labeled antidepressants) could be dangerous? Her reply, if you could call it such, was quite puzzling:
So, now she was using her same line on me, Gerada ordered me to "stop it."
Minutes later she made a claim that these drugs save lives and told me to read the 500 clinical trials that prove it. Ahem, I hated to break the following to her:
Gerada could not answer my question because the fact is there have been no clinical trials for drugs labeled antidepressants that supported the claim Gerada made. There are no clinical trials that have found any evidence that taking these drugs saves lives. If there were, pharmaceutical companies would have already printed this bold proclamation on their product packaging. Pharma would never let such a sales and promotional opportunity slip by.
After running face first into a brick wall, Gerada's next tweet was equally lame but more bizarre:
I've previously written about how critics of patient safety advocates throw out the PR stigma line. You can read all about it here.
I then pointed out Gerada's strawman arguments and her shady goal to suppress and shame those harmed by drugs labeled antidepressants. Fiona French, who has been seriously damaged by benzo prescribing, joined the twitter conversation. What is astounding here is the way Gerada diagnoses French.
The conversation seemed to end there, but the following morning Gerada tweeted something even more delusional.
My answer was short and sweet. "Stop it", I said.
Coming late to the twitter round was Kristina Gehrki. Her tweets appeared to have ended Gerada's nonsense. Perhaps Gerada was too busy the last days with her googling "Who is Florence Nightingale?"
**STOP PRESS**
Remarkably, just minutes ago, Gerada felt the need to chip in again. This time, responding to a parent whose son died in an 'antidepressant' induced death. Telling a parent whose child died as a result of a prescription that they are 'wrong' is an affront to public health. Her reply also shows an appalling lack of human compassion.
Here's the tweet.
Gerada has now blocked me on Twitter.
Bob Fiddaman
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