Informed Consent or Blind Trust? | Kim Witczak

That's tough, and I'm sorry you guys went through that.

For him to be prescribed an antidepressant for insomnia, I know that off-label prescriptions is a somewhat common thing, Do you know if that's common for insomnia where doctors would say, oh, maybe Zoloft would work for this?

Well, it is true.

At the time, I knew nothing about off-label.

I mean, I'm not sure that Woody did either because we did what most people do, which is blindly trust, right? We trust that the medicine that the doctor is going to give you is going to help.

And so I had no idea that it was off label and not used for insomnia.

But what I have learned since is off label, once a drug's on the market, a doctor can prescribe it any way they want to give a medication.

And if there are, and I'm sure, you know, when they said take the edge off, I'm sure, you know, the companies come in there, they promote it to doctors, like, anxiety and insomnia.

I'm sure that that gets put in into the whole mix.

But once I started to really dive into antidepressants, I was shocked at how many people got it for things that it was never even approved for, like breakups.

I mean, of course they would say it was a sadness, but grief.

So I think we see a lot of off-label prescribing done in the mental health with these psychiatric drugs.

So it sounds like you guys didn't suspect anything at the time when things started to go off.

He was like profusely sweating and feeling uncomfortable describing disembodiment.

It sounds like because of that blind faith that you described, the idea that the drug may have been causing this didn't even come up.

No, that's the whole thing.

It didn't even, that was not even a question.

Again, I think this idea that we blindly trust our doctors to give us medication that's going to help us, right? And then they did tell them, I mean, if you look at back then, night sweats, Which, by the way, one of the side effects of these antidepressants is not being able to sleep.

So the whole idea that he even got it and was still having trouble sleeping.

But the night sweats, diarrhea are common ones that they'll talk about.

I don't think that and I think that's a common with a lot of different medications.

But I think the one that wasn't.

Anything that we had ever known about was this thing, the head outside the body, which was this constant movement, which is what we subsequently learned is called akathisia, which is this deep, extremely painful, constant movement, agitation.

You want to scratch it out of your body, et cetera.

And that was the side effect that Woody was experiencing.