Selling Sickness - An ill for every pill

[Lilly]

Thanks for the remind. Looking forward to it.

Lilly

[scotty]

Thanks for the live TV info! Very interesting and something I think I will do. The picture is wonderful for the special. I'm going to send a copy of it to Tom Woodward. That's him and his wife on the left side.

[Ariella]

Oh cool! You met Tom? I have no idea who those people are, except for David.

[scotty]

Tom and his neighbor (a neuroscientist who put Tom onto the possibility of Zoloft being a factor in Julies suicide) have been at everything I've gone to. Congressman Fergusons office, the FDA hearing and they both have attended both of the congressional hearings. He is a wonderful dedicated man and his neighbor(why can't I remember his name??) is extremely intelligent. They had Julies blood tested post mortem and found she lacked the enzyme to metabolize Zoloft. Just two wonderful human beings!!

[elisa]

Yesterday, I gave my lady doc the time and channel to watch the program tonite. I hope she watches, will ask her next week.

Whoops, 1/2 hour left before program starts. Got to eat dinner first.

[Ariella]

Well, it aired. My mother tells me that I was on there 3 times, and that I made sense. She said it was a really good show and wishes that anybody ever taking Paxil, should watch it first. LOL! Gotta love a supportive mom.

She then asked why I didn't sue GSK. I said, "look at what good came of me channeling that angst to serving other people?". I then added, "if I sued, I would have been playing the victim, admitting that they could actually make my life miserable enough for me to seek some kind of revenge. My slogan is freedom is in you. What freedom is there if you go around suing companies, which says you're a victim and not free". Thirdly I said, "look at me? I'M FINE. There's nothing for me to sue about. I have found ways to accept and even benefit from whatever damage was caused by Paxil, if any".

I've got too much optimistic spin put on my whole life, to make suing some company even remotely logical.

[Lilly]

Darcy,

The program does not start for 2 1/2 hours yet, so I have not seen it yet, but part of my big changes lately was I pulled out of my lawsuit. I realize now, that a lot of what I thought was protracted stuff , was not, recently. And that the lawsuit was dragging me back.

I figured out what was going on with me, did lots of work on it, got it to stop and when it did, all my depression and anxiety went away. My cognitive skills came back and now I just want to concentrate on life.

I had to stop blaming the drug, for this recent stuff at least and take responsibility. I believe coming back here helped me down that road too.

And I'm free now and life is wonderful!

[elisa]

The program was really good! Typical David Suzuki style.

Darcy - I didn't see you in the documentary.

It felt to me though when it was coming to an end that it wasn't quite finished yet. Time went by too fast. Or is it that we can never get enough of watching the truth come out?

[rdjanis]

I missed it!!!! Got home about 8:30, (been spending 12 hours a day with my mom in hospital), sad down to watch the show because I taped it, and got some presidential special instead????

I am sooo discouraged, was looking forward to seeing it, I will try again for Oct 3.

I look forward to seeing it Darcy, I am sure you were great!

[Lilly]

I thought it was a great show, very real and informative and exactly what I want to get out to the public. I would really like to see this kind of stuff in the U.S. too.

Darcy, you did great!
Lilly

[Ariella]

Originally Posted by elisa

Darcy - I didn't see you in the documentary.

I was the guy in the orange polar fleece turtleneck.

[elisa]

merde - I never saw an orange fleece turtleneck cause I was looking at the faces to see if I could pick you out.

Next airing on October 3rd at 3:00 pm, I'll watch the program again with a magnifying glass. Thanks for the tip on the orange turtleneck Darcy

[pippyone]

I watched and taped it. Not sure if my tape turned out but sure it will have. By the way saw you Darcy...thought it was more red/orange turtle neck, the same as you are wearing in a pic somewhere on this site. It was very emotional where the folks who had lost loved ones to suicide. That's how I felt after only 4 20mg pills, thank goodness I found PP and discontinued taking the rotten stuff.

It was a well put together and informative programme. I want to show this to everyone who is ever thinking of going on AD's or whose doc is suggesting they should ever take AD's.

[rdjanis]

Finally saw the show, not much of a tv person, and was taping wrong channel. Got home about ten minutes after show aired, realized wrong station again, and caught the rest of the show.

It was very good, as to be expected. Informative, and would certainly make a person think twice before taking SSRI's. My heart broke listening to the families who lost their kids to these drugs, but, also covered how it effected adults as well. Very well put together.

We caught you just as we found the station, Skye thought that you didn't get very much coverage, said Dr. Healy should have had less time, and more for Darcy, kids.... lol

[elisa]

Yeah - I saw the repeat today and noticed many more details which I missed during the first airing.

That we didn't see Darcy on this program as much as we would have liked, could have been because of time constraints. So much was covered.

[Ariella]

I've got a few photos to share with you, and a bit more story on my participation.

In early January, Pat Fiske from Paradigm Pictures wrote me asking if I knew anybody in Ottawa who was on Paxil. I wrote a message post and news item inviting people here to contact me if they were in Ottawa and on Paxil. We didn't get any replies, so I volunteered to share my depth of experience and knowledge on it. They agreed.

I got the go ahead to drive to Ottawa from Sudbury just days before the interview date.

The drive there was difficult. There was blizzard after blizzard, and we frequently had to dodge oncoming cars that had slid into the opposing traffic lane. It wasn't a new driving experience for me, being a seasoned Canadian and all, and we got there safely in 6 hours. Once we got there, we had some more driving trouble.

To plan the trip to the hotel where we were going to stay, we plotted a route with Yahoo maps. Well, we followed the directions very carefully and near the end, the instructions said to turn right on a street called Albert I think. That right hand turn was a turn going in the wrong direction on a one way street. There wasn't any flowing traffic when I made that turn, so I quickly turned around and had to figure out a new way to get to the hotel. All one way streets were in the wrong direction! We ended up crossing half of downtown Ottawa, making big circles of 4 or more blocks, trying to find the magic one-way that would get us there.

Finally we found one. Only...the parking lot was in behind the hotel, on a different one way street that we couldn't get to without doing another big city loop. *sigh* So I did the loop and found the parking garage I thought was the one for the hotel since it was generally in behind it.

Wrong parking garage. The right parking ramp was right next to this one. The wrong one when underground, and the right one went up a few stories. So, I tried to back up going the opposite direction on the one way street, but there were cars queued up behind me, so I had to do the city loop...AGAIN. This time around, I got the right turn off unto the elevating ramp, and got to the right parking lot.

At the desk we gave our names and the room had been reserved as expected. We went to the high floor it was one and got to the room and opened it. Oh wow. It was a huge room with living room, conference table, the works. The bathroom had two sinks and the bedroom with its own door and everything had two queens. Nice! It was so beautiful, Andrea became worried that it was a scam. LOL! It wasn't of course. What had happened is that the hotel was observing a down time, and they just upgraded the rooms for everyone. They weren't originally supposed to be so plush. Thank you hotel!

It was about 5pm and we didn't know what to do next. We knew we had to wait until Cathy, the director called us, but we were also waiting to hear from an old highschool pal of mine who invited us over for dinner. So we sat with our 'wonder how pp.org is doing, wonder if this is real or a scam' thoughts for a while. Eventually Cathy called and invited us out for drinks with Dr. David Healy.

GASP! What? I can actually meet him? She was laughing at me, and I was getting that 'gonna meet my hero' type feeling. Not that Mr. Healy is my hero in any way, but the man has done some incredible research which I respet highly. Anyway, I was ecstatic and felt like I had won the lottery hehe. I told them I'd have to check with my friends and their dinner plans first, and that I'd call her back. I got a hold of my friends and was tempted to ask if they could just come and join us with the crew and Dr., but Andi calmed down my star-struckedness and we declined the offer favoring plans with our friends. What we did do is that when my buddy came to pick us up, we went to the lounge of the much fancier hotel where Healy was staying and we hooked up with Cathy and crew to chit chat a little, and have at least one drink. I then left my copy of "Let them eat Prozac" with Cathy to get David to sign.

Our dinner with friends was tons of fun. I'm so glad I hung out with them.

Once back at the hotel much later, I had the huge job of trying to relax and get to sleep: interview time was 8am. I had to use several relaxation techniques to get to sleep hehe. I was so pumped!

The next morning, I did the getting ready thing, and joined Cathy and crew in their hotel room for the interview. These guys were funny. I love Australian accents, but to have heard that while jokes are intentionally being made, broke my funny bone many times over heh. They taped a mic under my sweater (the tape wouldn't stick, they had to readjust it over and over), and Cathy started talking about things and asking questions. I had so much passion in me for the answers I wanted to give that I had a hard time just trying to relax and make complete sentences. I mean, 8 years of anxiety experience with half of that Paxil related, can make a person have tons to say! Good thing about filming is that you can do things over and over.

And over and over we did do, for a few reasons. One was that a tape had run out and parts of the interview didn't get captured. So we had to do that all over. To a stutterer, that's the most painful thing because if you got it fluent and perfect the first time, it's like a golden opportunity lost, because you can never make it sound as good as it did the first time hehe. So I had to work a little harder on take 2. Some of my delivery really impressed Cathy. At some points she was glowing with enthusiasm and she kept saying, "oh god that's good, say that again, you're so passionate, I love it". I guessed that she was focused more on the oomph a passionate interivew can give to a documentary trying to present its side of things, but as we talked more and more off camera, I discovered that it was genuine. She had experienced anxiety herself and was familiar with that delicious experience of getting through it yourself, and benefitting so much from that opportunity afterwards.

Once the rushes were collected, they took some photos of me sitting and typing at my computer. They collected that in case I became part of the jacket of the cassette/DVD. After that was all done, Andrea took some photos for keepsakes, and off to breakfast we went. We had another great discussion about the ebbs and flows of money in the mental health industry, and I continued to talk about you guys, how I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by the most brilliant stars I had ever seen, and that I hoped to remain a useful tool to building awareness.

We parted then, said goodbyes and all that fun stuff. Andi and I had packed up the car and were ready to go when the crew's van drove up the driveway and started loading gear. I helped them load up some crates and gave final handshakes.

The drive home was quick and uneventful. The roads were clear and skies blue. Perfect!

A few months later, Pat writes me frantic that they lost their still shots of me at the computer. Not a problem I said. I called up my photographer cousin and she got me into the studio to take some white background stills of me standing in various poses, and some of me sitting on a couch wearing the same clothes (intentionally for consistency) and working on a laptop they had on hand. We sent these photos on a CD to the studio to help them rebuild their stock photography collection. I don't know if any of the photos taken will be used in the jacket of the documentary yet.

A few months after that, Pat wrote me to ask if I had any graphics about the serotonergic process for drugs like Paxil. I gave her whatever I had. They weren't very high quality images, but I hope they helped. It was very difficult for me to help them at that time. I was living with my inlaws with a brutally slow internet connection, and very judgmental expectations that I ignore paxilprogress and pick their garden, mow their lawn, build a flowerbed retaining wall, transplant trees and so on. I felt bad that I couldn't help the studio any more than I did.

Then several months of silence go by, and I just sent probe emails every now and then,"are we there yet?" hehe. Pat had a hard time getting press release information from CBC, so she had to send me the SBS stuff and could tell me little more than that the documentary would be 10 minutes shorter in its Canadian broadcast.

And that's the journey! Pat recently wrote me to ask what I thought of the documentary. I haven't seen it yet, and told her so. I'm waiting for my family to send me a recording of it. Then I have to find a VCR to play it on. I don't have one available right now LOL! If only the world could just go fully DVD, I'd be happy.

Below are a few pictures of the time we spent together in Ottawa. Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.

[rdjanis]

Thanks for sharing Darcy!

[elisa]

That's an experience that one would never forget, isn't it Darcy?

Did you ever get a chance to skate on the Rideau canal? Ottawa is a delightful city in the summer full with hundreds of thousands of tulips.

Thank you for sharing it with us all.

[Ariella]

I didn't get to skate, but have seen it on tv and post cards plenty of times. I'm not a good ice skater, my ankles are too weak for it. Roller skates on the other hand...zooom!

[CloneX]

Will it be available online ?

[genevieve]

I just listen to the david suzuki documentary. and when I say LISTEN I mean LISTEN because I taped it but CBC was really messy with the antennas and I had not fixed them before I tape. So I did not saw anything but I heard it!!
It was good. I am just happy that more and more people are getting the truth about these drugs.