Lawsuit filed against the VA after female West Point Cadet committed suicide

Family of former West Point cadet who died by suicide alleges death resulted from Portland VA Medical Center’s negligent health care

The Oregonian
By Maxine Bernstein
Jan 14, 2020

Before she got the medication from the VA hospital, Darneille never expressed thoughts of self-harm, according to the suit. She remained positive and had plans to become a pilot, her family said.

Emylee Therese Darneille, a 24-year-old Lewis and Clark College graduate, died by suicide on July 5, 2015, in Seville, Spain. Her mother has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center, alleging "medical negligence'' contributed to Darneille's death.

A 24-year-old woman who injured her ankle as a West Point Military Academy cadet ended her life due to medical negligence after she was treated at Portland’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center for chronic pain and associated anxiety, her family alleges in a federal lawsuit.

Emylee Darneille was discovered dead in Spain on July 5, 2015, two months after she was prescribed an anti-depressant called fluoxetine, a generic form of Prozac, at the medical center. She had seriously injured her ankle as a cadet in 2008 and over the next seven years developed a complex regional pain syndrome marked by prolonged severe pain. She underwent numerous surgeries and physical therapies.

Darneille quickly began experiencing suicidal symptoms and reported them to her doctors repeatedly, the suit alleges.

Darneille’s mother, Cherylee Bridges, contends that her daughter’s suffering and death resulted from “negligent health care” provided at the VA hospital. She’s seeking $5 million in compensation for the family’s grief, anguish and loss in a wrongful death suit filed against the U.S. government.

The suit alleges the medical center failed to manage Darneille’s medication, investigate the cause of her increased suicidal thoughts or give her appropriate care.
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Fitness Seeker? Want Prozac With That?

Pulled twice from exchanges, OxyElite Pro supplement now found to contain Prozac drug 
Stars and Stripes
By Travis J. Tritten
Published: March 2, 2015

WASHINGTON — A fitness supplement that was twice pulled from exchange store shelves, first following soldier deaths and then after an outbreak of liver disease, has now been found to contain the active ingredient in the prescription drug Prozac, the Food and Drug Administration announced Saturday.

OxyElite Pro Super Thermogenic is sold as a weight-loss supplement, but the FDA said it has discovered the product contains fluoxetine, a drug used in treating mental disorders such as depression, bulimia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Fluoxetine and other drugs in its class can have serious side effects such as suicidal thinking, seizures and abnormal bleeding, the FDA said in its warning. The agency said consumers should not buy or use OxyElite Pro.

The Marine Corps Exchange, the Navy Exchange and the Army and Air Force Exchange Service said Monday that they do not stock it.

The supplement was first pulled from military bases in 2011 after it and other supplements were found to contain the unregulated synthetic stimulant methylhexanamine, known as DMAA, which was suspected in the deaths of two soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas.
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Online Prozac sale leads to trial after suicide

Online Prozac sale leads to trial after suicide
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, December 29, 2008


(12-29) 17:50 PST SAN FRANCSICO -- In August 2005, John McKay, a 19-year-old Stanford student and former high school debate champion, committed suicide by rolling up the windows in a car at his mother's Menlo Park home and piping in exhaust fumes.

In the next few weeks, a Colorado doctor who had prescribed a generic form of Prozac for McKay after receiving his request over the Internet, without ever seeing or examining him, will go on trial in Redwood City on possibly precedent-setting charges of practicing medicine in California without a license.

A conviction of Dr. Christian Hageseth, 67, "would send a clear message to those individuals who are blindly writing prescriptions to patients they know nothing about," said the youth's father, David McKay, a former Stanford professor now living in Colorado. They would have to ask themselves, he said, "whether quick and easy money is worth the risk of a criminal conviction and permanent loss of their medical license."

Hageseth's lawyer, Carleton Briggs, sees the issue differently. The case may determine, he said, whether California can reach across state lines to prosecute practitioners of "telemedicine," an increasingly common source of health care.

"A lot of medication is prescribed over the Internet," Briggs said. "Can California regulate it in this fashion? ... No out-of-state telemedicine provider has ever been jailed for practicing medicine in California."

So far, though, courts have rejected Briggs' attempts to get the charge dismissed, including a civil suit claiming the prosecution is an unconstitutional attempt by California to regulate interstate commerce. A San Mateo County Superior Court judge threw the suit out Dec. 17, but Briggs said he'll raise the issue in an appeal if Hageseth is convicted.
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Nearly 40% of Army suicide victims in 2006 and 2007 were on Prozac or Zoloft

Nearly 40% of Army suicide victims in 2006 and 2007 took psychotropic drugs like Prozac and Zoloft.

The military’s invisible wounds
by David Isenberg August 4th, 2008

Yesterday I was a panelist on a television program talking about the rising number of suicides and suicide attempts in the American military.

Being a veteran myself, and having acted as a veteran’s advocate in my undergraduate days vets issues have always been of special interest to me. So let me summarize some of the facts that you may be unfamiliar with.

Currently, many veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from invisible wounds. As in previous wars, service members can leave a war zone, but the war often follows them in their minds.

Numbers are always iffy but according to a RAND study released in April, nearly one in five Iraq and Afghanistan veterans report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression. It estimated that 830,000 veterans - 300,000 of whom served in Iraq or Afghanistan - suffer from depression or PTSD symptoms.

Why might troops be medicating themselves? Well, consider that repeated deployments to the war zones also contribute to the onset of mental-health problems. Nearly 30% of troops on their third deployment suffer from serious mental-health problems, a top Army psychiatrist told Congress in March. The doctor, said that recent research has shown the current 12 months between combat tours “is insufficient time” for soldiers “to reset” and recover from the stress of a combat tour before heading back to war.
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Prozac Platoon America's Medicated Army

America's Medicated Army
Thursday, Jun. 05, 2008 By MARK THOMPSON

Seven months after Sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad's dangerous roads — acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them — he found himself growing increasingly despondent. "We'd been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me," LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own messes.

He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. "You don't always know who the bad guys are," he says. "When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor — things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would."

So LeJeune visited a military doctor in Iraq, who, after a quick session, diagnosed depression. The doctor sent him back to war armed with the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons," LeJeune says. "If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills."

While the headline-grabbing weapons in this war have been high-tech wonders, like unmanned drones that drop Hellfire missiles on the enemy below, troops like LeJeune are going into battle with a different kind of weapon, one so stealthy that few Americans even know of its deployment. For the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines.

Data contained in the Army's fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope. Escalating violence in Afghanistan and the more isolated mission have driven troops to rely more on medication there than in Iraq, military officials say.

But if the Army numbers reflect those of other services — the Army has by far the most troops deployed to the war zones — about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were on such medications last fall. The Army estimates that authorized drug use splits roughly fifty-fifty between troops taking antidepressants — largely the class of drugs that includes Prozac and Zoloft — and those taking prescription sleeping pills like Ambien.

Medication helps but it is not the answer. All psychiatric medications come with them a requirement the patient is monitored. Medication alone cannot and should not be expected to treat PTSD. If you go to the link of the video below, you will hear how talk therapy works best when addressing PTSD and how the brain manages to learn how to reprocess the events.

Ambien itself is a danger

U.S. Food and Drug Administration urged sleep drug manufacturers Wednesday to strengthen their package labeling to include warnings of sleep walking, "sleep driving" and other behaviors.

A class action lawsuit against Sanofi-Aventis, the maker of Ambien, was filed on March 6, 2006, by those claiming that they engaged in a bizarre variety of activities while asleep after taking the drug -- from binge eating to driving their cars while asleep.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=2952054&page=1

When it comes to fighting wars, though, troops have historically been barred from using such drugs in combat. And soldiers — who are younger and healthier on average than the general population — have been prescreened for mental illnesses before enlisting.

Here is just one more example of how any kind of non-sense of a preexisting personality disorder is not possible. Unless the tests given are flawed, there is no way a soldier can have a mental disorder and be enlisted in service and given a weapon.

Medication for a wound of the mind and a weapon is not a good idea. It is not only giving the soldier a means to end their suffering, it puts the rest of the platoon in danger.

The symptoms often continue back home, playing a key role in broken marriages, suicides and psychiatric breakdowns. The mental trauma has become so common that the Pentagon may expand the list of "qualifying wounds" for a Purple Heart — historically limited to those physically injured on the battlefield — to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on May 2 that it's "clearly something" that needs to be considered, and the Pentagon is weighing the change.

The Army says half of the suicides among the troops happen after a breakup. While some want to dismiss this percentage of suicides as "just another breakup" the soldier couldn't deal with, they do not look at the root cause of the breakup. Extended deployments and redeployments play a role in this however we do a disservice to the soldiers when we leave it at that. People do get depressed when they breakup with someone they love in normal life. Divorce is stressful. A serious relationship ending is stressful, however, we do not see anything near this rate in "normal" life. What we do see is that when PTSD is alive in a relationship, the relationship itself becomes stressful. (More on this below) What needs to be addressed is why there are so many divorces and breakups instead of just leaving it at that.

Which means that any drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours. If troops do not get sufficient time away from combat — both while in theater and during the "dwell time" at home before they go back to war — it's possible that antidepressants and sleeping aids will be used to stretch an already taut force even tighter. "This is what happens when you try to fight a long war with an army that wasn't designed for a long war," says Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan Administration.
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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1811858,00.html

While the Army can come out with all kinds of studies showing the harm being done to the soldiers with the extended deployments and redeployments, the DOD is not considering any of the studies. They just do it because they can. Imagine being at the end of your part of the deal with the DOD that tells your brain your time is over and you get to go back to civilian life in a manner of weeks only to discover that you have been "stop-loss" and extended with or without your agreement. This is not just a let down but an attack on the brain. It is not just a matter of sending them home to "rest" because they cannot when they know they will have to go back into Iraq and Afghanistan and the danger to their lives is not over but in a truce instead.


Many spouses are not able to cope with the stress of the redeployments and extended tours of duty. No matter how much support they receive from friends and families, it is nearly impossible to stay in the marriage when PTSD is added into the stress they have to endure. Give the fact that there are still too many military spouses unaware of what PTSD is, they lack the tools to cope with the emotional changes on the relationship.

In order to retain a trained force and save money, the price is being paid by the soldiers as well as their families. It is an outrageous ambivalence toward all of them when the quality of their lives falls so low in the concern of the command.

The PTSD part of this interview begins about 20 minutes into the program. Dennis Charney MD, Bruce McEwen Ph.D, and Joe LaDeoux Ph.D are interviewed by Charlie Rose.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2325225245580975678&q=+fear+brain&ei=RBlISPfAEYa4igLpgr3NDA

While medications work well, the combination of them, no therapy, no one checking on the patient, a well trained soldier with a weapon, it is a dangerous combination and must end.

Prozac plus rifle plus Iraq ended Spc. Travis Virgadamo's life

Army struggles with rising suicide
A soldier's tale illustrates the prevention battle inside the service as 2007 set a new high for troops taking their own lives

By Dahleen Glanton and Aamer Madhani Tribune correspondents
March 3, 2008

PAHRUMP, Nev. - All Spec. Travis Virgadamo ever wanted was to be a soldier.

But two years after his father signed papers for him to enlist at age 17, things went terribly wrong. Last August, three months after arriving in Iraq, he walked outside his barracks and killed himself with his rifle.

When the news crackled over the Bonecrusher Troop's radio, 1st Lt. Kyle Graham knew immediately that it was Virgadamo, the troubled soldier who had been on suicide watch since June, when he threatened to kill himself while on patrol.

"I feel like we all had some responsibility to make sure this didn't happen," Graham said shortly after the incident. "It's our responsibility to make sure we take care of our fellow soldiers."

Virgadamo, whose case has been cited on the Senate floor and in congressional hearings, is a symbol of a growing problem facing the military as soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars face repeated and extended deployments.

Last year, 121 soldiers in the Army and active-duty National Guard and Reserves committed suicide, the largest number since the military began keeping records in 1980.

That is more than double the 52 suicides reported in 2001, the year the war in Afghanistan began, according to a recent Pentagon report. The report also cited 2,100 attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries last year -- six times the 350 reported in 2002, prior to the start of the Iraq war.

Efforts fail to stunt rise

The numbers are rising despite efforts by the military to beef up its mental-health programs. Faced with growing scrutiny over those programs in Congress and the news media, the Army has sought to improve services for soldiers, spending more than $1 million last year on additional counselors, training and screening, Army officials said.

"We are concerned," said Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army's chief psychiatrist. "We are doing a lot already to assist in suicide prevention, but clearly we need to do more."

It is not uncommon to see an increase in suicides during war, said Coleen Boyle, an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and co-author of a mortality study on Vietnam veterans.

The current suicides, one-quarter of which occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, are due primarily to strained personal relationships exacerbated by repeated deployments that last up to 15 months, Ritchie said. That, coupled with the ready availability of firearms, often can become a deadly combination.

Ritchie said there is no indication that the stress of combat plays a major role in the suicides. But 19-year-old Virgadamo, his relatives said, was distressed over what he had seen in Iraq.

There were signs that he was having trouble long before he deployed. According to his grandmother, Katie O'Brien, Virgadamo had been sent to an anger-management program while in boot camp. She said he also was placed on suicide watch at the Army's Ft. Stewart in Georgia and prescribed the antidepressant Prozac shortly before he deployed. Last June, officials in Iraq placed him on suicide watch again.

Informed of Virgadamo's death, "I asked, 'How many others lost their life with him?'" said O'Brien, 65. "They stood there for a minute and took a deep breath and said, 'No others. It was self-inflicted.' I went ballistic, and I screamed, 'No, no no!'"
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Virgadamo was so depressed he needed Prozac but they sent him anyway. He lasted three months when he used the rifle he had been handed to end his own pain by taking his own life. What's wrong with sending them into combat on medication? Ask his family. Ask the families of all the others who were given medication and a rifle what's wrong with it. While Congress felt the need to make sure if anyone is diagnosed with mental illness they should not have a gun permit, they see nothing wrong with putting soldiers with mental illness into a combat zone.

Suicide Data Regarding Prozac Buried

Blast From the Past: Suicide Data Regarding Prozac Buried
This post will document plainly how Lilly and/or the National Institute of Mental Health and/or key opinion leader(s) made data on Prozac and suicide vanish. Poof! A study known as Study X065, published with Graham Emslie as the lead author, differs notably from the FDA report on the data from the same study. In the published paper, there is no mention of suicidal ideation whatsoever. None. However, according to the FDA report...
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