It was supposed to be a rare treat, a moment of indulgence away from her busy life as a mother of three young children.
But for Laura Turner, 45, a project manager from Morden, Surrey, the decision to have a facial would spiral into a nightmare that left her suicidal, then arrested and sectioned under the Mental Health Act – after a reaction to antidepressants she didn’t need.
‘It was a sliding doors moment,’ Laura reflects. ‘That one decision changed the course of my life forever.’
Her ordeal began in November 2021 when she visited a beauty clinic in Wimbledon, south-west London, where she was encouraged to try a galvanic facial treatment – a procedure using low-voltage currents.
Laura, who has a metal retainer – a thin metal wire bonded behind the teeth to hold them in place – was not warned of potential risks, but minutes into the treatment, she felt sharp pain shooting through her teeth and into the roof of her mouth. When she told the beautician, who looked horrified, the session was stopped straight away.
Laura later discovered that such facials aren’t recommended if you have a metal retainer. Two months later, still in ‘unbearable, relentless pain’ and unable to sleep, work or function (her parents had to help with the childcare), Laura saw her GP who referred her to a neurologist (who she saw privately).
The neurologist diagnosed damage to tiny nerve fibres in her teeth and prescribed nortriptyline, an antidepressant commonly used for nerve pain.
‘I wasn’t happy about taking antidepressants because I wasn’t depressed – but I was desperate, so I agreed,’ Laura recalls.
Laura Turner, who has a metal retainer, was not warned of the potential risks when she had a facial treatment
The night she took her first dose she woke an hour later ‘feeling like I couldn’t breathe. It was as if my airways were closing. My body was burning from the inside out, and I had this terrifying sense of being under attack,’ says Laura.
What she is describing is akathisia, a rare but severe reaction to medication (including, but not limited to, antidepressants) that causes constant agitation, an inability to stay still, and a consuming sense of terror.
‘It was like swallowing hell in a bottle,’ she says. ‘I felt like I was being tortured from the inside. I couldn’t sleep, and I was pacing around like a caged animal.’
Laura’s husband, Duncan, 45, a product designer, took her to A&E – doctors said it was a panic attack.
‘They told me it wasn’t the drug, but I knew my body was being poisoned so I stopped taking it,’ she says. Three weeks later, still in pain, Laura went back to the neurologist who switched her to amitriptyline, a similar drug: her symptoms escalated.
As Laura recalls: ‘At that point I was barely functioning. I couldn’t leave the house and was having intrusive, suicidal thoughts.’
Her case is one of many that highlight how antidepressants, while they do help some people, can have devastating effects.
Last year, Thomas Kingston, husband of Lady Gabriella Windsor, tragically took his life after experiencing an adverse reaction to medication he was taking for insomnia and anxiety.
Laura later discovered that such facials aren’t recommended if you have a metal retainer. Two months later she was still in ‘unbearable, relentless pain’
Earlier this month the coroner at the 45-year-old’s inquest issued a warning about the effects of these drugs – sertraline and citalopram – saying ‘there is a risk that future deaths will occur unless action is taken’.
Her official report was sent to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority and the Royal College of General Practitioners – and requires them to respond.
It’s since been revealed that coroners have issued more than 40 of these reports on sertraline and citalopram.
Following Mr Kingston’s death, MPs have called for an urgent review of how antidepressants are prescribed.
Dr Simon Opher, MP for Stroud and chairman of the Beyond Pills All Party Parliamentary Group, told Good Health: ‘Suicide has always been a known side-effect of antidepressants. The tragic case of Thomas Kingston has highlighted the need for the dangers of these drugs to be made more overt, with warnings on the packaging and with better education for both doctors and patients.’
For years, Good Health has been highlighting the alarming link between suicidal thoughts and SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), the class of antidepressants that include sertraline and citalopram.
But it’s not just these drugs raising red flags – older antidepressants, tricyclics, such as the ones Laura was prescribed, can also trigger suicidal thoughts.
As Dr Mark Horowitz, a clinical research fellow at North East London NHS Foundation Trust, explains: ‘The manufacturers of these older drugs explicitly warn that patients should be alerted to the potential for suicidal thoughts when starting the medication. This risk applies to everyone, not just those with existing mental health conditions.’
In Laura’s case, as with so many others who suffer adverse reactions, the symptoms were mistaken for mental illness.
A few weeks after the neurologist had changed her prescription, Laura saw her GP, who diagnosed anxiety and depression, and prescribed additional medications, including the anticonvulsant pregabalin and another antidepressant, mirtazapine, a type of drug known as a tetracyclic. ‘This pushed me over the edge,’ she recalls. ‘The terror became unbearable. I was researching suicide online, convinced there was no way out.’
Over the next few months, her condition worsened.
Despite many visits to her GP and A&E, nobody connected the drugs she was taking to her condition (even though the patient leaflet warns about suicidal thoughts: in the US it carries a black box warning, the most serious caution issued by the Food and Drug Administration).
Duncan, meanwhile, was in despair that the Laura ‘he knew was unrecognisable’.
Her thoughts became increasingly irrational. In June that year she became convinced her children – then aged eight, six and two – had taken her medication and she rushed them to A&E in panic. ‘The doctors looked at me in disbelief and said the kids looked fine.’ Yet her thinking was so confused she then walked out of the hospital, leaving her kids there and got into her car.
‘All I knew was that I needed to find somewhere to jump from,’ she recalls. Laura drove into Croydon and found a building. ‘The next thing I remember was just falling. I remember voices, and then I don’t remember anything.’
Laura woke up in intensive care with multiple fractures including her pelvis, and unable to walk.
She recalls: ‘I was in excruciating pain. All I could think was, ‘Now I’ve failed to die, and I’m left with these horrific injuries.’
What happened next was every parent’s worst nightmare.
While she was being rushed to hospital (where she was detained under the Mental Health Act), the police had placed her under arrest on suspicion of endangering her children. Social services then banned Laura from being alone with them.
At this point she was still under hospital psychiatric care – after four weeks she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital and then a specialist ward at Queen Mary’s in south-west London. She was given a cocktail of drugs including the antipsychotic olanzapine, the antidepressant venlafaxine (which works in a similar way to SSRIs) and benzodiazepines. Her symptoms didn’t improve. As she recalls: ‘My body and my brain were in total agony. I was pacing the corridors on a walking frame because – despite my injuries – the akathisia made me so agitated. I was sleeping for barely an hour every night and was put on suicide watch.’
In a dramatic turn, Laura managed to secure her discharge after three months, in October 2022, after discovering a loophole in the Mental Health Act – where a patient’s closest relative (in her case, Duncan) can request their release, provided they take responsibility for their care. But the bail conditions meant Laura still had to be supervised while she was with her children.
‘Even then the simplest things were beyond me,’ Laura admits. ‘I was barely sleeping, so basic functioning was impossible. I couldn’t cook, couldn’t drive, and the drugs had left me unable to do even simple things like watching TV with my kids.’ She also started having seizures.
The turning point came when, in January 2023, she came across a YouTube interview with Dr Raymond Singer, an eminent neurotoxicologist in the US, who has written many papers and books, and given expert testimony in civil and criminal cases, including some landmark litigation.
Laura recalls: ‘He was talking about neurotoxic poisoning from psychiatric drugs and said you can develop insomnia, suicidal thoughts, pins and needles – and a complete and instant decline of executive functioning [the ability to make decisions, for instance].’
‘I had tears streaming down my face as I watched. Everything matched what I was experiencing.’ She booked an online consultation with Dr Singer, who confirmed that her symptoms indicated she’d suffered neurotoxic damage, which can affect signals in the brain and body.
He referred her to Dr Selma Eikelenboom-Schieveld, a forensic medical examiner, who recommended DNA testing: this revealed that Laura had a genetic variation in enzymes that help the body metabolise certain drugs – put simply it meant the drugs had a toxic effect in her body.
After Dr Singer confirmed Laura’s symptoms were caused by involuntary intoxication from the medication, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the charges against her. But by then the family had spent £35,000 on her legal case – ‘money we didn’t have, particularly as I’d been unable to work for two years’ – and she’d been under the cloud of 21 months of investigation.
‘The only thing that got me through it was that now Duncan believed it was the drugs [that] had caused my illness.’
She adds: ‘I can’t even begin to describe the impact that’s had on my life – not only the trauma and on our finances, but this has cost me so many milestones with my kids that I’ll never get back.’
Dr Eikelenboom-Schieveld wrote a report recommending Laura be weaned off all the drugs; her GP then referred her to a psychiatrist. It took her six months to come off the drugs – ‘the akathisia lessened so I wasn’t pacing around so much and my sleep got better. But it felt like I had to re-educate my brain to do simple things such as cooking.’
Today, Laura is off all medication. Although she’s left with injuries from her fall and still has pain in her mouth, she is well. She is one of the lucky ones.
I hear from people like Laura every week through antidepressantrisks.org, the non-profit website I set up with experts after I suffered a catastrophic reaction to an SSRI.
Tragically, as in Laura’s case and my own, their medication-induced reactions are often misdiagnosed as mental illness.
This is not uncommon, says Dr Horowitz, ‘because they can look so similar. The misdiagnosis can then set off a cascade of further prescribing where the adverse effects of one drug leads to more prescriptions, causing unnecessary side-effects. This happens because the risks aren’t taught in medical education’.
‘Nobody listened when I said it was the medication causing my symptoms,’ says Laura. ‘If they had, I could have been spared so much suffering. These drugs can make people want to kill themselves and people need to know this.’
- The Pill That Steals Lives by Katinka Blackford Newman (John Blake Publishing).
For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116 123 or go to samaritans.org.
