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Antidepressants and murder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

J. Guy Edwards
J. Guy Edwards*
Affiliation:
Royal South Hants Hospital, Southampton SO9 4PE
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A 44-year-old man was treated with amitriptyline by his general practitioner for ‘mild depression’. Shortly after starting treatment he was said to have become ‘beserk’; he hit his wife and a family friend with an iron bar and attempted to sever their heads with a kitchen knife. He was found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of substantially diminished responsibility and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Type
Expert opinion
Information
Psychiatric Bulletin , Volume 16 , Issue 9 , September 1992 , pp. 537 - 539
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1992

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