Wonder Drug on Trial
Once regarded as a miracle cure for depression, Prozac will soon be under attack in a Houston courtroom for causing suicides. The sad case of Skye Morris may determine the fate of the nation’s leading antidepressant.
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This is how modern culture handles depression. Psychiatrists earn their living treating misery they can’t explain. Patients diagnose their ailments after listening to TV talk shows. Then, when the longed-for cure eludes them, they or their loved ones turn to the courts for vengeance.
Skye Morris was a creature of this culture. Why was she depressed? The reasons are as elusive as the cure. The roots of her illness lay in her chemistry, her relationship with her parents, and her choice of husbands. Skye’s first instinct was to put her faith in romantic love, and when that failed, she put her faith in prescription drugs. The drugs failed her too. Skye was a brown-eyed, sturdy brunette who had worked all her life, but for some reason she didn’t have the internal means to get what she needed. She tumbled into a black hole that led to her death. Why did she die? Those closest to her have decided to let a jury decide. The irony is that Michael and her parents may have victimized her as much as any drug.
Skye Morris could have been a poster girl for depression. She was born on May 9, 1956 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to working-class parents. Dean Redford, tall, with dark hair and jug ears, joined the Navy, worked in the oil fields in Louisiana, and ultimately became a long-haul truck driver. He and Skye’s mother, Juanita, separated when Skye was only four.
Thirty years later, Juanita says she hasn’t a clue as to why she and Skye’s father got divorced, nor does she understand what went wrong with her three other husbands. “I was so young when Skye’s daddy left,” says Juanita. “I guess I was just an airhead.” After Redford left, Juanita moved to Port Arthur, where she took a job as a waitress. Later she moved to Austin and worked on an assembly line at Motorola Computer company.
The one thing Juanita gave her daughter that seemed to stick was her name, which Juanita selected from the Sunday comics. Skye was a character in the Mary Worth strip. “She just loved her name,” recalls Juanita. “If anyone ever called her anything other than Skye, she had a real fit.” Around the time her father left, her hands started shaking. Juanita knew about the trembling, but didn’t take her to the doctor. “I wasn’t one to run to doctors very much,” she explains. As an adult, Skye consulted many doctors, but nothing seemed to steady her hands.
When Skye was ten, she decided never to have children. Years later she told a psychiatrist that she had never owned a baby doll, never felt the slightest stirring of maternal instinct. Juanita knew of Skye’s decision but thought nothing of it. “I never thought much about it, because I never did much like small kids either,” Juanita says. Nonetheless, she bore four children—Skye and three boys.
As an adult, Skye told her best friend that her worst fear in life was that she would follow in her mother’s pattern, going from one bad marriage to another. That, of course, is exactly what happened.
She met her first husband in 1975, her senior year of high school. Ralph epitomized stability. After graduation they married, and he went to work at a Safeway in north Austin. After a promotion to assistant manager, Ralph got the chance to manage his own store. He and Skye moved to Bryan. Four years after their wedding, they were divorced. “There seems to be a pattern of her feeling let down by people,” one of her doctors noted in Skye’s medical records, which Michael obtained after she died.
After she left her first husband, Skye moved home to Austin and took a job at the Texas Rehabilitation Commission as a secretary. The work was boring and repetitive, but her $21,000 salary was enough to pay her bills. Besides, she liked the women she worked with. On weekends they often went in groups to country and western bars. One night at the Okey Dokey, a South Austin club, Skye met her second husband. Sam Seelig was a foreman on a ranch southeast of town and seemed emblematic of the country and western way of life. They were married in 1982 and settled into a pattern of working during the week and dancing on weekends.
“Skye was a real private person,” recalls Sam. “If something was bothering her, she didn’t talk about it. She just withdrew.” Her interior life was a mystery to Sam. For instance, she was jealous and insecure about the marriage, but he never knew of her feelings. In 1986, she made good on her childhood promise and had a tubal ligation. “After it was all over, she seemed relieved,” said Sam. “I though she was happy.”
Apparently she wasn’t. In March 1987, she complained to her family doctor in Austin about feeling depressed. He prescribed several different antidepressants, some of which made her constipated and caused her to gain weight. A few months later, shortly before Skye turned 31, her two cats—Whiskers and Squeaky—died. No other event in her life affected her as much as the death of her cats. It provoked what psychiatrists refer to as a serious depressive episode. In 1988 her physician referred her to an Austin psychiatrist, who diagnosed dysthymia, a form of long-term depression that isn’t disabling but keeps people from ever feeling really happy.
She couldn’t sleep, and it became harder to work. The psychiatric survey indicated that she was having trouble remembering things, was afraid of open spaces, and was uneasy in crowds. She said she felt lonely, hopeless, and worthless and admitted she had never felt close to another person. As sad as she felt, she said she had never considered suicide. The psychiatrist noted that she was plagued with low self-esteem, which was not a surprising diagnosis, and that her neediness and jealousy were a result of feeling abandoned.
The doctor prescribed Desyrel, but Skye later complained that it failed to relieve the depression. Then in 1988, when Prozac was hailed as a wonder drug, her family physician gave it to her, but Prozac produced no miracles, only insomnia. Later that year, she alternated between Prozac and Elavil. She never told her mother that she was depressed. But she complained of headaches and general tiredness. “The pills changed her,” says Sam. “They made her nervous and more edgy, but she wouldn’t get off of them.”
In November 1988 Skye and Sam went to a country and western bar called the South Forty. Many of Skye’s friends from work were there. Sam thought they were having a good time, but late that night she confided in her best friend, Di Anna Guinn, that she had been unhappy with Sam for two years and planned to leave him. At midnight, when Sam told her it was time to go home, she refused to go with him. Sam was completely surprised. “Next thing I knew, she wanted a divorce,” says Sam.
A few weeks later Skye confided to her psychiatrist that leaving Sam was a mistake. “The leaving impulsively may have been a misdirected effort for her to take more control of her life,” wrote the doctor in her records. His solution? He took her off Desyrel. He prescribed Xanax to ease her anxiety, and Skye went off in search of a new Sir Galahad.
“Skye was always good and smiles for me,” Michael Morris recalls one evening about nine months after her death. At 38, Michael is a slim sandy-haired man who smokes one cigarette after another. He seemed the personification of the grieving widower. He walked around the apartment he had shared with Skye, picking up Skye’s favorite knickknacks—hand towels imprinted with cat faces, a pair of crystal cocktail stirrers, her address book, in which she had written, “I love him—he is so fine!” by Michael’s name. “Sometimes,” says Michael, “I can still smell her perfume when I walk into this apartment.”
The two of them met in July 1989 at the South Forty, the same Austin bar where she had told Sam she was leaving him. Michael and Eric Miller had moved to Austin and rented a townhouse just around the corner from the South Forty. From the townhouse they tried to sell used cars.
On the night Michael met Skye she was wearing a suede skirt, a silk blouse, and two-inch heels. “She looked so sharp that she stood out,” Michael recalls. He asked her to dance. She refused but eventually followed him to the dance floor, where Michael stepped on her toes. “You can’t dance,” Skye told him and stalked off.
Over the next few nights, they both returned to the South Forty. On one occasion Michael stopped a flower girl, bought every rose in her basket—about $300 worth—and sent them over to Skye’s table. Gestures such as this won her over. She began spending more time at the townhouse.
Skye believed things would be different with Michael. “She told me I changed her whole life,” he says. “All she wanted was to please me.” In his deposition, Michael described their relationship this way: “We were happy. We enjoyed being with each other. She loved me very much, and I loved her.” The two decided to get married. On a Friday afternoon, September 1, 1989, Skye took off early from work, changed into a new black and white print dress, and married Michael at the Travis County courthouse.
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