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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By October, Eric and Michael weren’t selling enough cars to support themselves. One night they moved back to Houston, leaving Skye behind with her mother. By then Skye had quit her job. Michael lived with his father until Skye moved to Houston in December. They shared an apartment with Eric, splitting the $425-a-month rent. In early spring, Skye went to work for the Houston office of the Rehabilitation Commission but quit in June 1990 when Michael got a job as the foreman in the body shop of an auto dealership.
Michael never thought of Skye as depressed. “She was happy and outgoing,” says Michael. “When I would come home from work, Skye would be dressed to a tee, ready to go out to eat or something.” He knew that she took prescription drugs, but Skye told him they were to help her sleep and to calm her nerves and her ever-trembling hands. “I recall times she would shake and be real nervous, but not depressed,” recalled Michael. When he would ask Skye why her hands trembled, she told him it was just something that happened to her. “Skye didn’t go on and on about her feelings, and I didn’t press her,” says Michael.
He did, however, press her about the drugs. When she moved to Houston in December, they had a major argument over her medication. “She was acting real erratic,” he says. “We sat down and talked, and I told her to please stop taking the pills.” Skye told her mother that Michael had thrown her medication in the garbage. In April she went to a Houston psychiatrist, Dr. Albert Douglass, and told him that she had tried a variety of antidepressants. He gave her a prescription for amitriptyline, but she went back to him and complained that the drug made her constipated. Later he gave her a prescription for Prozac. She took it for about ten days, until Michael again insisted that she get off the drug. “She started getting real hyper,” insists Michael. “I made fun of people who called it the wonder drug, saying it sounded like something out of a cartoon. It sounds like Batman and Robin.”
In late August she had prescriptions for both Prozac and amitriptyline. Again Michael noticed a change in her behavior. One night she became irate because Michael got home late from work. “She shut the computer off,” said Michael, “and knocked the keyboard on the floor.” Then she threw a glass across the room.
Michael asked her, “What is it that you take that makes you like this?”
She got the pills from the bedroom and handed him the bottle of Prozac.
Did Prozac kill Skye Morris? According to Michael, it did. To prove it, he hired Dan Fontaine and Russ Waddell, both of Houston, as his lawyers. Fontaine has won several large judgments for plaintiffs in the past. In 1989 he won an $8.8 million judgment by proving to a Houston jury that Jeep CJ7’s were defective and prone to rollovers. Now he has set his sights on Eli Lilly’s deep pockets. “Every time Skye got on Prozac, she had to get off of it because it made her jittery,” said Fontaine. “The last time she took it, it killed her.”
Fontaine is also suing all of the doctors who prescribed drugs to Skye. He will try to prove that their diagnoses were imprecise, as was their method for prescribing drugs. For instance, Dr. Mary Garrity, who prescribed amitriptyline, never laid eyes on Skye or even talked to her on the telephone. Garrity authorized a nurse to refill Skye’s prescription. In addition, Fontaine will try to show that Eli Lilly over-promoted Prozac and that the safeguards for drug testing are insufficient. The basic flaw of the process is that it costs so much money for a drug company to develop a promising drug that the company can’t afford for tests to fail. One clinical psychiatrist in Houston who participated in the early testing of Prozac, says, “The drug companies give us the parameters of the tests, and we rarely ever find anything that was not expected.” The doctor said psychiatrists can’t accurately measure a drug’s full performance until they prescribe it to patients and follow the results. By that standard, Skye Morris’ life was not much more than one long drug test and a preparation for a lawsuit.
But there is another version of Skye and Michael Morris’ marriage, as revealed by people who knew them and by Michael’s deposition in his own lawsuit. It is the story of a third troubled marriage, of yet another man in Skye’s life who had let her down and thereby may have contributed to her depression.
In his deposition, Michael reveled himself as an unlikely Sir Galahad. In the early seventies, he was court-martialed in the Army for selling hashish and was given a general discharge. In the early eighties, he was arrested for changing a price tag and was given deferred adjudication, which means the incident was wiped off his record after he served probation. Later he was convicted of being publicly intoxicated in a bar and paid a $100 fine. In March 1989 he was charged with driving while intoxicated and served probation.
In addition, his deposition indicates a checkered employment history. By the time he met Skye, he had lost one job because of the DWI. He was forced to resign from an insurance company after allegations that he had received a $250 kickback from an auto repair shop. He had no job when he went to Austin with Eric Miller to sell used cars. His credit cards had been revoked for nonpayment. Apparently he had saved some money through a profit-sharing plan, but when he met Skye, he wasn’t as flush as he appeared the night he bought her $300 worth of roses.
Michael’s financial troubles became clear to Skye after the two were married. In the first ten months of their marriage, Skye and Michael Morris spent the $10,000 she got from her retirement fund and accumulated another $10,000 in debt. Her friend Di Anna Guinn said that level of spending was uncharacteristic of Skye. “I used to help her balance her checkbook,” recalled Guinn. “She was very particular about every penny and fanatical about paying all of her bills on time.” One Friday night Skye telephoned Di Anna and confided she was upset because her retirement money was gone. “I love Michael,” Skye told Di Anna, “but I’m going to leave him.”
Di Anna said Skye often talked about suicide. She became increasingly worried about her friend, and in February 1990 she went to Houston to visit Skye. Skye told her that Michael went to bars most weekends without her. On Saturday night, the two women went to a bar by themselves, but Michael joined them later. When it was time to leave, Skye and Michael had a major argument in the parking lot over a woman Skye believed Michael was flirting with. Skye continually cursed Michael, and Michael pulled her from the car and she fell to the ground. “I’d never seen Skye like that,” said Di Anna. “She was simply furious.”
It turns out that she had good reason to be jealous. In his deposition, Michael revealed that less than a month after they were married, when he moved to Houston and left Skye in Austin, he had had an affair with an old girlfriend. After Skye moved to Houston, he told her about the affair. Michael denied in the deposition testimony that he ever hit Skye or that the two ever considered divorce. Eric Miller, who witnessed much of what went on in their marriage, has twice failed to show up for depositions.
“These are just straw issues that the defense will use to attempt to discredit Michael,” Fontaine said. As for the money problems, Fontaine explained that poverty was nothing new to Skye Morris. “Besides, she and Michael had pulled themselves out. His job at the auto dealership was good enough that he encouraged her to quit her secretarial job. That doesn’t sound like a man who was taking advantage of her.” As for the affair, Fontaine insists that Skye and Michael had put it behind them and noted that there was nothing in the suicide note to suggest she was angry at Michael. On the other hand, there was nothing in the note to suggest she was drug-crazed either.
Why Skye Morris committed suicide is the unanswerable question that nonetheless will have to be decided by a jury. A lot is riding on the answer—including whether millions of people like Skye will be able to buy Prozac. The jury will have to determine whether Michael Morris is a grieving widower who wants to alert others to the dangers of Prozac or a venal opportunist who took advantage of Skye Morris and now hopes to profit from her death. They will have to make scientific judgments as well about the effects of Prozac on the brain and about the sufficiency of drug testing.
And they will have to make sense of her shaking hands. Her hands were the outward manifestation of her depression and muted rage. She was a woman who never came clean with anyone. “She wasn’t the depressed type,” her mother told me. “She just got the blahs sometimes.” Her father called her frequently and sent Christmas presents. He described their relationship in his deposition as close. She told all three husbands she loved them, and all three thought that meant she was happy. Everyone noticed her hands, but no one—least of all Skye—knew what to do about it. Her hands kept trembling until, at 34, she quieted them with drugs that had not helped her live but that she took to help her die.
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