Word: teicher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Teicher, a member of the National Security Council staff under Reagan, remembers an April 1982 meeting between Walter Stoessel, then Deputy Secretary of State, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. At the time, Iranian troops had recaptured much of the territory Iraq had seized in the first weeks of the war. At the end of the meeting, Teicher recalls, "Mubarak held my hand and wouldn't let go. He talked to me about the desperate situation Saddam Hussein was in, and the absolute necessity for America to find ways to help him. He wanted me to take his message back...
Arab leaders were not alone in suggesting that Saddam could be lured into behaving with more restraint. In the spring of 1984, Teicher accompanied Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan's special Middle East envoy, on a visit to Israel. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told Rumsfeld that Israel considered Iran, not Iraq, to be the greatest threat in the region. According to Teicher, Shamir proposed the construction of an oil pipeline from Iraq to the Israeli port of Haifa as a goodwill gesture. When the U.S. relayed the offer to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, he refused to pass it along...
Despite the new concern, the evidence linking Prozac to suicidal behavior is tenuous and relies mostly on anecdotal histories. The most substantial report appeared last February in the American Journal of Psychiatry. In that study, Dr. Martin Teicher, a research psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., documented the cases of six depressed patients who became obsessed with violent suicidal thoughts two to seven weeks after starting treatment with Prozac. Four tried to hurt or kill themselves. The compulsion subsided after the patients went off the drug...
...there were several confounding factors, as Teicher is quick to admit. Four of the patients were on other medications as well as Prozac. Five of the patients had contemplated suicide or attempted it at some point in their past. That raises the question of whether the preoccupation with self-destruction resulted from Prozac or from the depressive disease itself. Teicher suspects the drug in part because none of the patients were actively suicidal at the time they began therapy with Prozac. "Moreover," he observes, "the nature of their suicidal thoughts was qualitatively different than it had been in the past...