Antidepressants require care in postmortem interpretation

Abstract

In the United States, antidepressants are not only the eighth leading substance most frequently involved in human exposures (99,800 incidents or 4.2%), they are also the second most common class of drug primarily responsible for death. Moreover, of these antidepressant deaths, 34% (45 of 133) resulted from ingestion of a single antidepressant. Amitriptyline was the sole agent in 12 cases (1).