Tracy has served as an expert witness in a dozen criminal cases — most recently a Maryland case against a teenage boy who fatally laced his best friend's soda with cyanide — and has been hired as a consultant in several civil cases against drug companies, including one that tried to implicate Luvox as the reason why Eric Harris shot students at Columbine High School. She estimates that the number of people she has consulted with about antidepressants — how to safely get off them, how to find alternative methods for treating depression, what to do when a family member is suicidal or manic — is now in the thousands.

Jason Atwood, who will be a senior this year at Copper Hills High School, credits Tracy with helping him get off antidepressants, first prescribed for him when he was 12. He tried suicide at least 15 times before reading Tracy's book and listening to her tape. It was then, he says, that he discovered that odd symptoms — persistent dreams of gouging his eyes out, for example — might be side effects of the drugs that were supposed to be making him feel normal. Following Tracy's advice, he slowly tapered off Remeron and now tries to avoid sugar, meat and dairy products. "I still have my moments of depression," he says. "But I haven't attempted suicide for over a year."

Ann Blake Tracy, according to the International Coalition for Drug Awareness web site, has a doctorate in health sciences with an emphasis on psychology. There is no mention of the institution that awarded her this degree — George Wythe College, in Cedar City. Tracy explains that the Ph.D. was awarded for "lifetime experience," specifically for the writing of "Prozac: Panacea or Pandora?" which she says she has been told is the equivalent of, or "far beyond," a dissertation.

Self-published, the book contains spelling and punctuation errors and incomplete sentences (although Tracy says an edited version will be published in the next few weeks). It also contains page after page of references to studies that seem to cast a cloud over the safety of antidepressants.

Tracy argues that the whole hypothesis of SSRIs is "backwards." She maintains that the drugs increase serotonin while decreasing the metabolism of serotonin, especially in the 7 to 10 percent of the population she says that studies have shown don't have the proper enzyme to metabolize SSRIs in the first place. The drugs, she charges, can also cause REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), which can cause people to act out their vivid, violent dreams while in a dreamlike state.

Deconstructing Tracy