"It's hard to know where to begin to detail the cognitive errors she's making," says psychiatrist Tomb about Tracy's book. "She is really taking license with the scientific method." Yes, Tracy is passionate about the evils of antidepressants, Tomb says, "but passion has very little place in the scientific method in terms of deciding what is accurate and truthful." The book is full of vignettes, but vignettes don't tell the whole story, he argues. "You could take aspirin and do the same thing: comb the literature and find horrible things that have occurred with aspirin."

But Dr. Donald Marks, an internal medicine physician from Alabama who was director of research at two large drug companies and now often testifies as an expert witness against the drugs, calls Tracy "in many ways a visionary." She "has observed a phenomenon that is now being validated," he says.

"I do think there are some people who don't understand Dr. Tracy and don't understand her passion and don't understand how smart she is," says Jennifer Tierney, a North Carolina mother whose teenage daughter was put on Effexor to treat her migraine headaches.

In her darkest hours — when her cheerful, straight-A daughter first became "a monster" and later, in an effort to wean herself from Effexor, had withdrawal symptoms that left her unable even to walk — Tierney called every antidepressant expert she could find on the Internet. Only Tracy called her back.

"Dr. Tracy never got one dime from me. She never mentioned money to me at all. When she first called me back and I said, 'What can I pay you?' she said, 'No. No.' You have to think that's pretty pure. And she helped me more than anyone else."

"An unsung hero," says Cassandra Dawn Casey, a Utah County woman who started an antidepressant group called Aspire after her son's death two years ago. "None of us would have known what was causing these problems in our lives if it hadn't been for trailblazers like Ann."

The beginning

Tracy's interest in antidepressants began in 1989 when, she says, she watched two LDS friends turn into alcoholics after being put on Prozac. After that she started reading about the drugs, and soon she was hunting down scientific studies, and then she got a button made that said "Just Say No to Prozac." After that she'd be at the grocery store or church and people would come up to her and start telling her their stories.

"There's great power in those stories," says Texas trial attorney Andy Vickery, who has been involved in more than 50 cases related to antidepressants. "They have a power to persuade and even change the bureaucratic forces of our country."

And that's just what Tracy expects to eventually happen. "I think these drugs are history," she says. Eventually, the stories told by parents, and the investigations into the clinical trials that the drug companies have suppressed, will add up to public outrage — and then antidepressants will be pulled from the market, she predicts.

"What is sad," she says, "is that so many have had to die or have their lives ruined while we have learned that this was yet another terrible mistake in our hope of 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' "

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com