Her interest in gambling abruptly vanished after she landed in a treatment facility that took her off the drug. And that was all within the brief six-month period she was on Abilify.

To satisfy her intense urges, she secretly tapped her family’s bank accounts and retirement funds and took out a loan for $50,000. Quickly after, the devoted mother of four began sneaking away from work, her kids’ sporting events, and gatherings with friends to hit up a nearby casino. She started taking the drug for depression and anxiety in December 2014. In one case, highlighted recently by Stat, Denise Miley says she became a compulsive gambler virtually overnight. Yet thousands of patients who have already taken the drug have linked its use to out-of-character behaviors and impulses that they say wreaked devastation on their lives and finances. Getting such data would likely require massive, resource-intensive clinical trials. There’s currently limited scientific data on whether or how the popular drug actually causes such compulsive behaviors-and in whom. In the event that Bristol-Myers Squibb and Otsuka fail to come up with a way to settle the rest by the deadline, the court will move a fresh batch of lawsuits from the MDL to trial.Įither way, the litigation will likely provide patients with a resolution that, so far, drug researchers have not been able to give them. That is, they were test cases for the rest, thus they set a precedent for settlement. Those cases had been carefully selected by the court and used as so-called bellwether trials. All three were settled for undisclosed sums. Judge Rodgers made the call after Abilify’s makers, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Otsuka, settled three lawsuits from the MDL individually earlier this year. Casey Rodgers in the Northern District Court of Florida, which is handling all the lawsuits in a lumped process called multidistrict litigation (MDL). The deadline for that “ global settlement” was ordered recently by Judge M. Makers of the blockbuster drug Abilify have until September 1 to come up with a way to settle more than 800 lawsuits that claim the anti-psychotic and anti-depressive drug spurred uncontrollable urges to gamble, binge eat, shop, and have sex-all without any warning. Getty | Bloomberg reader comments 130 with

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