Is This Smoking Pill Safe? ; (1) Yesterday's Mail Revealed How a Father Killed Himself After Taking a Pill to Help Him Quit Smoking. Here, Another User Describes How the Drug Sent Her Spiralling Into Suicidal Depression ... (2) Good Health

Daily Mail › January 22, 2008

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Summary

WHEN Karen McGhee woke up in a hospital bed and saw her teenage daughter looking anxiously at her, she was completely flummoxed. 'My arm was bandaged and the left side of my mouth and neck felt numb, as if I had been to the dentist but I had no idea why I was in hospital,' says the 38-year-old.

'Then Jenna told me I'd tried to kill myself. She said her nineyear-old sister, Aynslie, had found me in the middle of the night hanging from the banisters with the pelmet from the curtains tied around my neck.' Karen listened in horror as her daughter recalled how she had turned blue through lack of oxygen, and her heart stopped five times in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

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Is This Smoking Pill Safe? ; (1) Yesterday's Mail Revealed How a Father Killed Himself After Taking a Pill to Help Him Quit Smoking. Here, Another User Describes How the Drug Sent Her Spiralling Into Suicidal Depression ... (2) Good Health

The doctors were convinced Karen had brain damage, and after three agonising days her family had decided to turn off her life support machine. She was expected to die within minutes, but instead miraculously began to breathe on her own.

With absolutely no memory at all of what she'd done, Karen says her daughter's account of what had happened was like hearing about another person.

'My last recollection was of being extremely happy,' she says.

'Just weeks before I was feeling blessed that my husband Robert had survived a heart attack. I was looking forward to the rest of our lives together.' In fact, the mother-of-three from Greenock, Scotland, had developed severe depression and tr...

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