“I couldn’t breathe, literally, my husband would often have to come pick me up from whatever aisle of the store I was stuck in and drive me home,” the traumatized daughter confided in a letter she wrote to her attorney that he provided to The Daily Beast.
The woman who had been happily married for 25 years was now sitting on a psychiatrist’s couch and popping a daily regimen of meds that she called the “pharmaceutical cocktail.”
They included Abilify, which was supposed to aid in treating her post-traumatic stress disorder.
“So began a life that was hazy, kind of disconnected,” she described in the letter.
Lucy blames the drug for her insatiable hunger for gambling that saw her drive at all hours of the night to Cripple Creek, a legion of Wild West-themed casinos in Colorado.
“I started going all the time,” she wrote. “I never even won, never came back with so much as a dime in my pocket,” she confessed.
Lucy burned through unemployment checks, pawned her mechanic husband’s automotive tools, and lied about needing money to buy baby formula.
As she puts it in the letter, “Nothing was off-limits when it came to getting the money I needed to keep up the ruse.”
Fanatical about the casino, and filling time in-between with lottery scratchers, Lucy’s urge to roll the dice was so desperate she admitted how she mastered her very own disappearing act.
“I’d stuff my bed at night to fool my husband that I was asleep when actually I was spinning the slots,” she admitted in the letter.
Like Lucy, thousands of patients who had been prescribed Abilify say in a mass tort lawsuit the drug created compulsions for sex and gambling, and that the drug makers knew of the serious side effects (as evidenced by warning labels in Canada and Europe) but waited years not to warn U.S. consumers.