Over-Prescription of
Multiple Potent Drugs
![[image]](img/pg10a_1.jpg)
Psychiatrist Nomi Fredrick, who treated Holliday, has been accused of overmedicating other patients, including producer Don Simpson (above). Once there, instead of helping Holliday resolve her physical problem, doctors virtually drowned her in a stream of drugs. As described in documents on file with the Los Angeles Superior Court, during a two-week period at the hospital under Fredrick’s care, she received the following:
- Dexedrine (an amphetamine) — up to 90 mg per day
- Depakote (an anti-convulsant) — up to 750 mg per day
- Eldepryl (a drug that inhibits certain chemicals in the brain) — 15 mg per day
- Ativan (a tranquilizer) — up to 2 mg per day
- Restoril (a sedative) — 30 mg per day
- Dalmane (another sedative) — 30 mg per day
- Wellbutrin (an anti-depressant) — 150 mg per day
- Synthroid (a thyroid hormone) — .025 mg per day
In addition, Vicodin, a powerful narcotic, and Lasix, a diuretic, were given “as needed.” “I felt like I was on a treadmill,” Holliday said. “The medication just kept coming and coming.”
“Such a rapidly changing regimen of multiple, concomitantly administered psychoactive drugs made it clinically impossible for a reasonable physician of ordinary care and prudence to realistically and correctly evaluate the mental status or clinical progress of such a patient under the influence of such a massive barrage of mind and mood altering drugs,” Lampone charged in the lawsuit.
“Such aggressive over-medication and over-prescription of multiple potent psychoactive drugs without allowing the patient time to stabilize and be properly evaluated for her response to such treatment was a breach of Dr. Fredrick’s and St. John’s duty of care to Ms. Holliday,” he stated.
As Holliday put it, “They’d given me so many drugs, I didn’t know if I was coming or going.” Although Fredrick’s attorney, David O’Keefe, asserted that the “therapy” provided was “appropriate,” it is well known that the psychiatrist he represents has been accused of overmedicating other patients, including the co-producer of some of Hollywood’s biggest hits, Don Simpson.
Simpson was found dead in his Bel Air estate in January 1996 — seven months after Melissa Holliday entered St. John’s Hospital — from a massive overdose of a combination of prescription drugs. Police found thousands of pills and tablets in Simpson’s residence following the death, many of them prescribed by Fredrick. Later that year, Fredrick’s office was raided by agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on suspicion that she had overprescribed drugs to Simpson and Steven Ammerman, a physician and friend of Simpson’s who had died of a similar drug overdose at the estate in September 1995.
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