“I think if we established prescription drugs as one of the key factors in these episodes, we’d press for laws to eliminate these drugs from sales.”
Oho! You mean Big Pharma might get blamed for mass murders, like the NRA does now?
Don’t most users successfully manage their illnesses with these same types of prescription drugs, without going homicidal, just like the majority of gun owners?
I’m not totally against what you’re saying. Perhaps it would be a useful debate, which, so far, Big Pharma has managed to prevent.
My admittedly unscientific and entirely anecdotally-based opinion is that it’s probably not the USE of the drug which causes the meltdown.
More likely, it’s the sudden, unmonitored WITHDRAWAL.
I worked with a guy who had a 17-year old daughter with various issues. The doc put her on a new medication one day. The next day....the family was on some outing near a Virginia interstate, where the daughter had some meltdown, and the cops felt that the father had triggered some event to occur and actually held him for six hours until the wife bailed him out. The medication? Oh, they went back to the original stuff.