Posted on 12/19/2012 5:07:41 AM PST by detective
From the moment news emerged Friday that a young man had carried out a horrific massacre of elementary-school children, politicians from local city halls to the White House have been restoking the age-old push for more gun control. While guns have been a common denominator in mass slayings at schools by teens, there’s another familiar element that seems increasingly to be minimized.
Some 90 percent of school shootings over more than a decade have been linked to a widely prescribed type of antidepressant called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, according to British psychiatrist Dr. David Healy, a founder of RxISK.org, an independent website for researching and reporting on prescription drugs.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
The article was very specific. Mass Murder shootings in schools where the perp "succeeded" in killing more than 4. Not bombs, gas cans, etc.
So, are the kids less or more dead because they wer’nt blown up with a bomb?
“Today we begin to disarm the criminal and the careless and the insane. All of our people who are deeply concerned in this country about law and order should hail this day.”—Lyndon B Johnson 1968 when he signed the 1968 GCA into law
I’m sorry, but what I said and what you’re talking about are two COMPLETELY different things.
SSRIs are NOT anti-psychotic medications. No qualified psychiatrist gives them to a patient with psychotic behavior and expects it to deal with their symptoms.
SSRIs are paroxetine,Escitalopram, and citalopram for example. That’s for DEPRESSION and ANXIETY.
Anti-psychotics are a COMPLETELY different class of drug that has NOTHING in common with SSRIs, except they are both pills.
If you don’t believe me, try comparing any SSRI to Clozapine.
You fail to differentiate between cases of neurotic behavior (anxiety and depressive disorders) and psychotic (schizophrenics or bi-polar disorder for example), which is doing little to support your dismissal of leaving treatment to trained professionals such as my sister, who has had plenty of experience with SSRIs and knows better than to give them out like Halloween candy.
Yes in rare cases, which is why typically when a psychiatrist recommends treatment with a drug like that, they typically monitor the patient to see if they suffer any severe side effects.
Just because there’s quack doctors who want to push pills on everyone doesn’t mean all of them are quacks. Any psychiatrist or psychologist who is deserving of their degree will pursue other avenues of treatment before resorting to pharmacology.
Unfortunately, a lot of the public has bought into the lies that pills are cure-alls, and will doctor shop until they get meds.
Corporations are people, and so is gov. Trust neither.
With SSRIs there is an established trend. Nutters and Guns have existed since the dawn of time, mass shootings in schools didn’t start until after Ssri’s. and so far all of the shooters in these mass homicide suicides were on SSRIs...or worse, withdrawing from them.
Www.ssristories.com
13 people were killed, and 32 others were wounded.
-PJ
There may have been others too. But the troubled young boy, Columbine type shootings were extremely rare before the 1990’s. I can't think of another one besides the Texas one. Now they seem to happen over and over again.
when did violent, realistic video games become mass marketed as solo entertainment and a prime babysitter of many young kids and teens?
Social misfits like Lanza and Jared Loughner who spent their hours blowing away virtual “enemies” and doing internet research on killing weren’t on prescriptions then, they were on nicotine and booze - then pot and then anything
when did primetime TV become a marathon of shows featuring gruesome murders? When did virtually all movies become a choice of bawdy sex or gruesome violence or both?
when did the internet become a common home convenience and allow boys like Adam Lanza to figure out how to select the most mortally violent flesh tearing ammunition, how to plan an assault, and how to “jungle tape” his weapon? and teach a schizo like James Holmes how to select assault gear and rig an apartment with homemade bombs?
I dont remember growing up in that kind of society before the 1990’s, either,
The first shooting occured in 1990? What a coincidence...
Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990
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Page 1 of BATFE Letter Stating CCW Reciprocity Does Not Exempt A Permit Holder From GFSZA[1][2] [3][4]
Page 2 of BATFE Letter Stating CCW Reciprocity Does Not Exempt A Permit Holder From GFSZA[1][2][3][4]
The Gun-Free School Zones Act (GFSZA, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 922(q)) is a federal United States law that prohibits any individual from knowingly possessing a firearm at a place that the individual knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a school zone. Its formal title is the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 and is sometimes referred to as the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1995, possibly in referrence to S. 890.
I used to go with a woman who started taking psychiatric prescribed drugs for mental problems. The more drugs she took, the worse her behavior became...despite reassurances from county counselors that she would get better taking the drugs. I eventually had to leave her before I woke up with a butcher knife in my chest. If you’ve ever had a person stand over you with a butcher knife in their hand threatening to commit suicide, you don’t know if they’re going to kill themselves or kill you. I got out while the getting was good.
imprimatur...not that I’m a stickler about those sorts of things.
You've made the same connection I've made. I know correlation does not mean causation, but like you I grew up in the fifties and sixties when going to shrink for your problems was unheard of for most people. Ditto for kids taking drugs in those days. Never heard of it. And I can't remember any mass shootings. Whitman's killings at U-Texas in 1966 was the first mass slaughter with guns I can remember.
The unfortunate part is that, despite your demurrers, there has been an explosion of such use of "psychotropic" drugs, invented one after another for their obscene profit margins. And it was famed psychiatrists shilling for the makers at conventions and in journals that have caused this sea change of treatment, according to the observers who have been seeking the truth behind it.
One of the big consumers has been the military and those ministering to veterans. But finally the Central Command has contravened, taking such drugs out of their formulary for treating PTSD sufferers.
Give me some statistics on what "rare cases" means. From my outlook, arguments against your view is found in "Anatomy of an Epidemic" and other internet available sources, TNTC.
“drugs, invented one after another for their obscene profit margins.”
You clearly have no idea how the Pharmaceutical industry works. Do you know how much money it costs to produce a new drug from “bench to shelf”? Maybe $750 million. Out of 100 new drugs being developed, maybe 3 might finally make it through FDA approval and onto the market. None of that gets advertised in their “obscene profit margins”.
But despite the fact that the FDA is the strictest regulatory agency in the world, and that Pharmaceutical Industries tend to have people in research who, you know, want to cure disease not cause it, there’s a giant cabal of corruption with absolutely no whistle blowers. I call that paranoid.
Do they try to win over doctors to advocate treatment? Absolutely. Do sales reps get overzealous and lose sight of what they’re doing? Yes. Do Pharmaceutical Industries voluntarily pull drugs off the market over risk management? Yes, Vioxx was a big one a few years ago. If you want to see what certain regulatory agencies view as an “acceptable risk level” for some of the worse side effects, trying researching that because the US and Canadian government both tried to reverse the voluntary recall, and Merck refused to do so.
If you want a drug that has no side effects, then you’re advocating the end of pharmacology, because even Penicillin and Acetaminophen can kill people.
Whittaker’s arguments are a hypothesis that has yet to be tested. He’s presented at best, a correlation, which is not the same as causality. His data is not strong enough to say with certainty that such conclusions are facts. Here’s on psychiatrist’s objections.
http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/01/robert-whitakers-anatomy-of-epidemic.html
I personally think that he’s blaming psychiatry’s treatments instead of the collapse in moral values in society that’s leading to dysfunctional treatment. I rather blame the fact that parents would rather drug their child who has issues because of their complete absence in his/her life on them rather than the drugs they doctored shopped for.
Psychiatry, and pharmacology, are tools. What is done with them is up to the person wielding them. Funny, because that’s kind of what a lot of people here would say about guns...
http://psychrights.org/Research/Digest/AntiDepressants/breggin31-49.pdf
The report [51] provided a clinical window into the development of obsessive violence and a school shooter
mentality. A twelve-year-old boy on fluoxetine developed nightmares about becoming a school
shooter and then began to lose track of reality concerning these events. This case occurred in a controlled clinical
trial and the investigators did not know that the child was getting fluoxetine until they broke the
double-blind code. The child’s reaction occurred long before any of the well-known school shootings
had taken place. Therefore, his reaction was not inspired by the school shootings; it was not a “copycat”:
[51] R. King, M. Riddle, P. Chappell, M. Hardin, G. Anderson, P. Lombroso and L. Scahill, Emergence of self-destructive
phenomena in children and adolescents during fluoxetine treatment, Journal of the American Academy of Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry 30 (1991), 179–186.
I’d rather believe it occurred because of the first full season of The Simpsons in 1990.
Too many leaps of logic going on around here about SSRI’s.
Having just read the book review you linked, it pretty much seems to validate the point I’ve been trying to make. It’s all at best, circumstantial evidence for rather large claims that he makes.
Also, one case is an anecdote. As tragic as that is, unless that’s put into context of how many people didn’t develop psychotic symptoms, it doesn’t give us full merit in debating whether or not the cases of withdrawing said drug from the market.
I’m seeing more rhetorical backflips in attempts to protect folks’ favorite happy pills.
Careful, you started with a genetic fallacy by attacking the source. It makes one look like a liberal... Don’t do that. That book report and the referenced book were both submitted for peer review.
The scientific method /inductive method is nothing without circumstantial evidence. Observation, hypothesis, test.
Boy on ssri dreams intesly about killing his parents, school children, then self. Boy removed from the ssri and the dreams stop. Boy is later put back on the ssri, dreams return. Boy removed front ssri treatment.... Dreams stop.
A couple years later actual shootings start.... All buy kids on ssri.
That alone is more empirical data then was available indicating ssri were safe for adolesence.
Now ther is research showing placebos are more effective. What exactly is the risk reward balance for ssri use?
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