Free Republic

Whille mass killers generally have guns in their hands, another commonality is that they often have psychiatric drugs in their blood. The difference, though, is that it isn't guns that have the side effect of "homicidal ideation." If you develop digestive problems after a change in diet, do you look for the cause in foods you always ate or the new ones you started eating? While the answer is obvious, this common sense is painfully uncommon when analyzing the new phenomenon of continual mass shootings: Many blame the long-present “foods” — guns in this case — and ignore the new...

Stephen Paddock, who killed at least 58 people and wounded hundreds more in Las Vegas on Sunday with high-powered rifles, was prescribed an anti-anxiety drug in June that can lead to aggressive behavior, the Las Vegas Review-Journal has learned... Records from the Nevada Prescription Monitoring Program obtained Tuesday show Paddock was prescribed 50 10-milligram diazepam tablets by Henderson physician Dr. Steven Winkler on June 21. A woman who answered the phone at Winkler’s office would not make him available to answer questions and would neither confirm nor deny that Paddock was ever a patient. Paddock purchased the drug — its...

Mass killings lead the headlines much more than they used to. Schools, theaters, churches, and other places where people gather peacefully have become killing fields more and more frequently over the past few years. The gun control crowd — never to miss an opportunity — claims that guns are the problem. More guns means more mass killings. Less guns would mean fewer killings. It's simple, they say. There are a couple of problems with that "simple" theory, though. For one thing, some of these recent attacks have not involved guns. In those cases, the tools of death were knives, cars,...

With the Christopher Dorner case, the role of prescription psychotropic drugs in mass killings has again come to the forefront. Numerous articles have approached the role of so-called "psych meds" in causing depraved and indifferent violent behavior, but one in particular deserves attention because it highlights the fact that among psychiatric professionals there is no coherent understanding of what needs to be done after we take people off of drugs that are prescribed for their psychiatric illnesses. The article -- Jon Rappoport's "Is Christopher Dorner Another Psychiatric Killer?" -- makes a number of important points about the former Los Angeles...

Is it safe? Nobody knows.More and more, parents at wit's end are begging doctors to help them calm their aggressive children or control their kids with ADHD. More and more, doctors are prescribing powerful antipsychotic drugs. In the past seven years, the number of Florida children prescribed such drugs has increased some 250 percent. Last year, more than 18,000 state kids on Medicaid were given prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs. Even children as young as 3 years old. Last year, 1,100 Medicaid children under 6 were prescribed antipsychotics, a practice so risky that state regulators say it should be used only...

This is a story with a hopeful ending. Lucky, even. But be forewarned, you have to get through a lot of hopeless, unlucky crap before you find it. Here's how it all starts: My first-born son has autism. Now that isn't hopeless or, in my opinion, unlucky. Autism isn't sick or crazy. It's rigid and routine, a little eccentric. Autism is multiplying columns of numbers easily while being unable to look anyone in the eyes; listening to only one band's music, and always in the same order, for a period of six weeks; refusing to eat anything orange. It's also...

Buried deep within H.J.RES.2, a Joint Resolution making further continuing appropriations for fiscal year 2003, are all sorts of interesting spending projects, few of which are authorized to the federal government by the Constitution. For instance, they appropriated $418,773,000 for carrying out section 301 and title IV of the Public Health Service Act with respect to alcohol abuse and alcoholism. Another $3,129,717,000 is appropriated for program management of the Mentally Ill Individuals Act and they targeted $12,000,000 to carry out data collection activities supporting the annual National Household Survey. Over and above that will come the new Bush bills to...

PHILADELPHIA -- In the days leading up to the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting here this past week, pharmaceutical companies mailed attendees hundreds of free phone cards, as well as invitations to museums, jazz concerts and fancy dinners. . . And in several dozen symposiums during the weeklong meeting, companies paid the APA about $50,000 per session to control which scientists and papers were presented and to help shape the presentations. Here's the rest of the article: