corbett medicated to death ssris and mass killings

| by James Corbett
| `BoilingFrogsPost.com `__
| April 16, 2014

In May 1998, 15 year old Kip Kinkel murdered his parents and two
classmates, as well as injuring 25 others, after engaging in a shooting
spree that ended up in his school’s cafeteria. In the investigation it
emerged that he `had been
taking `__
popular antidepressant medication Prozac since the summer of the
previous year.

In December 2000, Michael McDermott went on a shooting rampage at his
workplace, Edgewater Technologies, killing seven of his co-workers.
During his trial, the court heard testimony that in the weeks before the
shooting, McDermott had `tripled the
dosage `__ of his
antidepressant medication, Prozac, from 70 milligrams per day to 210
milligrams.

In March 2005, 16 year old Jeff Weise shot and killed nine people,
including five students at Red Lake Senior High School in Minnesota,
before turning the gun on himself. It was later revealed he had been
undergoing treatment for depression and had `been on
Prozac `__
at the time.

In September 2008, Finnish post-secondary student Matti Saari shot and
killed ten other students on campus before killing himself. The official
Finnish government report on the incident revealed that he had been
`taking an SSRI
medication `__
at the time of the shooting.

SSRI stands for Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitor, and it is a
class of drugs that is often used to treat depression and anxiety. It
includes Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Paxil and a host of other commonly
prescribed antidepressants. And the perpetrators of a raft of school
shootings, mass murders and other violent incidents in recent years have
been taking them.

And so it was perhaps not surprising when the culprit of this month’s
mass shooting at Fort Hood, Specialist Ivan Lopez, turned out to be
`taking unnamed
antidepressants `__
himself.

Although it has yet to be reported (and may in fact never be revealed)
precisely what type of antidepressant Lopez was taking or whether it was
an SSRI, the number of confirmed SSRI shooters in recent years has
raised the question of a causal link between the medication and
incidents of violence.

Although the drug manufacturers are quick to downplay this connection as
`anecdotal or
coincidental `__
mounting scientific evidence points to a strong correlation between the
use of psychiatric drugs in general, and SSRIS in particular, and
violent behavior.

In 2010, the Public Library of Science published a study titled
“ `Prescription Drugs Associa
ted with Reports of Violence Towards
Others `__ ”
which examined how 484 drugs were associated with 1,937 documented cases
of violent behaviour. Of those 484 drugs, 31 of them were responsible
for 79% of the violence, including 11 antidepressants.

When incidents of school massacres in the US are charted against
prescription of psychiatric medication, the correlation is undeniable.
Further research is needed to establish if there is a causal linkage
between these pharmaceuticals and the incidents of violence, but critics
of the big pharmaceutical manufacturers complain such research is
hampered by the low standards for reporting that these companies are
held to.

One such critic, `David Healy `__, author of
over 150 peer-reviewed papers in the field of psychiatry and the author
of numerous books, including
`Pharmageddon `__,
joined me on `The Corbett
Report `__
last week to discuss this issue.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that the general public is
often, as in the case of the Fort Hood shooter, left in a state of limbo
regarding the medical history of the perpetrators of these mass shooting
events. Often stories are reported with vague and unconfirmed details
about “antidepressants” or sometimes just medication. It can be
difficult for the average person to sort through the daily reports of
adverse and violent effects of these types of drugs.

One website that helps in that effort is
`SSRIStories.org `__. Begun in the 1990s,
it is a repository of over 5000 news articles in which prescription
drugs were linked to adverse events, including incidents of violence.
Last week Julie Wood, one of the proprietors of the site, `joined
me `__
to discuss the problem of sorting through the often incomplete
information from these reports.

In the final equation, the question of the causal linkage between SSRIs
and indeed other forms of psychiatric drugs and incidents of violence
needs to be taken seriously. There are many factors at play here, from
differences in individual reactions to the fact that people who are more
likely to commit violent acts in the first place are often the people
who are prescribed these drugs.

But the threat of violence has been taken seriously enough that the FDA
in the US, the Ministry of Health in Japan and other similar bodies in
countries around the world have added a warning in their guidelines for
antidepressants. According to the `Japanese Ministry of
Health `__, “There are
cases where we cannot rule out a causal relationship [of hostility,
anxiety, and sudden acts of violence] with the medication.” And in the
`FDA
formulation `__:
“Antidepressant medicines may increase suicidal thoughts or actions in
some children, teenagers, and young adults within the first few months
of treatment.”

How can it be seen to be a good thing for anyone but the drug
manufacturers themselves that these drugs have been on the market for
decades and the bodies in charge of regulating them still can only offer
such wishy-washy, non-evidence based statements? The issue of
drug-linked violence is one that we as a society need to start
discussing and acting on soon, otherwise we will continue to let the
status quo be ruled not by doctors or patients or their loved ones, and
certainly not by the victims of these mass murders, but by the men in
the board rooms of these pharmaceutical companies who have been shown
time and time again to `care about
nothing `__ other than
their own bottom line.