Hell must be getting chilly right about now.
I think there is a bigger link with people who have mental problems, the severity of that problem and the ability of medication to treat that problem.
The world is a lot more densely populated today than it was just a hundred years-ago. In 1915 the estimated world population was 1.8 billion; today the estimate is 7.3 billion; since 1959, the world population increases by about a billion every 12-13 years. This is largely due to decreased infant mortality rates and vaccinations.
Point being, there have always been folks who suffered from depression, or were just plain batshit crazy. In the not too recent past those folks didn’t make it to adulthood, often if they did they were criminals, hermits, the town drunk, or the crazy guy everyone either stayed away from or messed with. In the more recent past many of those folks were institutionalized.
Today, the vast majority of folks with diagnosed depression or psychotic tendencies are controlled by medication, far more than those who go postal or active shooter. They do far more good than harm.
But you know, if we took all the guns away…
Maybe a better approach would be to reduce publicity of mass murder so the unbalanced don’t fixate on it. That way when they go off they will likely only harm those close to them who ignored the warning signs.
I attended a School Violence workshop several years ago and the issue of mental health and prescription drugs was discussed. Check out the data on the attachment. It makes a person think.
Here’s a whole website full of incidents where something bad happened and the actor involved was using SSRI medications, or recently came off of them. We all know “correlation is not causation” and therefore this alone is not proof of causation, but there’s certainly some connection. The only other logical connection I can think of is that people prone to mass murder are being prescribed SSRI drugs - in other words, independent cause but still a potential red flag.
That little expose jumped to conclusions and was about as ignorant as most anti-gun news stories. Just another opportunity to blame something other than the evil individual who actually committed the crime. Another example of blaming a widely used product for the actions of a few people.
Anti-depressants don’t turn normal people into psycho killers. If that were the case, there would be a hell of a lot more psycho killers running around. I speak from personal experience and from having numerous friends and family who have taken SSRIs for years for various reasons. The main issue is that the anti-depressants just don’t treat the underlying problem that would make a person do that. The problem is that SSRIs are not a treatment for psychotic disorders or personality disorders. The nuts who go on shooting sprees were going to do it whether or not they were on medication.
I know what many people want is for the cure for anxiety and depression to be smacking a person upside the head and telling them to “quit bitching and grow a ****ing pair for Christ’s sake.” But if that were the case, nobody would have ever had to take medication. The stuff helped me with my OCD, helped my wife with her anxiety, helped my dad with his depression, and helped many police officers and combat vets I know with their stress.
I’ll be damned if I let anyone take away my guns because someone else did something awful with a similar gun. I’ll be damned if someone tells me I can’t take medication that’s helping me because it may or may not have caused someone else to do something awful. And if anyone says I have to choose either medication or being able to own guns but not both, **** that.
no it does not make normal people go overboard but allows folks who are borderline to cross that line that much easier which is a problem
and not of the drug but the abuse of doctors subscribing it to often IMHO
I agree 100%. What I find amazing is a member of the MSM is saying something besides “It’s the guns fault”.
I don’t believe it is the SSRI that causes the issue. It is the fact that someone with a propensity to go unhinged is more likely to be on an SSRI that someone who without psychiatric illness. The key lies in determining WHICH psychiatric diagnoses and personality traits are high risk. Obviously schizophrenia is at the top of the list. Frankly, it should not be that difficult to search electronic data from these mass shooters to determine the common factors. Look at FB, other social media, emails, texts.
It is very similar to “Which came first the Chicken or the Egg?”.
I have a friend who has some pretty severe issues, both physical and psychological due to his service, the best thing that ever happened to him was his Girlfriend, now Wife sitting down with all of these meds and cross checking them with a PDR and Health Care Professionals. Many of the meds he had been prescribed were in conflict with each other and were hurting his quality of life, with time and lots of help from his Doctors he has whittled two dozen meds to include a pain pump down to a manageable number and he is for all purposes, a new and better Man.
Now if you don’t have someone in your life who has that kind of smarts and love in their heart for you, you very well could be in trouble.
On the other hand and something totally different, how do you deal with a mentally ill and potentially violent loved one, especially a child?
There aren’t a lot of alternatives anymore for people with severe mental issues, it would seem the name of the game is to medicate them, or perhaps over medicate them. Now that’s simply not going to work for everyone, especially without the kind of awareness not everyone seems to have about these meds.
The other side of that same coin may be that many people want to convince themselves, no matter what evidence is available that their loved ones do not need to be institutionalized.
Until we take mental illness seriously and put the money up, we can only expect more of these incidents, at least that is what I believe.
I get really damned tired of hearing someone say “I knew it was going to happen one of these days.”
A couple of years ago I had an interesting conversation with a physician who was buying a rifle from me. It was shortly after Sandy Hook and I mentioned something about the seeming connection between SSRIs and mass killings. He mentioned that a close friend of his, also a physician, had told him about taking an SSRI drug for mild depression and having new and frequent homicidal thoughts, which he hadn’t had before starting the drug. He stopped taking it and after a few weeks stopped having them. Fortunately he recognized and corrected the problem. Now, is this other doctor normal or somehow prone to violence - I have no idea. But he apparently found it weird and disturbing enough to share it with a friend.
If you look at the correlations between SSRI drugs and weird behavior, you’ll find that there are correlations not only with murder but also suicide, adultery and specifically the weird modern phenomena of seemingly attractive and normal adult women pursuing teenage boys for sex, which just doesn’t show up in my history books before the current era. I’m not saying there is pure cause and effect, but I suspect there is some contributing cause in some people.
SSRIs are a whole class of drugs that aren’t very well understood scientifically, but are nonetheless widely prescribed and used. Nearly all drugs, psych and otherwise, have varying effects in different people. It’s quite possible that SSRIs are OK in many people but do actually cause some small subset of people to basically go nuts. I don’t see this being studied seriously.
My comments aren’t directed at the tv news piece.
I’m gonna go with, there’s a link between being diagnosed as ****ed in the head and taking antidepressants. And people that are jacked in the head have higher tendency to do jacked up stuff.
Perhaps those inclined to commit mass-shootings are demon-possessed. Jesus cast out many demons.
you cant talk about that! Big Pharma will pull your advertising. Of which are some of the biggest advertising budgets in the nation
So instead of using the Left’s tactic of “blame the gun, not the evil person” we’ve moved to “blame the medication, not the evil person?”
As far as I know, Flanagan/Williams drug history or lack thereof isn’t known. Roof was only mentioned to have used an opioid drug for withdrawal from painkillers. Holmes was using Vicodin. These are three of the most infamous cases being discussed. It’s no surprise that people with mental health issues are some of the most prone to have serious substance abuse issues.
But let’s pretend that doesn’t matter and get back to basic mental health and treatment.
By the time a person seeks treatment for mental disorders, especially extreme psychotic disorders, it can be too late. A doctor simply cannot know the degree of a person’s issues with a few visits. That’s complicated by these patients having difficulty expressing or even intentionally hiding their true problems.
Erratic and impulsive behavior complicates the patients taking their medication properly and missing followup appointments or even stopping therapy all together.
Doctors are often in no-win situations. They have the job of honing in on some of the worst disorders in the shortest amounts of time before it’s too late. What works for the majority of patients, prescribing typical antidepressants, obviously doesn’t work for everyone. The doctor may not have the time nor means to see that the SSRI they prescribed as the first line of treatment did not work for these psychos.
Sometimes it’s just a losing battle.
Medication is, generally speaking, over used by the medical profession.
Until I intervened and started asking questions, my mother was on far too many medications. She is now down from nine or so daily meds to three, that are probably doing more good than harm.
Anti-depressants are being over used, just like everything else, I wouldn’t be surprised if these medicines are a contributing factor.
Let’s say I have insomnia and I tell my doctor I’ve tried everything to sleep. He writes me a prescription and I try the medication for weeks but I still can’t sleep. Or let’s say I can finally sleep but forget to take my daily dose or run out.
Then one day on my way to work I doze off, cause a crash and kill somebody.
Should the doctor or medication be blamed? Or should I be blamed?
Blame the car. :no:
It isn’t about “blame” it is about identifying the problem and fixing it if possible. Hope you folks don’t work in environments where every time something goes wrong you play the blame game instead of accepting people make mistakes and learn from them.
I have to agree with 99% of what you wrote, but the issue is everyone is afraid to recommend committing someone for observation, be that Healthcare Professionals or family members.
You can’t love away some severe mental illness