{"id":108845,"date":"2018-04-09T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=108845"},"modified":"2018-04-05T16:12:59","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T15:12:59","slug":"psych-drugs-and-guns-dont-mix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/04\/psych-drugs-and-guns-dont-mix\/","title":{"rendered":"Psych Drugs and Guns Don\u2019t Mix"},"content":{"rendered":"

3 Apr 2018<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cViolence and other potentially criminal behaviors caused by prescription drugs are medicine\u2019s best kept secret.\u201d <\/em>
\n— <\/em>David Healy, UK psychiatrist and author (and co-founder of www.RxISK.org)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe establishment media ignores the scientific evidence linking psychiatric medications and violent behavior because psychiatry is the religion of the mainstream media, and they don\u2019t want to see the dangers of psychiatrically prescribed drugs.\u201d <\/em>
\n— <\/em>Peter R. Breggin, psychiatrist and author (www.breggin.org)<\/p>\n

\u201cIn some European nations it is against the law for doctors to prescribe SSRIs for children and adolescents because of 1) the lack of long-term safety studies and 2) the known increased incidence of violence and suicide.\u201d<\/em>
\n— From http:\/\/www.globalnewscentre.com\/duty-to-warn-the-red-lake-school-shootings-10th-anniversary\/#sthash.TB6ZespH.dpbs<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe FDA has warned that any abrupt change in dose, whether starting on, increasing, decreasing or discontinuing the drug, skipping doses by forgetting, or when switching from one antidepressant to another where you are both abruptly decreasing one antidepressant AND abruptly increasing the new antidepressant can cause suicide, hostility or psychosis \u2013 generally a manic psychosis which is often (mis-)diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder or occasionally as Schizophrenia when it is actually caused by the abrupt change in dose. Another problem can be if another antidepressant is added to one you are already takin,g thus producing a synergistic affect.<\/em> Withdrawal, especially abrupt withdrawal, from any of these medications can cause severe neuropsychiatric as well as physical symptoms, both of which can be life threatening.\u201d <\/strong><\/em>
\n\u2013 <\/em><\/strong>From http:\/\/ssristories.net\/archive\/indexb6a1.html?sort=date&p<\/a><\/p>\n

“It is difficult to get a man to understand<\/em> something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!<\/em>” <\/em>
\n\u2013 <\/em>Upton Sinclair, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist American author from the early decades of the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sinclair\u2019s 1903 novel \u201cJungle\u201d was about the horrific slaughterhouse practices in the meat-packing industry in Chicago. That powerful book led to President Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s pushing through the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. (Ed note: Upton Sinclair\u2019s axiom, if taken to heart, applies to almost every employee, investor, CEO or member of every board of directors of every polluting, for-profit industry as well as for most of us physicians, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, nurses, pharmacists, drug sales reps, journalists, banker-lenders and the employees and CEOs of every company that makes or markets toxic substances, drugs and vaccines\u2013 (with the exception of those courageous ones who stood up and spoke out against the injustice or the pollution that their industries were participating in). I was recently reminded of the lyrics of a Peter, Paul and Mary song that included the lyrics: \u201cIf you\u2019ve been to jail for justice, then you\u2019re a friend of mine\u201d.<\/em><\/strong> Upton Sinclair would have resonated with that song.)<\/p>\n

<<<Psychoactive Drugs and Violence>>><\/strong><\/p>\n

In my weekly Duty to Warn columns I have frequently written about the connections between 1) the wide-spread prescribing of dangerous psychiatric drugs to humans whose brains have not fully developed and 2) the large variety of violent, often criminal behaviors that are committed by the newly drug-intoxicated patients.<\/p>\n

These abnormal drug-induced behaviors can occur either while the patient is \u201cunder the influence\u201d of the drug or while the patient is going through the crazy-making withdrawal process when the patient stops or reduces the dosage of the drug – usually because of intolerable side effects.<\/p>\n

For much more on this reality, see the addendum at the end of this column that discusses the not uncommon incidence of fully resolvable, drug-induced behaviors that include transient psychoses, homicidal violence, suicidality and a large variety of irrational behaviors.<\/p>\n

Importantly, such drug-induced behaviors are NOT mental illnesses but still are commonly diagnosed as such and then tragically \u201ctreated\u201d with life-long psychiatric drugs as if they were mental illnesses! The DSM IV code for that reality is 292.11. I wrote a column in 2012 that discussed 31 of Big Pharma\u2019s most popular psychoactive drugs and their astonishingly high risks of causing violence. The link to that article is: http:\/\/duluthreader.com\/articles\/2012\/04\/05\/299_many_psychoactive_drugs_are_strongly_associated<\/a><\/p>\n

The most infamous of those psychiatric drug-induced criminal behaviors happens to be the uniquely American epidemic of mass school shootings, of which the Parkland, Florida shooting is just one of the most recent ones. Not usually so well-publicized are the many acts of asocial behaviors, poor judgements (or actual crimes) which includes such actions as impulsive thefts, inappropriate sexual conduct, physical assaults, homicidal thinking, suicidality, drug-induced psychotic episodes, drug-induced mania, drug-induced OCD symptoms, drug-induced anxiety or depression, drug-induced, crazy-making sleep-deprivation, etc.<\/p>\n

Illicit intoxicating drugs and alcohol are often accurately mentioned by \u201cthe authorities\u201d as potential root causes of abnormal behaviors or criminal acts, but when legal, intoxicating prescription drugs are involved, most police, psychiatrists, lawyers and journalists don\u2019t even consider the possibility that those psychoactive drugs could be a factor, despite the well-documented fact that the molecular structures, brain-damaging effects and mechanisms of action of both types of drugs can be identical.<\/p>\n

<<<Psychoactive Drugs and Brain Damage>>><\/strong><\/p>\n

In addition to warning about the many abnormal behaviors and criminal acts that are commonly associated with the use of psychoactive drugs, I have often written about the tight connections between violence and the many neurotoxic (ie, brain-damaging) effects of psychiatric drug use – which includes dementia, personality disorders, brain shrinkage, addiction\/dependency, and the many varieties of withdrawal syndromes. These outcomes are well documented, but when these highly profitable, well-advertised, and popularized Big Pharma products are factors in public crimes, the whole truth is likely to be sabotaged, the connections buried and the primary role of the prescribed drugs hidden away, another teachable moment is wasted and we physician\u2019s blameworthy prescribing habits continue unchanged. Prestige and doctor-patient confidentiality and all that.<\/p>\n

The deadly relationship between prescription drug use and gun homicidality range from simple threats to \u201cmass\u201d shootings (which, according to the FBI\u2019s definition of \u201cmass shooting\u201d, only applies when 4 or more gunshot victims actually die. Hence when an angry, humiliated, abusive \u201cboyfriend\u201d or ex-spouse shoots and kills his estranged partner and their two kids, the FBI does not regard that as a mass shooting!<\/p>\n

<<<Psychoactive Drugs and Guns: A Very Bad Combination>>><\/strong><\/p>\n

A good example of the connections between drugs and guns is the 2005 school shooting incident in Red Lake, Minnesota. Jeff Weise, the 16 year-old shooter, had just had the dose of Prozac<\/strong> upped to an unconscionable, highly toxic, 60 mg per day! Eli Lilly & Company\u2019s<\/strong> popular, so-called \u201canti-depressant\u201d drug Prozac<\/strong> was never proven to be safe at such a high dosage, particularly for adolescents. Indeed, the recommended starting dose for adults (as approved by the FDA) was 10 \u2013 20 mg per day, which, for 10% of the population is not normally metabolizable and therefore even small doses of psych drugs can be toxic overdoses! Jeff Weise was tragically being overdosed with a dangerous brain-altering drug, unbeknownst to him, his psychiatrist and his community. His worsening depression, sleep deprivation, fear, hatred, self-hatred, aggression, suicidality and homicidality were actually being caused by his so-called drug \u201ctreatment\u201d! It should be obvious to any open-minded observer that the shooter\u2019s drug was a far more important motivating factor in the school shooting than the gun that he used to irrationally kill his family members, himself and his schoolmates. And that the tragic affair was iatrogenic (doctor- or treatment-induced).<\/p>\n

Over the past several generations there has developed an unholy alliance between the following handful of corporate-controlled, profit-at-all-cost entities that have been prime suspects for the rapid rise in American school shootings and other mass shootings:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Big Pharma; the multinational pharmaceutical industry;<\/li>\n
  2. Big Government and its various agencies such as the corporate-subsidized and influenced FDA, CDC, NIMH, NIH, etc;<\/li>\n
  3. Big Medicine and Big Psychiatry and most of its physicians, trade associations and their journals (like the AMA, the APA, the AAP, AAFP, etc);<\/li>\n
  4. Big Pharma\u2019s Washington, DC lobbyists and the legislators that are in the back pockets of corporations;<\/li>\n
  5. Big Insurance and the HMOs, who have chosen to favor (and reimburse for) non-curative psych drug treatments over the potentially curative psychotherapy;<\/li>\n
  6. the NRA and the weapons manufacturers it lobbies for;<\/li>\n
  7. Big Media, the entity that refused to publish the factual information that might offend their wealthy Big Pharma advertisers because such truths might adversely impact their bottom line; and<\/li>\n
  8. Wall Street and Big Finance, whose lending institutions and investment groups that salivate over the huge profits to be made in any industry that sells addictive products that customers can\u2019t stop taking, even if it is killing them.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    <<<My Perspective on the Drug\/Gun Connection>>><\/strong><\/p>\n

    For the decade prior to my retirement from family practice medicine in rural Minnesota, I practiced holistic mental health care in Duluth, Minnesota a small city in the northeast part of the state. My independent solo practice largely dealt with the sickened, over-dosed and addicted survivors of conventional drug-based psychiatry. Every patient that came to me for help had never had a really thorough biopsychosocial (or drug) history taken. All of those drug-toxified patients had been too-rapidly diagnosed and then reflexively treated with neurotoxic psych drugs, usually in combinations that had never been adequately tested for safety or long-term efficacy. By the time my patients had come to see me, most of them had been over-diagnosed and mis-diagnosed with a large variety of often mutually-exclusive DSM coded disorders and then over-treated and\/or mis-treated with cocktails of neurotoxic drugs whose mechanisms of action often conflicted one with the other. It soon became clear to me that my major responsibilities had to be: to re-assess each patient, re-diagnose them, re-educate them and then help them start the process of gradually tapering down the drugs that had both sickened and addicted them.<\/p>\n

    During that decade, I acquired a unique fund of insider knowledge about how psychiatry was being practiced behind the closed doors of out-patient clinics, psychiatric in-patient treatment facilities and electroshock rooms. In order to sort everything out, I had to re-learn what I actually had never been taught in med school or in my continuing education courses (which had ALL been partially planned and paid for by Big Pharma). In order to be successful in helping drug-toxified patients, I had to become familiar with psychology, brain chemistry, brain pathophysiology, brain nutrition and the molecular structures and mechanisms of action of the illicit drugs, the over-the-counter drugs and the legal psychoactive prescription drugs that my sickened patients had been exposed to over their lifetimes.<\/p>\n

    That decade of hard work helping patients get off or at least cut down the dosages of their drugs was sobering yet enlightening. But what I learned about the brain damage and the long-term dangers that those synthetic chemicals posed to patients, convinced me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, of the tight connection between psych drugs and medication-induced violence. Those adverse effects included homicidality, suicidality, akathisia, sleep-deprivation, irrational behaviors, restlessness, aggression, toxic psychosis, mania, worsening depression, behavioral dys-control and acute and tardive akathisia, dyskinesia and bradykinesia (Parkinson\u2019s) . And what was so sobering to me was the fact that any of those drug-induced, iatrogenic symptoms were commonly mistaken for new or recurring \u201cmental illnesses of unknown cause\u201d and therefore promptly mis-treated with more toxic drugs!<\/p>\n

    I witnessed again and again the mis-diagnoses and drug-induced tragedies to which my patients had been unnecessarily subjected. And they had all been made worse because of the long-term us of their brain-altering, brain-damaging cocktails of drugs despite the evidence that I had uncovered that revealed that most of them had not actually had a mental illness in the first place.<\/p>\n

    Most of my patients had been normal up until the time that they had become victims of brain trauma, drug- or vaccine poisoning, severe neglect during child-rearing or significant psychological, physical, sexual, military or spiritual trauma anytime during their brain-development and up-bringing.<\/p>\n

    All during my experience as an un-wanted insider observing up close and personal what was the common practice of drug-centered psychiatry, I was slowly beginning to realize how widespread must be the mis-treatment of patients elsewhere around the world. I eventually realized that I might be in a position to do something about what had to be considered an iatrogenic and drug-induced disaster. The 1,200 patients with which I had worked so hard over the decade represented a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of other victims of Big Pharma and Big Psychiatry world-wide. Having only directly impacted 1,200 patients over the decade, it became obvious to me that my advocacy for damaged patients couldn\u2019t stop with my retirement. Hence my continued journalistic efforts to raise consciousness about these serious issues, even if my consciousness-raising might be regarded as a threat to the members of the 7 groups of wealthy obstructionists listed above.<\/p>\n

    It should be clear to every open-minded reader that psychiatric drugs are over-promoted and over-sold for huge profits by the entities listed above. It should be clear that Big Pharma\u2019s dangerous, potentially addictive and unaffordable drugs are often cavalierly and ignorantly prescribed by Big Psychiatry\u2019s psychiatrists and Big Medicine\u2019s physicians to desperate, obedient, vulnerable, brain-washed patients who are often erroneously told to \u201ctake these medications for the rest of your lives\u201d and then \u201csee me every month or three for the rest of your lives for your brief med checks and prescription renewals\u201d. It should be clear that Big Media, Big Medicine\u2019s lobbying groups and its medical journals all benefit from the lucrative advertising revenues that they get from Big Pharma and therefore refuse to publish valid articles by authors and journalists who know that they should be exposing Big Pharma\u2019s propaganda, corrupted clinical trials and other evil agendas – but are not allowed to do so.<\/p>\n

    The New York Times\u2019 masthead slogan, \u201cAll the News That\u2019s Fit to Print\u201d, is seriously deceptive when it comes to that premier newspaper\u2019s obvious reluctance to step on the big toes of the pharmaceutical industry or the psychiatric industry when their powerful propaganda claims are exposed as false, dangerous or criminal. As Dr Peter Breggin so accurately wrote:<\/p>\n

    \u201cThe establishment media ignores the scientific evidence linking psychiatric medications and violent behavior because psychiatry is the religion of the mainstream media, and they don\u2019t want to see the dangers of psychiatrically prescribed drugs.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    90+% of American school shooters were either \u201cunder the influence\u201d of legal brain-altering drugs at the time of the shootings or were experiencing the confusing and crazy-making symptoms of drug withdrawal. Eric Harris, the Columbine school shooter, blogged how he could alter the level of his aggressiveness and hatred for society and certain of his classmates by altering the dose of his Luvox<\/strong> (a Prozac look-alike drug marketed originally by Solvay Pharmaceuticals<\/strong>, then by Jazz Pharmaceuticals<\/strong> and Abbott Labs<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

    The punishment of inadvertently drug-intoxicated individuals needs to be informed by the reality of the above information, just like bartenders who may at times legally share some of the responsibility for the victims of the crimes committed by their intoxicated customers. That principle should also apply when justice is sought for the innocent victims of mass shootings. That of course would open up a can of worms for the assorted guilty parties who have falsely and widely promoted the false notion that psych drugs are safe and non-addictive, implying that the shooter\u2019s genetics and innate badness are entirely to blame for the violent acts and NOT the guilty brain-altering drug or the prescribers or manufacturers of the guilty drug.<\/p>\n

    If one were to paraphrase the silly, distracting NRA mantra that wants to shift the blame, Big Pharma could proclaim that \u201cDrugs Don\u2019t Kill People; People Kill People\u201d but they would be as wrong as the NRA because, in the case of deadly psychiatric drugs and deadly guns, both the drugs and the guns as well as the people and the corporations that are cavalierly dishing them out all must share the blame.<\/p>\n

    The information below lists a short list (of a hundred or so) cases where prescription psych drugs had large influences in American\u2019s school shootings prior to 2012. This is a partial list, just like any list of non-school shootings would measure in the thousands. Antidepressants of all types are well-known to cause anger, aggression, sleep deprivation, worsening depression, hostility, suicidality and an \u201cI don\u2019t give a damn attitude\u201d. Without those drug effects, the impulse to kill or suicide may never have occurred.<\/p>\n

    And, prior to the easy access to addictive, neurotoxic and lethal drug prescriptions and prior to the easy access to affordable, easy-to-shoot and highly lethal weapons of mass destruction (thanks to the NRA and the highly profitable weapons-manufacturing sector for which the NRA is a propaganda and lobbying tool), any psychiatric drug-induced motivation to avenge some perceived injustice or dis-respect might have only resulted in a fist fight or knife attack.<\/p>\n

    Guns and drugs don\u2019t mix.<\/p>\n

    For much more on the sobering connections between irrational acts of violence and other dangerous aspects of psychotropic drugs, check out<\/p>\n