This is a great article from the NY Times (which is rare) about what kind of role anti-depressants played at the NIU tragedy.
In a word they probably played no role whatsoever.
Kazmierczak was on Prozac and was off of it for three days prior to the shooting. According to the article Prozac doesn’t leave your system in that time.
Now the anti-depressant Luddites will still use this as an argument because they can’t make up their minds if being on or off anti-depressants cause situations like this.
Most medical professionals quoted in the article say that when patients on anti-depressants have violent outbursts like this it usually indicates another underlying problem.
And I’m sure they’ll also ignore this quote.
Dr. Michael Stone, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia, maintains a database of 1,000 violent crimes, including mass murders, going back decades. In many cases the accused had stopped taking drugs for schizophrenia, Dr. Stone said.
“I only have a handful of cases,” he added, “where the person was on an antidepressant.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if Kazmierczak had undiagnosed schizophrenia.
Personally I couldn’t laud the benefits of anti-depressants enough. Being on one has literally saved my life.
(Trench Reynolds blogs about school violence at TheTrenchcoat Chronicles)
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackActually, he had stopped taking Prozac three weeks before the rampage.
Prozac has a long half life, which means it takes two to three weeks to work or get out of one’s system…unlike shorter acting anti depressants.
For people on long term anti depressants, there is a mild “withdrawal”, but it is rare on Prozac because the half life is long and the withdrawal slope is low.
In other words, we can’t blame it on Prozac or on Prozac withdrawal.
From what some say, he was a normal kid. Schizophrenics are often described as “weird” because of their flat affect. He was also being treated for “obsessive compulsive” symptoms.
But OCD isn’t associated with paranoia. However, bipolar disease is, and acute paranoid delusions can be found in the manic phase. And cases are often misdiagnosed, especially early in the disease.
Giving anti depressants can “flip” a depression into a manic phase of bipolar, but if this was the problem, friends could report he was up all night, taking downers, hypersexual, spending like mad etc. before the rampage.
So without a firm “psychiatric autopsy” we will never know.
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