I am pleased to hear that someone is taking a stand on the issue of shootings that have been committed by individuals under the influence of psychiatric drugs. The public at large needs to write their representative in Congress and demand that these situations be looked into. There are plenty of individuals who may have emotional problems, but it seems that only those on psyche drugs are committing these horrific and random acts of violence. One needs to question how effective these drugs are when some of the individuals taking them are reacting so violently when under their influence.

All I can say to you is: THANK GOD for Prozac. It saved my life in college. Prozac and other drugs like it have saved the lives of other siblings who also struggle with depression. I only wish it had been around to help my father, who was profoundly depressed and who did not do very well on the primitive antidepressants of his era.

You seem quite ready to throw psychiatric drugs under the train, solely because a small number of people who take them react disastrously. Are you also ready to rid yourself of the dangers of the automobile, which likewise helps many more people than it hinders every day? There are numerous automobile-related deaths every day in the United States (my father himself died in a car accident), and I don’t see any serious calls for an end to car transportation.

In response to Barbara M. Roberts’ message above: To defend anti-depressant use by comparing it to the automobile is wrong. Generally accidents occur because of human error. People who become enraged and psychotic on anti-depressants are not doing so because of their own carelessness or neglect. Neither have they assumed the risk. I have yet to hear of anyone being warned by their prescriber that they could become homocidal, suicidal, manic or psychotic from the drug(s) they’re being offered. Yet everyone who gets behind the wheel knows that the risk of injury is inherent.

I take a migraine drug which has helped me immensely. I have suffered no ill effects. Still, I am aware, by the manufacturer’s own warning, that some people take this drug, have heart attacks and die. Is it ethical of me to try to dismiss and discredit such findings because I myself have suffered no ill effects and feel the drug is a boon in my life?

The irony of anti-depressants which cause suicide and murder is so accute it makes one reel. The manufacturer of Effexor now posts a warning of the risk of homocidal ideation from its own drug! Paxil has a candy-flavored version for children under two. Ms. Roberts, the notion that people–including the victims of campus masacres–are expendable for your gain is ethically indefensible. Anti-depressant use is associated with a lack of compassion. I think you prove the case.

I did a google search today typing in Cho’s full name and ADD drugs and discovered this blog. The reason for my search was, I recalled having listened to a radio show discussion on the little known fact that the Columbine shooters(at least one of them) were on antidepressent medication. I have a passion for the subject and my mission in prevention. I am a service provider of Supported Living for adults with developmental challenges for over 17 years. Early on in my business we served mostly clients with diagnosis from early childhood such as Cerebral Palsy, Down Syndrome and some developmental delays said to be of unknown cause. In the last two years, I am getting new referrals of college age adults whom I believe developmental delays and violent behaviors have been created by haste to “fix” them with drugs.
I see a pattern in their histories that is too similar to ignore. These were children who had “normal” developmental milestones, talents and gifts just like anyone of us yet, at some point, the focus shifted to their weak areas…such as communication, reading or attention to task. I believe research has shown that much of the concern over development can be cured through diet. I believe the effect of processed foods in the American diet is grossly overlooked in favor of drug intervention to mask symptoms. The violent behaviors always followed being placed on drugs…not the other way around. The developmental and emotional delays occured after the drug interventions. I also see a trend in my older adults who had lived successful lives in the community in spite of true devleopmental challenges…they have been over medicated and are now dually diagnosed with a psychiatric label and end up needing to be placed in the care of others.

First of all, this guy was raised in USA for 15 years while 6years in Korea and lived with the name Seunghui Cho. You should correct his name. Nobody called him Cho Seung-Hui with hipen in it!!! He educated by USA schools and society. Don’t abuse culture by sneaking his name.
It’s not cultural matter, not like insane ‘Max Moscow Russian’ said in the above(if he say that then, I can say 100% of Russian were psycho.
This incident has some simillarities with the killing of Kip Kinkel in May 1998 Oregon. Like majority of killers have the problem in mental and showing alination in the environment. It is not about cultural matter at all, don’t fool yourself guys!!!!

On May 21, Kinkel drove his mother’s Ford Explorer to his former high school. He wore a trenchcoat to hide the four weapons he carried, including:

Hunting Knife (purchased for him by his father)
9mm Glock 19 pistol
Ruger .22 Semi-Automatic Rifle
Ruger .22 pistol
He left his mother’s car outside the school and carried a backpack filled with ammunition. He entered the hallway and fired two shots, one fatally wounding Ben Walker and the other wounding Ryan Atteberry. Kinkel then entered the cafeteria and, walking across the cafeteria, fired the remaining 48 rounds from the 50-round magazine in his rifle, wounding 24 students and killing one by the name of Mikeal Nicholauson.

When his rifle ran out of ammunition and Kinkel began to reload, wounded student Jake Ryker tackled Kinkel, who attempted to kill Ryker with the Glock. He only managed to fire one shot before Ryker knocked the gun out of his hand. More students, including Jake’s brother Josh, helped restrain Kinkel until the police arrived and arrested him.

Nicholauson died at the scene, and Walker died after being transported to the hospital and kept on life support until his parents arrived. The other students, including Jake Ryker (who was in critical condition) were also taken to the hospital with a variety of wounds.

At the high school, he fired a total of 51 rounds, 50 being .22 bullets from the rifle, and one from the 9mm Glock.

At his sentencing, the defense presented a number of experts in mental health in an effort to prove that Kinkel was mentally ill. The only psychologist who had seen Kinkel before the shootings maintained that he was in satisfactory mental health. However, he had only seen Kinkel for a total of nine sessions, after which his parents felt that he had made satisfactory progress.

OK, one more. After re-reading the posts from the THC fan club above, I have a few more comments. Using your logic, we could just as easliy blame marijuana for causing much of the violence we’ve seen. You don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Columbine tragedy occured on 4-20 do you?? My point is an extension of my point before. You cannot point to any one reason for violence. It is a culmination of factors that produces the school shooter. You can take 1000 kids and put them on meds. One may kill others, but many more could have without psychiatric treatment.

If you actually check into the majority of people on psychiatric antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs you would find that they do not live healthier more fulfilling lives. According to mortality tables, people who are started on psych drugs will not live as long as people who aren’t started on them. Usually they get worse because their physical and mental condition will worsen slowly heading them irrevocably in the direction of partial or near total mental or physical disability. After all, if several drugs are prescribed as a cocktail and the person dies of an “overdose” what sort of physical or mental damage must these drugs be causing in lesser doses. If a person gets turned into a glassy-eyed rag doll by larger doses, what sort of damage are lesser doses causing? We aren’t talking about eating the right foods or exercising, we are talking about consumption of powerful mind-altering drugs over long periods of time or for life.

Larry, you are correct. People with mental illnesses do tend to die earlier than those without a mental illness. The reasons are numerous as to why this happens but suffice it to say that many people with very serious mental illness often lack the capacity to care for themsleves appropriately. They are also more likely to have comorbid substance abuse disorders, take excessive risks, and are more likely to die by homicide, suicide, or by accidental means. None of these things have anything to do with medication except the fact that these risks are usually decreased when the person is on an appropriate medication. I’m not sure where you’re getting your data regarding mortality but I would have to seriously question any data that suggests a person with schizophrenia who gets relief from severe hallucinations and delusions on medication does not have a better quality of life. Can you provide me with the source data you are referencing? I have never seen any data that suggests medication, as a single variable, decreases a person’s lifespan. Lots of people don’t seem to understand that mental illnesses are neuro-biological diseases. In recent years, some very fascinating research has been done in this arena. Caspi, et. al. found that the lack or lowered levels of a specific chemical in the brain called monoamine oxidase (MAO) when combined with childhood maltreatment significantly increases violence and aggression in males. There has also been some interesting work done with brain imaging and violence. Let me know what you think.

Dickson. If you want to say that the mortality rate us higher in people on psychiatric drugs because they live dangerously, you can do that. There are people who feel invincible and take dangerous risks because it makes them feel alive or its there way of surviving. What I was pointing out is, if you look at at people confined to a mental health facility, these people should live longer because supposedly they are in a quiet non-stressful atmosphere or that is the ideal of a good mental health facility but they actually deteriorate when confined and not allowed to engage in dangerous behavior. You see 28-year-olds limping with canes or walkers that you more usually see in men and women in their late 60’s, or 70’s or 80’s. Nobody has tracked what the toxicity of these powerful drugs do to a persons body and mind over time. But if you go inside a mental health facility you see this pervasive physical disability that has to be caused by the psychiatric drugs. In a quiet environment, the mortality rate should be better not worse. And if you compare the mortality rate of people the same age not on the drugs or confined in a mental health facility, those people live longer. Mental health facilities don’t want to admit what these toxic drugs are doing to the people in their care. Yet if you had to work there, it would be pretty hard to ignore the obvious. Since nobody wants to be in that environment, people can get all drugged up for years and become physically disabled and nobody objects. Because the disabled physical state is always supposedly “better” for the person than a “disordered mental state” which supposedly “causes” the deteriorated physical state. If they weren’t on the drugs there wouldn’t be the deteriorated physical state. No matter how badly a person deteriorates, that person is blamed for causing their own deterioration in themselves either by dangerous living or having a mental state that is incomprehensively dangerous to them physically. That doesn’t work scientifically or rationally. The experts just use it to get away with harming the person whose family’s only recourse is to keep them away from the “experts”.

Psychotropic drugs are EVIL. The medical community admits that they do not even know how they work (which they don’t) except all of them dry up the cerebral spinal fluid in the brain. Now they have named and renamed all these nutter pills so many times that the devil himself could not have as many names as the same old pills name over and over again. Needless to say, they are evil. How would I know? Because I have been perscribed them. Some of these blasted doctors making a killing from the pharmaceutical companies should be FORCED to take one or two themselves. I was given Mellaril in the 70’s and my blood pressure dropped below 60; but it was not the EVIL Mellaril that did it…I was just an exhausted young 18 year old mother. Seroquel was a joy. It knocks a person out colder than two bottles of any liquor….and one cannot even make it to the bathroom in time and pees their pants. Paxil gave my mother a heart attack…BUT the doctor was not allowed to write that in his records; he did tell me not to let anyone prescribe Paxil to my then 83 year old mother. She is normally calm…made a BIG mistake by telling her doctor she felt depressed sometimes. Out comes that prescription pad. She was on it for under a week and kept feeling worse and worse. She finally resorted to beating on her bed in hysterics, as she later told me after her heart was checked and there was nothing wrong except Paxil had given her a heat attack. These other wonderful pills that are not dangerous nor addictive…and just marvels of the modern science pocket book include MANY. Haldol had me sleep walking and throwing tooth brushes in the toilet. I saw a friend of mine going from being an active Mensan to being a vegetable from psychotropics. These things are EVIL. They are used to punish and control children and old people in nursing homes. They are a control mechanism that goes beyond evil. One woman I know has put all her children on this medicine and she gets checks for every one of them. When I see my doctor, I hear parents tell their children to act out in front of the doctor. These psychotropics are just plain EVIL. I have seen children go on these drugs for NO reason that I could see, and after they take those drugs they turn into evil little zombies that have no conscience nor mind of their own anymore. These drugs are killing our veterans…they perscribe Seroquel at a high dose and an antidepressent at the same time. The veterans then die in their sleep. Maybe that is what the powers that be want to have happen to them. These drugs started in the 70’s…when they closed the asylums because they were too expensive to run. I have had to be a psychiatric patient more than one time…and I have watched people becoming drooling monstors or mindless bodies, and I cannot think of anything so evil as these drugs. The horror stories just continue and no one calls out what the REAL problem is…from school killings to people going crazy. My friend who does not smoke, drink, nor curse…went crazy at her workplace; she tore down the paper towel rack, took a plunger, and slammed the walls in the bathroom. She told her boss. She went home, grabbed those idiot pills and told her doctor to NEVER give her anything like that AGAIN!!!!! I was given some more antidepressents when I worked in Atlanta…oh, something new and better. I went to the grocery store and felt OK. All of a sudden, I slung my cart at an inhuman force that went speeding down the aisle and almost struck an old lady. It slammed into the dairy case with such force that it turned over. I gathered up what I could and was SHOCKED at what I had done. I was going to make a bank deposit for my store…but just left a lot of the money in the dairy case and quickly left before someone called the police. Like my friend, I went home and got the stupid pills; marched past a screaming secretary, slammed them on the desk of the so called psychiatrist and asked her what she thought she was trying to do to ME…as I would rather die than act like a monstor. Don’t ever tell your doctor that you are depressed! Don’t ever let them give this poison to your children. Some parents do and then sell some of it on the street…like adderoll. They get their children on checks for being ‘disabled’. The whole nightmare is sickening and someone had better wake up quick to what has become America’s REAL drug problem!!!!! There is no heroin-no crack-no cocaine=no anything that could equal the legitimization of this poison and the money that these sisister doctors and poison pill factories make and destroy us with. Yes, maybe I AM crazy, but I DO think it is all a plan to help destroy this country and bring in a NEW WORLD ORDER. I have never seen anything so evil being so praised and it being so evil!!!!! It is going to get worse.