Fri, 15 Feb 2008
Why the Violence?
Yesterday another student went on a killing spree in Illinois. I just want to point out that this sort of murder-suicide was all but unknown when I was a child. This is a new malady caused by modern medicine. The new class of antidepressants, selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have long been associated with violence, mutilation, and self-destructive behavior. As Dr. Alan Gaby explains:
Whitaker cites a study by Dr. David Healy, showing that when people without mental illness were given the SSRI drug sertraline (Zoloft), 20% became suicidal. There has also been a long-held suspicion that Prozac causes some people to become obsessed with killing themselves. The hall-of-fame singer Del Shannon, whose 1961 smash hit Runaway was number one on the charts for eight weeks, shot himself in the head in 1990, 15 days after starting Prozac. According to his wife, Shannon was, at the time, an emotionally healthy individual who had been prescribed the drug to help him through a period of relatively minor stress. Abby Hoffman, the political radical and founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies), also committed suicide shortly after starting Prozac.
Eli Lilly faced a series of lawsuits connecting Prozac with violence, but through some sharp legal tactics managed to finesse the issue. However, later it was discovered that Eli Lilly had hidden evidence connecting Prozac with violence:
Congressman Maurice Hinchey, a member of the Appropriations Committee, which oversees federal agencies including the F.D.A., said the documents date back to the 1980's and include memos between Eli Lilly employees: "clearly show a link between Prozac and actions of violence perpetrated by people taking the drug against themselves and against others. The documents we have show that the company was instructing its employees to hide this information. We're seeing evidence here that it was a conscious act on the part of the company."
One factor all these murder-suicide cases have in common is that the perpetrators have all been under a doctor's care for years and loaded to the gills with prescribed medications, including SSRIs. It's scary to contemplate how common these prescriptions are. If modern America is a scary place, modern medicine shares part of the blame.
