Prozac a factor in rampage?
When something horrible happens like the shootings in Red Lake, Minnesota from 16 year old Jeff Weise, I get so tired of reading that the culprit must have been the antidepressant he was taking. In this case, it looks like they are going to blame the popular antidepressant Prozac as the culprit.
They claim that since his daily dosage was increased to 60mg per day, that must have caused it. I was on 80mg per day, along with other antidepressants to boost the effects of Prozac, and it didn’t make me want to go out and kill people. It had other effects on me that weren’t altogether pleasant, but I dealt with them.
If society wants this kind of thing to stop, they should start looking at the real cause of it, and stop trying to pawn the blame off on some chemical that can’t defend itself.
The real blame is our society. We embrace violence. It is in our movie theaters, it is on our streets, it is in just about every facet of our lives. And sometimes, it is in very innocuous things that we gloss over. A commercial comes to mind about Honey Nut Cheerios. This man is eating Honey Nut Cheerios. A group of cowboys are around him and one of them ask him what he’s eating. He replies, “Nut’N Honey”. They all draw their guns and point them to his head as if they are about to blow his brains out. And, that was funny?
That is part of the culture we have cultivated. You have a problem, you don’t deal with it and work your feelings out on it. You get even. That may mean playing a cruel trick on someone, or it may mean that you get a gun and really get even. Guns are everywhere. I don’t own a gun, but I’m sure if I put my mind to it, I could have one in my hands before the day was over.
And it’s not like we are doing anything about it. The right to bear arms after all, is a “right” of all Americans. So why then are we so confused when we hear about some student who was bullied or made fun of, all the sudden go off the deep end and seek revenge for the wrongs done to him?
It’s really no mystery to me. If you want to solve this problem, we have to stop looking at the smoking guns (the real guns and the Prozac’s that we blame) and really start looking at what is at the heart of all of this: OUR SICK SOCIETY THAT BREEDS HATRED AND VIOLENCE.
You want the killings to stop? Let’s start there because that is what really let this happen.
RED LAKE, MINN. -- Relatives of high school killer Jeff Weise, 16, believe the popular anti-depressant Prozac, may have played a role in the teen’s rampage. Friends and family members have said he had been taking Prozac since a suicide scare last summer.
Family members told the New York Times newspaper Weise’s dose was recently increased to 60 mg a day.
“I can’t help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off,” an aunt, Tammy Lussier, said. (source)
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Have you ever considered that someone or some entity may be interested in developing this kind of violence in kids precisely because it is useful when channelled into combat? Are you aware of the "New Freedom in Mental Health Act" scheduled to debut in June, which has been developed to screen out the 'mentally ill' kids among the public school population so they can get medicated on the new psychiatric drugs as soon as possible?
It is not the drugs to blame in my opinion i think it is the parents fault,to many parents let their children think and act like adults too soon, giving them to much freedom,sending them to therpy will not help if all they need is stronger discipline,people will blame it on drugs but the real problem starts at home,the young man who murdered my nephew, was in trouble with the law at the age of 9 his mom was on drugs and he had no adult supervision he was living on the streets,when he was 12 years old he met my nephew shannon at the store and told my nephew he was hungry so my nephew took him to the store and bought him some doughnuts and milk the boy lured my nephew to a gravel pit and drowned him,the young man now lives in foster care and has a good family to look after him,when he killed my nephew i was very angry at him,when i walked into the courtroom i thought i would see a 12 year old monster but instead i saw a 12 yearold scared kid with his hands folded in his lap,all i could do was cry,i think if this child would have had an ounce of discipline and a family who cared for him my nephew would be here today,if a child is forced to grow up too fast they have no choice but to act out,the young man in ohio who killed his family was forced to grow up fast and run a farm,we have to look at the whole picture here,it is very sad to think this boy was given this much responsibility to handle,so who is really at fault?
Bill,
Today May 30, 2005, an 18 year old in Ohio shot a number of people and himself.
No news yet about this kid being on psych meds.
Want to bet that within days we'll find out that he medicated? It will be just the same as every single other such event!
Dan
I suppose we will never really know what drove this kid to do this act. I just think that at the end of the day, it's not enough to say, "...oh, Prozac tipped him over the edge...". I think many things had already tipped him over the edge. We all know of his horrible family circumstance. I also understand that he was a loner at school and didn't interact with other kids. I'm not sure if he was bullied or not, but I've heard nothing to indicate that was a factor.
This is a kid who slipped through the cracks. There are many of them. As you said Dan, real therapy is very expensive, but there are no shortcuts here. If society isn't willing or interested in changing some very fundamental ways we think ("I'm going to keep my guns no matter what"), then we can expect more of these problems to arise. Blaming it on a drug is not going to make it better.
That's just my opinion. Prozac and the many other drugs I took didn't "cure" my depression. They simply knocked my on my ass enough so I didn't know I was depressed. My memory from day to day was not there. I had to stop just to do my job. It wasn't easy. I did it slowly and I really stepped back and developed a support system. When I was depressed, I made sure I had people around me. I did other things like exercise that occupied my mind. In other words, I changed my lifestyle to the point that there simply was no room for depression. It can be done, with the right therapist.
I couldn't disagree more!
We live in a society that believes that whenever there is something wrong with us, it is not us, it is our "chemical imbalance."
The most likely scenerio here, is that this kid having the emotional baggage he was carrying (father committed suicide, mother severely hurt physically and mentally in a car acciedent, etc.), was probably treated with medication for his supposed "chemical imbalance" and very little true, intense, expensive as hell, therapy.
Only in the US do kids (and adults) get medicated this often, and only the US we have school killings. I have yet to see a single case of school shootings that psych drugs were not already introduced into the perpetrators life.
Dan
"Correlated? Yes. Cause? No."
My point exactly! Prozac was not the "cause" of this shooting. The cause is deeper and this will continue to happen until we stop blaming drugs like Prozac as being the "cause" of this. That is exactly what they did. They said this kid probably did this because of his Prozac dosage.
That's bunk. He did it because of his circumstances, yes. But, if we had a society that didn't foster the idea of violence first, this probably would not have happened. We need to stop using medication as a crutch. We need to start addressing the real problem behind this, and Prozac isn't it.
"Would they rather hear that nothing was being done to try and help this kid?"
No. I would rather we DEAL WITH THE REAL PROBLEM. That is the propensity towards violence in our society and our schools. Addressing that is what really would have helped this kid. If we had done that, perhaps he would have had that support system the he obviously needed.
Would they rather hear that nothing was being done to try and help this kid? The primary reason anti-depressants are linker to these incidents it:
1) They got some treatment going.
2) The medicine didn't kick in yet, OR
3) They decided themselves to increase the dose rapidly or stop taking it altogether.
4) They were already inclined to this type of behavior, or they wouldn't be needing the psychiatrist from reason 1.
Correlated? Yes. Cause? No.