School shootings and psychiatric drugs

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**KalashnikovMarine**

http://www.cchrint.org/2012/12/19/nental-health-care-to-blame-for-school-shootings/

I have no idea how reliable the Citizen's Commission for Human Rights International is, but this is interesting stuff.

School shooter Adam Lanza is reported to have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a form of Autism. Some reports say he was also diagnosed with a personality disorder. In this series, I examine what this means by asking experts and activists what we should blame for school shootings and what we should do about it. In Part 1, we examine the role of psychiatric drugs....

.....
Clint Moser, a Volunteer Lobbyist for “We The People”, provided this list of shooters on psychiatric drugs:

Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Colombine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public.

Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.

Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.

Jarred Viktor, age 15, stabbed his grandmother 61 times after 5 days on Paxil.

Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.

Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded.

A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.

TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.

Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.

James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a.22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania.

Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California.

Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic’s file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.

Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.

Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.

Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family’s Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.
Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn’t take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”).

Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002, (Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.)

Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family’s detached garage.

Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.

Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

Woody Witczak, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.

Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”.

Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.

Asa [see forum posting rules] from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show [see forum posting rules] was on Trazodone.

Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.”

Again I have no idea if it's valid, but it's interesting stuff. Having been on anti-depressants I don't think I was more likely to kill anything but a twinkie. (I gained about 50lbs)

**hotsauceman1**

A big problem today is indeed over medicating people for illness with drugs that have unknown side effects.
I was on drugs for my ADD, and I swear it cause problems with various part of my body not growing right.
My nephew is on drugs for for ADHD and it makes him anti-social.
This is why I hate the medical field, Therapy could do the same things as drugs can, but without putting harmful chemicals in your body.

**Asherian Command**

hotsauceman1 wrote:
A big problem today is indeed over medicating people for illness with drugs that have unknown side effects.
I was on drugs for my ADD, and I swear it cause problems with various part of my body not growing right.
My nephew is on drugs for for ADHD and it makes him anti-social.
This is why I hate the medical field, Therapy could do the same things as drugs can, but without putting harmful chemicals in your body.

I can also atest to my drugs that treat aDD
IT causes severe headaches, severe depressions, mood swings, increased aggression, anxiety, Anti-social tendencies, weakens immune system... The list goes on. Thank god it only causes me to have headaches and depressions, and anti social tendencies.
To be honest, I can't get off it mostly because it actually works, even with the side effects.

Also what is with one of those guy's name being Censored. When is [see forum posting rules] censored?

**KalashnikovMarine**

I remember the anti-social stuff now. I was a total cave dweller on my anti-depressants. That stuff screws you up man. Getting off my meds was probably the most important step into me actually getting better.

**Frazzled**

KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I remember the anti-social stuff now. I was a total cave dweller on my anti-depressants. That stuff screws you up man. Getting off my meds was probably the most important step into me actually getting better.

Thats why I stick to a strict diet of rum and water.

**Fafnir**

If you're going to talk about psychiatric drugs and shootings, you should compare the amount of people on the drugs doing shootings to the people off drugs doing shootings.

The list given looks impressive now, but if you were to compare it to shootings that happened from people who were unmedicated, it could be perfectly in line with the general population.

Not to say that I doubt the involvement of psychiatric medication, but as it stands, these statistics mean nothing without something to compare them to.

**hotsauceman1**

Frazzled wrote:
KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I remember the anti-social stuff now. I was a total cave dweller on my anti-depressants. That stuff screws you up man. Getting off my meds was probably the most important step into me actually getting better.

Thats why I stick to a strict diet of rum and water.

The more and more you post Frazzle the more and more i think you might be a pirate.

**LoneLictor**

I think it's that mentally ill people are more likely to go on shooting sprees. And mentally ill people are more likely to be on psychiatric drugs than the average person.

Blaming the drugs themselves is bs. Look at all the people on them who don't go on shooting sprees. Look at how common zoloft and prozac are. Nearly 30 million prescriptions are written for zoloft a year. And prozac is at around 35 million.

**Frazzled**

hotsauceman1 wrote:
Frazzled wrote:
KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I remember the anti-social stuff now. I was a total cave dweller on my anti-depressants. That stuff screws you up man. Getting off my meds was probably the most important step into me actually getting better.

Thats why I stick to a strict diet of rum and water.

The more and more you post Frazzle the more and more i think you might be a pirate.

Arr!!! A wiener dog pirate I be! My wife be the captain and a fearsome captain she be!
You've not known fear til you've seen attack wiener dogs shot grapeshot style at you from the 24 lb carronades ARR!

**Ouze**

and now... we're finally talking about mental health in this country. Good deal, cause it's a mess imo.

I suspect that in like, 50 years, we're going to look back on current prescribing practices in psychiatry the way we look back on Thalidomide now.

**sebster**

Fafnir wrote:
If you're going to talk about psychiatric drugs and shootings, you should compare the amount of people on the drugs doing shootings to the people off drugs doing shootings.

Yeah, this seems to me as mistaken an approach as looking just at school shootings when talking about the issue. The real, and probably only truly meaningful figure is that there's about 10,000 homicides by firearm in the US every year.

That's a massive figure, way out of whack per capita with any other stable, developed country. And when you look at the figures you don't see school shootings or people who just went on medication making up more than a rounding error in the stats. Accounting for most of the problem you're basically looking at gang violence, and also people who got really pissed off and shot someone in the heat of the moment.

This 'blame the drugs thing' is just another piece distracting nonsense by people who are lobbying to prevent any further restrictions on guns.

**tyrant of loserville**

My experience with the VA is you either take meds and see a bunch of "specialists" or you dont and get minimal one on one help. I decided not to be medicated due to having adverse effects from a wide range of med types. I guess I got lucky with finding other ways to deal with things without the use of drugs. Ill admit it would have been way easier to take the meds and get that extra help. I think a lot about those, though, that needed the extra help without the drugs but took them only because it was part of the package. The theme with the docs that i saw was "we cant help you outside of meds." So Id imagine the numbers are high of med usage within the VA system. Troubling to think of the damage that could be done by those individuals with training.

**KalashnikovMarine**

Frazzled wrote:
KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I remember the anti-social stuff now. I was a total cave dweller on my anti-depressants. That stuff screws you up man. Getting off my meds was probably the most important step into me actually getting better.

Thats why I stick to a strict diet of rum and water.

Throw in whiskey and that's my diet now

Automatically Appended Next Post:

sebster wrote:
Fafnir wrote:
If you're going to talk about psychiatric drugs and shootings, you should compare the amount of people on the drugs doing shootings to the people off drugs doing shootings.

Yeah, this seems to me as mistaken an approach as looking just at school shootings when talking about the issue. The real, and probably only truly meaningful figure is that there's about 10,000 homicides by firearm in the US every year.

That's a massive figure, way out of whack per capita with any other stable, developed country. .

Well we also have more firearms per capita then well any where. So it kinda makes sense.

**SoloFalcon1138**

I concur. Maybe the problem wasn't the medication, but the concept that all you need is a medication to deal with your problem. Therapy is expwnsive and time-consuming, plus it can make parents take responsivility for their actions, too...

**DutchKillsRambo**

Ouze wrote:
and now... we're finally talking about mental health in this country. Good deal, cause it's a mess imo.

I suspect that in like, 50 years, we're going to look back on current prescribing practices in psychiatry the way we look back on Thalidomide now.

You're not a fan of stumpy limbs?

The whole mental health thing is a way to move focus away from guns. No one in the NRA gives two gaks about mental health. A lot of uninformed people are calling for "mental health awareness", and much more scarier to lock up "crazies" in a asylum.

The fact is these stupid laws about "black" rifle bans are pointless. The people that own high capacity rifles aren't the ones committing the crimes. It's handguns by a huge margin. Getting rid of "assault rifles" gets rid of the people with enough money to buy these guns. And demographics will tell you people with money aren't the ones committing the murder statistics you read about in the paper. Its uneducated (inner-city or rural take your biased pick) people that commit the most murders. So who are we really punishing?

It just scares the hell out of me that people advocating so strong for the 2nd are asking the government to establish a way to come up with a way to tell who the "crazies" are and who is not. By all means I am with you guys that the 2nd Amendment allows for a fething semi-auto rifle. Anyone that thinks that that's so dangerous has never held one. But for the love of god don't push for an institution that can lock people away on the thought they are "crazy"

**RatBot**

I stopped reading this entire thread after I saw "Citizens' Commission for Human Rights International". For those of you unaware, CCHR is a Scientologist front. They run an anti-psychiatry "museum" in Hollywood that I used to walk by every week, called "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death".

Anything they have to say on the subject of psychiatry and psychology should be completely disregarded.

The Wikipedia article pertaining to them is pretty much in accordance with a few books I've read about Scientology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Commission_on_Human_Rights

**Peregrine**

KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I have no idea how reliable the Citizen's Commission for Human Rights International is

Not at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Commission_on_Human_Rights

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a Scientology front group which campaigns against psychiatry and psychiatrists.

In other words, the article has about as much credibility as the crazy guy standing on the corner screaming about how the alien mind control rays are going to kill us all.

**KalashnikovMarine**

Peregrine wrote:
KalashnikovMarine wrote:
I have no idea how reliable the Citizen's Commission for Human Rights International is

Not at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Commission_on_Human_Rights

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) is a Scientology front group which campaigns against psychiatry and psychiatrists.

In other words, the article has about as much credibility as the crazy guy standing on the corner screaming about how the alien mind control rays are going to kill us all.

There you go then.

**Ouze**

DutchKillsRambo wrote:
Ouze wrote:
and now... we're finally talking about mental health in this country. Good deal, cause it's a mess imo.

I suspect that in like, 50 years, we're going to look back on current prescribing practices in psychiatry the way we look back on Thalidomide now.

You're not a fan of stumpy limbs?

The whole mental health thing is a way to move focus away from guns. No one in the NRA gives two gaks about mental health. A lot of uninformed people are calling for "mental health awareness", and much more scarier to lock up "crazies" in a asylum.

OK, listen. First off, I'm not really on the NRA's "team". I also agree that in our country that our constitution gives us the right to own firearms. However, I also favor a great many measures that would have the NRA pooping blood with rage. I'd see no problem, with say, requiring that you show some basic level of competence before being licensed to own a gun, just as we do with cars, with regular re-checks however often (yes, I know the difference between a right and a privilege, but we accept necessary restrictions on the first amendment so not sure why the second is so sacrosanct). I'd also completely ignore the scary front grips on AR-15s in favor of much tighter regulation on pistols.

So yeah, I get why the NRA is suddenly interested in mental health. But even a self-interested, dissembling clock is right twice a day: mental health in this country is rather poor and could stand much improvement. I don't how you made the leap from that to "locking up crazies in an asylum", which is both simplistic and not what I actually endorsed.

This can be an awesome country when we get our gak together, and I think we can do both things - better gun control, better mental health.

RatBot wrote:I stopped reading this entire thread after I saw "Citizens' Commission for Human Rights International". For those of you unaware, CCHR is a Scientologist front.

In OP's defense, he was clearly not aware of that.

**RatBot**

Ouze wrote:

RatBot wrote:I stopped reading this entire thread after I saw "Citizens' Commission for Human Rights International". For those of you unaware, CCHR is a Scientologist front.

In OP's defense, he was clearly not aware of that.

Oh, yes, I know, I assume most people don't know who runs the CCHR. I wasn't attacking or insulting the OP, and if it sounded like I was, I apologize. I just happen to strongly dislike Scientology and get a bit terse whenever they're involved. I didn't mean "Stopped reading this thread because OP is saying something stupid", I mean I literally stopped reading the thread to make that post so that people would be aware of what's really going on here.

**hotsauceman1**

Still, I think over medication of kids is a big problem.

**sebster**

KalashnikovMarine wrote:
Well we also have more firearms per capita then well any where. So it kinda makes sense.

I thought Canada had you beat? Though I guess looking at firearms overall is pretty misleading, as a few types of firearm account for the overwhelming majority of homicides (mostly pistols and other compact weapons), and the US has far and away the most of those types.

But I think the point is that just having lots of guns is only part of the issue, and I think the argument could be made that the guns themselves are really just a symptom of larger cultural issues (for most of our history it wasn't really that much harder to get guns here in Australia, but we never bought them on anything like the level as you guys - there just isn't that great a desire to own a gun).

**d-usa**

I am always amazed at the talk about how making a registry of gun owners will be just like Hitler (even though he didn't really pass any new gun laws until fairly late after he already was in power), but the NRA guy wants a national database of people with mental health problems.

**sebster**

RatBot wrote:
I stopped reading this entire thread after I saw "Citizens' Commission for Human Rights International". For those of you unaware, CCHR is a Scientologist front. They run an anti-psychiatry "museum" in Hollywood that I used to walk by every week, called "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death".

Anything they have to say on the subject of psychiatry and psychology should be completely disregarded.

The Wikipedia article pertaining to them is pretty much in accordance with a few books I've read about Scientology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Commission_on_Human_Rights

Ah, thankyou for posting that (and thanks to Peregrine for contributing the same).

I saw the words 'Citizen' and pegged them as a right wing fringe group, and didn't think to look any further. In hindsight 'Human Rights' should have got me to look up what kind of crazy they were, that's the kind of term the right wing stays well away from, as they prefer 'Freedom' and words like that.

Anyhow, cheers for establishing what kind of crazy this group is.

**Ouze**

RatBot wrote:
I mean I literally stopped reading the thread to make that post so that people would be aware of what's really going on here.

A laudable goal, surely. I'd put Scientology just a hair over the Westboro Baptists.

**Seaward**

sebster wrote:
I thought Canada had you beat?

No. Nobody comes even close to us. We have around 89 guns per 100 people. According to the gods of Wikipedia, Serbia's the next-closest, at 58.

**sebster**

Seaward wrote:
No. Nobody comes even close to us. We have around 89 guns per 100 people. According to the gods of Wikipedia, Serbia's the next-closest, at 58.

Just looked it up. Thanks for the correction, and wow, the US is just miles ahead of the rest.

**KalashnikovMarine**

RatBot wrote:
Ouze wrote:

RatBot wrote:I stopped reading this entire thread after I saw "Citizens' Commission for Human Rights International". For those of you unaware, CCHR is a Scientologist front.

In OP's defense, he was clearly not aware of that.

Oh, yes, I know, I assume most people don't know who runs the CCHR. I wasn't attacking or insulting the OP, and if it sounded like I was, I apologize. I just happen to strongly dislike Scientology and get a bit terse whenever they're involved. I didn't mean "Stopped reading this thread because OP is saying something stupid", I mean I literally stopped reading the thread to make that post so that people would be aware of what's really going on here.

I got it from a tactical training group I've worked with's facebook page. They had no idea either. Thanks for the heads up and no I don't think you were attacking or insulting me. While I think A. Scientologists are looney toons, and B. This article's probably equine gak, I do think the conversation needs to be had about mental health care in this country. That's the ticket for stopping fethed in the head individuals from shooting up location X. Dealing with the over all violent crime rate is gonna mean a serious look at the causes of said violence. (Which I believe we've gone into detail on enough to let it go in this thread. Culture, poverty, lack of education, etc)

**Frazzled**

Seaward wrote:
sebster wrote:
I thought Canada had you beat?

No. Nobody comes even close to us. We have around 89 guns per 100 people. According to the gods of Wikipedia, Serbia's the next-closest, at 58.

1. Serbia's #2. Quick, get thee to an Academy! We cannot let Serbia catch up. Mr. President, we cannot allow an XDM gap!
2. GO Serbia. Don't they make Springfield's XDs?

**Goliath**

Ouze wrote:
and now... we're finally talking about mental health in this country. Good deal, cause it's a mess imo.

I suspect that in like, 50 years, we're going to look back on current prescribing practices in psychiatry the way we look back on Thalidomide now.

Fun facts: Thalidomide is currently prescribed, as its ability to stem the growth of blood vessels makes it excellent at slowing tumour growth.

The thalidomide that caused the growth irregularities was only one of the optical isomers of thalidomide, the other was perfectly fine for use as a morning sickness drug from what I can recall, it was just that they didn't know to separate the isomers.

Also, I tend to agree somewhat with the people saying that the shooters may have been on drugs because of their tendencies, not their tendencies being caused by the drugs. We also don't know whether they actually took these drugs, just that they were prescribed them.

Edit:
Also, as Ratbarf pointed out, CCHR is a group specifically devoted to campaigning against psychiatry and psychiatric drugs, and quietly promoting Scientology's own specific brand of crazy.