Interesting article (2 yrs ago) on pyschotropic drugs and mass shootings
- Thread starter Displaced Bama Fan
- Start date
I noticed we have two on the list - Franklin and Memon. Sometimes people just bring their problems with them. The Franklins had just moved here from NY state. The Memons from Pakistan. Memon was arrested along with his mother in Dallas, with about $15K cash on their persons, airline tickets and passports, trying to escape to Pakistan. He was placed in jail without bond and both his parents were arrested...
Good post DBF.
I watched this whole trail on Court TV some years ago. Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.
Pittman was small 12 year old looking scared to death and out of it. His lawyer introduced some studies about Zoloft and violence but a company rep testified other wise. I think this trail caused the FDA to put warning labels on anti-depressant and their use for young people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/us/drug-trial-justice-science-boy-s-murder-case-entangled-fight-over.html
But the Pittman case has attracted special attention because it is among the first to arise amid a national debate over the safety of antidepressant use in children and teenagers. Depression is a complex condition, and antidepressants like Zoloft have helped countless children and adults.
In recent months, however, the federal Food and Drug Administration has been examining data from clinical trials indicating that some depressed children and adolescents taking antidepressants think more about suicide and attempt it more often than patients given placebos. The findings varied between drugs. The F.D.A. is scheduled to hold an advisory committee meeting on the issue next month.
Pfizer, the maker of Zoloft, has helped the county solicitor who is prosecuting Christopher Pittman. Plaintiffs' lawyers from Houston and Los Angeles, who between them have brought numerous civil lawsuits against Pfizer and other antidepressant makers, have signed onto the defense team. Groups opposed to pediatric antidepressant use have also championed the boy's case, which is being played out in Chester, S.C., a small town near the North Carolina border.
FDA warning requirement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidepressants_and_suicide_risk
Benefits versus risk as always. If you stop taking the drugs irritability increases.
I watched this whole trail on Court TV some years ago. Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.
Pittman was small 12 year old looking scared to death and out of it. His lawyer introduced some studies about Zoloft and violence but a company rep testified other wise. I think this trail caused the FDA to put warning labels on anti-depressant and their use for young people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/us/drug-trial-justice-science-boy-s-murder-case-entangled-fight-over.html
But the Pittman case has attracted special attention because it is among the first to arise amid a national debate over the safety of antidepressant use in children and teenagers. Depression is a complex condition, and antidepressants like Zoloft have helped countless children and adults.
In recent months, however, the federal Food and Drug Administration has been examining data from clinical trials indicating that some depressed children and adolescents taking antidepressants think more about suicide and attempt it more often than patients given placebos. The findings varied between drugs. The F.D.A. is scheduled to hold an advisory committee meeting on the issue next month.
Pfizer, the maker of Zoloft, has helped the county solicitor who is prosecuting Christopher Pittman. Plaintiffs' lawyers from Houston and Los Angeles, who between them have brought numerous civil lawsuits against Pfizer and other antidepressant makers, have signed onto the defense team. Groups opposed to pediatric antidepressant use have also championed the boy's case, which is being played out in Chester, S.C., a small town near the North Carolina border.
FDA warning requirement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidepressants_and_suicide_risk
Benefits versus risk as always. If you stop taking the drugs irritability increases.
That's the reason I proposed in the thread about Denmark, their being the world's leading consumer of antidepressants, and also continually polling as the world's "happiest people," that their pills should be withheld for a period of days and then poll them again. I think the result would be different. Danes without drugs would, I think, yield a different result...Good post DBF.
I watched this whole trail on Court TV some years ago. Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.
Pittman was small 12 year old looking scared to death and out of it. His lawyer introduced some studies about Zoloft and violence but a company rep testified other wise. I think this trail caused the FDA to put warning labels on anti-depressant and their use for young people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/us/drug-trial-justice-science-boy-s-murder-case-entangled-fight-over.html
But the Pittman case has attracted special attention because it is among the first to arise amid a national debate over the safety of antidepressant use in children and teenagers. Depression is a complex condition, and antidepressants like Zoloft have helped countless children and adults.
In recent months, however, the federal Food and Drug Administration has been examining data from clinical trials indicating that some depressed children and adolescents taking antidepressants think more about suicide and attempt it more often than patients given placebos. The findings varied between drugs. The F.D.A. is scheduled to hold an advisory committee meeting on the issue next month.
Pfizer, the maker of Zoloft, has helped the county solicitor who is prosecuting Christopher Pittman. Plaintiffs' lawyers from Houston and Los Angeles, who between them have brought numerous civil lawsuits against Pfizer and other antidepressant makers, have signed onto the defense team. Groups opposed to pediatric antidepressant use have also championed the boy's case, which is being played out in Chester, S.C., a small town near the North Carolina border.
FDA warning requirement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidepressants_and_suicide_risk
Benefits versus risk as always. If you stop taking the drugs irritability increases.
I wonder what the violent crime stats are thereThat's the reason I proposed in the thread about Denmark, their being the world's leading consumer of antidepressants, and also continually polling as the world's "happiest people," that their pills should be withheld for a period of days and then poll them again. I think the result would be different. Danes without drugs would, I think, yield a different result...
Move to Colorado you darn blunt toking commie!
Actually a good question warriors. Could cost the big drug companies some money. Lost profits.
I find this extremely interesting especially after reading about MKULTRA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
It is a little "tin foil hat" but interesting, nonetheless. I have personally witnessed what an overdose of Wellbutrin can do to a person and it is scary as anything I have ever seen. By overdose, I don't mean someone takes too many at once, but a too high of a dosage given to a person who is already on another SSRI drug. I've never wanted to choke the life out of someone like I did the doctor who prescribed 300mg of Wellbutrin to my mother. She is lucky she is alive and still practicing medicine. :mad2: As soon as WE (via google) figured out it was an overdose and not a stroke that caused psychosis and we took her off the meds, she was 100% better within 2 days and completely back to normal.
These Rx drugs are scary.
It is a little "tin foil hat" but interesting, nonetheless. I have personally witnessed what an overdose of Wellbutrin can do to a person and it is scary as anything I have ever seen. By overdose, I don't mean someone takes too many at once, but a too high of a dosage given to a person who is already on another SSRI drug. I've never wanted to choke the life out of someone like I did the doctor who prescribed 300mg of Wellbutrin to my mother. She is lucky she is alive and still practicing medicine. :mad2: As soon as WE (via google) figured out it was an overdose and not a stroke that caused psychosis and we took her off the meds, she was 100% better within 2 days and completely back to normal.
These Rx drugs are scary.
I don't trust any doctor now. I do my own research on every new med as to drug interaction, side effect, etc. I have caught numerous dangerous errors. That extends to supplements. I take DIM (diindolylmethane) for prostate. It's a marvelous drug and NIH is examining it now for an anticancer drug for breast and prostate cancer. However, it also has blood thinning qualities just about equal to Plavix. I didn't know this until about a year and half ago. It made one knee operation miserable for me, because I bled like a stuck pig for several days. Now, I know better. I need about ten days off it before surgery. In the end, it's your responsibility...
Which is why they have been behind the Partnership for a Drug Free America since its inceptionMove to Colorado you darn blunt toking commie!
It's a long-held legal principle that voluntarily ingested drugs, including alcohol, cannot be a defense in evading responsibility for an action. I see a bit of a problem when it comes to juveniles who are involuntarily dosed by parents or guardians...
Absolutely a person's responsibility!! I wish that we had known more about this doctor my mom went to. We found out after the fact that her husband has just left her and she was in her own deep depression. Makes me so mad just thinking about it!!
This is definitely an issue for me. I've had one situation where I believed the child had been prescribed too much medication and I acted on it. We found out that he had been double dosed on a extended release and a high single dosage of the same drug by the same doctor!! Once we got all of that regulated for him, his life changed for the better. Too many parents rely on the meds so THEY can get through the day. They do not do research and they don't ask questions.
I'm sure Staci could probably chime in more authoritatively on this than I can but the bottom line when it comes to mental health, mental illness, and mental health medications is that...
...we know next to nothing.
Seriously. No blue font, no joking, no hyperbole.
Many of the most successful - or at least most commonly prescribed - "mental health medications" were originally created with no intention of treating the mental illness(es) for which they are most often prescribed. Medications originally designed to treat various ailments and illnesses from chronic headaches, chronic fatigue, and acne to diabetes and epilepsy were found during clinical trials to have a surprising and significant effect on patients suffering from symptoms x, y, and/or z - which are common to mental illnesses a, b, and/or c. So, new clinical trials were begun to test those medications' effects on patients with those mental illnesses and, voila, an entire new demographic of potential purchasers was opened up to the drug manufacturers.
And yet, for many if not most of these medications, neither the doctors prescribing them nor even the companies who manufactured them can actually tell you why they are having the effect they are having on the people to whom they're being prescribed.
Even more so, they also cannot tell you why the effects are so inconsistent. You can have 10 people with similar genetic backgrounds, e.g., 10 Southern Caucasians, who are all diagnosed with the same mental illness and all present with virtually identical symptoms but, when they are all prescribed and take the same dosage of a particular medication over several weeks or months, they exhibit 5 or 6 different effects from their medication. For example, it may work great for four of them, have no effect on three others, increase (worsen) the symptoms in two others, and result in a fit of psychosis in the tenth. And, just to make things interesting, for two out of the four people for whom it worked great the medication will suddenly stop working at all in about a year.
In many ways, prescribing medications for mental illness is nothing but a crap-shoot.
If we really want to help people, we need to get away from this mindset that a pill can fix it. What we, as a society and especially those in the medical field, need to be concentrating on is education and management:
1) Prescribe medications not in an attempt to "cure" or "suppress" the patient's symptoms but rather just to make the symptoms "manageable" with help;
2) Educate patients on what their illness is, i.e. how it changes them, changes the way they think, in order to help them to be able to recognize the patterns;
3) Educate patients in ways to develop healthy, helpful coping mechanisms so that they can actively - with the preferably temporary assistance of medication - help manage their own symptoms; and, finally,
4) Educate the general public but particularly patients' family and friends properly about mental illness - what it is, what it isn't, etc. - and especially about how to help their affected friends and/or family members with their roles in steps 2 and 3.
Yet we, as Americans and humans, are so arrogant that we believe that we can play 'Go Fish' with the brain chemistry of patients with mental illnesses - and even many without mental illnesses - without causing unforeseen side effects. And, even worse, we often attempt to play this game in a vacuum while pretending that things from a person's diet to other "unrelated" medications they may be taking to even a person's personal, moral beliefs have no effect upon this game.
And as for that last item in the list - a person's personal, moral beliefs - it isn't something at which to simply sneer.
I once witnessed a highly trained psychologist - judging from the many diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall behind her desk - attempting to provide therapy and treatment for a young lady suffering from bouts of depression that had recently attempted suicide who, after finally getting the girl to open up a bit and listening to her talk for a good five or ten minutes about how much she thinks about, worries about, and regrets things she'd done in the past and whether or not her sins have been forgiven, summarily dismiss the girl's comments by saying that she needs to focus on the future instead of the past and that everyone has things in the past that they regret but not to let them affect the future. She was, of course, completely ignoring the fact that, for this girl, without forgiveness for the things she did in the past she has no [eternal] future and that her mindset regarding her sins and forgiveness is constantly adding the weight of guilt to her shoulders. Though, of course, unusual feelings of guilt wouldn't have any effect on depression.
I also once witnessed a highly recommended - by a patient's medical doctor - therapist attempting to help a young man who had recently attempted suicide. This young man was a preacher's son and had always been very religious himself. However, he had lost his best friend to cancer two or three years earlier and he could barely talk about it without crying. To her credit, she was able to get him to actually talk about it which was more than anyone else had been able to do. Then, he sort of blurts out "I'm just so angry!" and rams his fist into the pillow with which he had been fidgeting. She got him to elaborate and he, probably for the first time aloud, explained that he was angry with God and couldn't forgive God for taking his fried from him. He said that he "prayed, believing with all his heart" that God would heal his friend and that the Bible says that "if you pray believing, God will do it." He said he knew it was wrong but he just could stop being angry with God; he felt like God hated him because God broke His promise and didn't heal his friend. At this point, the therapist replied, "So, that's like a faith thing?"
While those are two fairly extreme examples it doesn't take a genius to figure out that when you're dealing with symptoms that affect they way a person thinks, the way they make decisions, etc. that the way they previously or would ordinarily think, the basis upon which they would ordinarily make decisions, etc. can have an affect on both how their mental illness presents itself as well as what treatments, exercises, coping mechanisms, etc. will most likely be successful for this patient.
When it comes to anyone with mental illness but especially children, we far to often over-prescribe and look to a pill as a solution rather than dealing with the real problems in the situation and taking proper steps to avoid the potential pitfalls that lie ahead.
...we know next to nothing.
Seriously. No blue font, no joking, no hyperbole.
Many of the most successful - or at least most commonly prescribed - "mental health medications" were originally created with no intention of treating the mental illness(es) for which they are most often prescribed. Medications originally designed to treat various ailments and illnesses from chronic headaches, chronic fatigue, and acne to diabetes and epilepsy were found during clinical trials to have a surprising and significant effect on patients suffering from symptoms x, y, and/or z - which are common to mental illnesses a, b, and/or c. So, new clinical trials were begun to test those medications' effects on patients with those mental illnesses and, voila, an entire new demographic of potential purchasers was opened up to the drug manufacturers.
And yet, for many if not most of these medications, neither the doctors prescribing them nor even the companies who manufactured them can actually tell you why they are having the effect they are having on the people to whom they're being prescribed.
Even more so, they also cannot tell you why the effects are so inconsistent. You can have 10 people with similar genetic backgrounds, e.g., 10 Southern Caucasians, who are all diagnosed with the same mental illness and all present with virtually identical symptoms but, when they are all prescribed and take the same dosage of a particular medication over several weeks or months, they exhibit 5 or 6 different effects from their medication. For example, it may work great for four of them, have no effect on three others, increase (worsen) the symptoms in two others, and result in a fit of psychosis in the tenth. And, just to make things interesting, for two out of the four people for whom it worked great the medication will suddenly stop working at all in about a year.
In many ways, prescribing medications for mental illness is nothing but a crap-shoot.
If we really want to help people, we need to get away from this mindset that a pill can fix it. What we, as a society and especially those in the medical field, need to be concentrating on is education and management:
1) Prescribe medications not in an attempt to "cure" or "suppress" the patient's symptoms but rather just to make the symptoms "manageable" with help;
2) Educate patients on what their illness is, i.e. how it changes them, changes the way they think, in order to help them to be able to recognize the patterns;
3) Educate patients in ways to develop healthy, helpful coping mechanisms so that they can actively - with the preferably temporary assistance of medication - help manage their own symptoms; and, finally,
4) Educate the general public but particularly patients' family and friends properly about mental illness - what it is, what it isn't, etc. - and especially about how to help their affected friends and/or family members with their roles in steps 2 and 3.
Yet we, as Americans and humans, are so arrogant that we believe that we can play 'Go Fish' with the brain chemistry of patients with mental illnesses - and even many without mental illnesses - without causing unforeseen side effects. And, even worse, we often attempt to play this game in a vacuum while pretending that things from a person's diet to other "unrelated" medications they may be taking to even a person's personal, moral beliefs have no effect upon this game.
And as for that last item in the list - a person's personal, moral beliefs - it isn't something at which to simply sneer.
I once witnessed a highly trained psychologist - judging from the many diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall behind her desk - attempting to provide therapy and treatment for a young lady suffering from bouts of depression that had recently attempted suicide who, after finally getting the girl to open up a bit and listening to her talk for a good five or ten minutes about how much she thinks about, worries about, and regrets things she'd done in the past and whether or not her sins have been forgiven, summarily dismiss the girl's comments by saying that she needs to focus on the future instead of the past and that everyone has things in the past that they regret but not to let them affect the future. She was, of course, completely ignoring the fact that, for this girl, without forgiveness for the things she did in the past she has no [eternal] future and that her mindset regarding her sins and forgiveness is constantly adding the weight of guilt to her shoulders. Though, of course, unusual feelings of guilt wouldn't have any effect on depression.
I also once witnessed a highly recommended - by a patient's medical doctor - therapist attempting to help a young man who had recently attempted suicide. This young man was a preacher's son and had always been very religious himself. However, he had lost his best friend to cancer two or three years earlier and he could barely talk about it without crying. To her credit, she was able to get him to actually talk about it which was more than anyone else had been able to do. Then, he sort of blurts out "I'm just so angry!" and rams his fist into the pillow with which he had been fidgeting. She got him to elaborate and he, probably for the first time aloud, explained that he was angry with God and couldn't forgive God for taking his fried from him. He said that he "prayed, believing with all his heart" that God would heal his friend and that the Bible says that "if you pray believing, God will do it." He said he knew it was wrong but he just could stop being angry with God; he felt like God hated him because God broke His promise and didn't heal his friend. At this point, the therapist replied, "So, that's like a faith thing?"
While those are two fairly extreme examples it doesn't take a genius to figure out that when you're dealing with symptoms that affect they way a person thinks, the way they make decisions, etc. that the way they previously or would ordinarily think, the basis upon which they would ordinarily make decisions, etc. can have an affect on both how their mental illness presents itself as well as what treatments, exercises, coping mechanisms, etc. will most likely be successful for this patient.
When it comes to anyone with mental illness but especially children, we far to often over-prescribe and look to a pill as a solution rather than dealing with the real problems in the situation and taking proper steps to avoid the potential pitfalls that lie ahead.
We must also keep in mind that many times doctors are compensated very well for prescribing all sorts of drugs.
That's exactly the argument my wife and I have over certain vaccines, like Gardasil.
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