Saturday, December 29, 2012

More Tragedy Ahead for Connecticut?

After the murders, you might think that people in Newtown, Connecticut, are dealing with as much grief, pain, shame, guilt, anger, and miscellaneous misery, as any town could possibly need.


If they're serious about wanting to know the answers to all the “How could it...Why did it...” sort of questions people ask after tragedies, they're in for another bit of shock. The Newtown murders fit into a well documented pattern that includes several other school shootings. The pattern, initially associated with street drugs like meth, PCP, and less often LSD, acquired the name “Prozac Dementia” in the 1990s, when incidents involving legal prescription medication began to outnumber incidents involving illegal drugs. Practicing psychiatrists Peter Breggin and Joseph Glenmullen wrote books about the syndrome; practicing psychologist Lauren Slater put herself on the line, using Prozac, specifically, with the conscious intention of exploring the pseudomemories the drug gave her. Then, as documented by Arianna Huffington, the pharmaceutical industry began urging the commercial news industry just to stop reporting on the link between stimulant drugs and violent insanity.

The fact remains: about one out of twenty people who use any of the prescription medications in the “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor” category are going to experience some combination of physical pain and bizarre, horrific new “memories” that seem to account for that pain. Some patients, like one of Dr. Glenmullen's students, will develop Prozac dementia after taking one or two pills; some may report only the “high” these drugs are supposed to induce for years before dementia sets in. Patients who are fully aware of the situation may, like Lauren Slater, be able to watch their pseudomemories like movies and not become violent. However, there will always be some danger involved in letting anyone who's taken SSRIs leave the hospital.

The position of this web site is that, if outpatients are allowed to use SSRIs, they should be supervised at all times. It goes without saying that they should have no access to anything that can be used as a weapon, including motor vehicles and sewing needles, but at least one Prozac-demented patient managed to murder a stranger by stomping on her head.

Earlier this month readers were referred to www.sssristories.com; if you've not visited this site already, you're encouraged to check it out now.

Nevertheless, greedheads in denial roll on...thanks to Steve Milloy for sharing this bit of Extremely Bad News:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/antidepressants-to-treat-grief-psychiatry-panelists-with-ties-to-drug-industry-say-yes/2012/12/26/ca09cde6-3d60-11e2-ae43-cf491b837f7b_story.html

Note the graphic on the left...and it's worth reading all the way to page 3 for more documentation of how industry-subsidized researchers can encourage overprescription of a medication they've “studied.”

If psychiatrists listen to the greedheads, Newtown could easily become the site of another mass murder, followed by a suicide, before the end of the school year.

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