Another School shooting.....another Anti-Depressant


I'm sure everyone is as stunned as I was yesterday to hear about the murders at Va-Tech. Today we learn more about what happened and some about those involved. The young 18 year old girl that the killer was obsessed with, the Israeli professor that blocked the doorway after he was shot so his students could escape, and a 23 year old South Korean student on Anti-depressants. Not to get me wrong here, I'm a firm believer in poly-pharmacy, I'm an Internist after all and I don't get started until I'm using at least 3 drugs.My mentor in my residency Dr. Bill Rebhun would always chastise me by saying " Weldon, if you have to use 3 medications, you don't know what the hell is going on with your patient". I think he may have been right. Neurochemistry has always been a complex topic for me to try and get my head around and I feel that the complex interactions of various drugs may be something that we need to be aware of in these cases. There is a link(although small) between SSRI (Selective Serotonin Re uptake Inhibitors) anti-depressants and increased suicides published in the American Journal of Psychiatry . Some Doctors have suggested that these kids just weren't medicated enough and it was under dosing in those cases. It used to be that when people were suffering from depression they went on suicide watch.....not killing sprees. Yesterday, another kid on Prozac kills a large group of people and then himself, not the other way around. A look back at some of the more notorious cases may show us something......

1989 – Joseph Wesbecker walked into a printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky and killed eight co-workers and then himself. Mr. Wesbecker was taking Prozac, which had recently been approved.

1998 – 14-year-old Kip Kinkle, who was on Ritalin and Prozac, killed his parents and then went on a shooting spree at his Springfield, Oregon, high school, killing two and injuring 22

1999 – Eric Harris, one of the teen gunmen in the infamous Columbine massacre in 1999, had been prescribed Luvox, an antidepressant similar to Prozac. The two boys entered the school with an arsenal of weaponry killed 12 people with many more injured before taking their own lives.

2001 – Christopher Pittman killed his grandparents while taking Zoloft, another antidepressant similar to Prozac. His lawyers faulted the drug, but a jury in Charleston, S.C., convicted him of murder in February.

This could be a chicken or the egg scenario......is it the mental illness or the mental illness+meds. I recently read that one concern about anti-depressant therapy may be a partial dissociation from reality and perhaps a loss of a feeling of consequence. It may also be that these people were just evil or it was just the mental illness . I worry that there could be an unintended consequence to our wide use of some of these meds. It's something to think about.

Comments

Techno said…
Crazy, isn't it all?

The sad part about it is how hard they tried to get him help, and how nothing positive really happened.
2:41 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Purina feed recall announced-Aflatoxin confirmed

Image
There have been several horse show signs of acute liver dysfunction recently while eating Purina feeds. The company seems to have jumped on this quickly and found an aflatoxin (mold toxin) contamination from one of their suppliers. It only affects 3 of their plants and the North eastern United States.The following states are under the recall, Connecticut; Delaware; Maine; Maryland; Massachusetts; New Hampshire; New Jersey; New York; North Carolina; Pennsylvania; Rhode Island; South Carolina; More info on Aflatoxins can be found HERE . " Aflatoxins are potent toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, immunosuppressive agents, produced as secondary metabolites by the fungus Aspergillus flavus and A. parasiticus on variety of food products. Among 18 different types of aflatoxins identified, major members are aflatoxin B1, B2, G1 and G2. Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) is normally predominant in amount in cultures as well as in food products. Pure AFB1 is pale-white to yellow crystalline, odorless so
Read more

How Horses could help fight "BIRD FLU"

Image
Horse serum has been used for years as a souce of "gamma globulins" (anti-bodies) for many species including man. Now a group of scientists in China are using antibody fragments from horses to fight the H5N1 virus. "The researchers included Jiahai Lu, PhD, of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. They're among experts worldwide working on bird flu treatments." The article is in MedicineNet.com and was written by Miranda Hitti from WebMD. "First, the scientists prepared H5N1 virus in hen's eggs. Next, they immunized horses to make antibodies to H5N1. Lu and colleagues took fragments of those antibodies, mixed them with H5N1 virus, and then spread the mixture on plates holding dog cells. Dog cells were only exposed to H5N1 or the horse antibody fragments. For comparison, other dog cells were left alone, without either H5N1 or the horse antibodies' fragments. The researchers checked on the dog cells every day for the next five
Read more

Headshaking Syndrome....Just the facts

Image
( angelfire cartoons ) Just to set the record straight....this is a SYNDROME. That means it is a condition with multiple potential causes that has a unique set of symptoms. In this case the symptom is head shaking, this is either horizontal, vertical or rotary and frequently resembles a nervous twitch. Sometimes this is so uncontrollable that the behavior becomes almost manic and dangerous. Over the years many different causes have been attibuted to causing head shaking syndrome, including (1) ear mites (2) allergic rhinitis (3) ocular disease (4) Trigeminal neuritis (5) dental disease and (6) photic headshaking. One, from the fever swamps of the internet , links it to vaccines ( see my previous post about my thoughts on holistics) One older study noted that these horses were frequently over 8 years of age, Throughbred or Warm Blood, owned by 40+ year old women used for hunter/jumper or dressage. Additional studies have linked this to the time of year (seasonal) and most recently, to b
Read more