Do you Really Think It's a gun Problem? - Psychiatric Drugs and Violence

[Drail]

There are people out there who are so mentally unbalanced that no amount of drugs are going to render them "harmless" enough to walk around in public. We used to lock these people up in a State facility - now we just sell them some pills. Follow the money people..... Billions of dollars making and selling drugs. And business is GOOD.

 

[jamil]

Yeah but attorneys know the dirty **** the ' medical professionals ' won't tell you .

Well. Especially Hough, given his area of practice.

 

[Twangbanger]

Some factual notes: although AR-15s have been available to the public since about 1965, these school shootings didn't start happening until a few years after SSRIs were approved by the FDA.

Any family doctor with a degree from Podunk State U. can prescribe them...and prescriptions of them have increased about the same rate as college tuition.

​

There are well-documented special effects associated with uncontrolled withdrawal from the medications.

The story is almost always the same: white kids with access to insurance, reach the age where the parents can no longer force them to take the pills, and bam.

The last I checked, the United States was the only country allowing these drugs to be prescribed to children without the advice of a trained, licensed mental health professional. Psychotropic drugs, without the stigma of a psychiatric diagnosis? It's all so convenient. Especially for Mom and Dad.

I don't want these drugs banned, when they help so many. But I also don't think we need to be creating short-cuts around proper mental health treatment. For kids with severe emotional disturbance, these drugs are not a cure; they are a Band-Aid. When they reach the age of adulthood, with a clean criminal record (ie, can buy guns), and mom and dad aren't there to make them take the pills properly, you have a problem. Society is not going to continue to accept this.

Something in society changed, around about 1990, and SSRIs are it. If we insist that further controls on guns aren't needed, we're going to have to come up with some kind of alternative, and that's true whether you want to accept it or not. Reams and reams of history tell us, when unacceptable events like this keep happening, a scape-goat has to be found and dispatched. Right now, guns are #1 on the list. If we cannot direct this public scrutiny elsewhere, we're going to get the sharp end of the stick.

My alternative, is that instead of re-engineering the Constitution of a nation of 360 Million people, that has had the freedom to own guns for 200+ years, why not look at the specific individuals who are committing these crimes? Emotionally-disturbed white males between the ages of 18~25, from families with access to health insurance, with tons and tons of danger signs, but no effective mental health intervention.

It amazes me that society wants to "Boil the Ocean" with changes to our Second Amendment rights, when looking at the actual individuals involved might show we have only a teacup worth of humanity that needs to be dealt with. When that phone call comes from the school principal, saying Johnny is a problem, if we could force that conversation into the psychiatrist's office at age 10 or 12 or 14, when intervention could make a difference, rather than just heading to the family doctor and driving the SUV through the pick-up line at CVS, maybe some of these kids would get the help they need.

Or, we can just sit here and wait until the Democrats hold all 3 seats of power again...and wait for the inevitable.

"Holding on in quiet desperation is the INGO way..."

(A sincere thank you to those who had real stories to tell about their personal experiences with depression, and took time to do so).

 

[jamil]

Twan, I think the medication is part of it. But why do we have so many people who need the medication. Part of the answer to that may be that it's a quick fix to some behavioral problems that would previously have been [STRIKE]solved[/STRIKE] prevented by good parenting.

I think another root of the problem, even beyond over/mis-prescribing psych drugs, is that we're cranking out these kinds of kids, incapable of coping with the simple problems in life, like big macs. Why can't kids cope with the things now that were simpler decades ago? Kids make such monumental mountains out of molehills to an extent that we've never witnessed before.

Maybe that's because of the fears in parents about their kids. I grew up in a rural area just outside an urban area. At age 9, I used to walk a couple of miles across fields, and then through neighborhoods, by myself, on the way to the Handy Dandy store to spend some of my allowance. No parent these days would ever imagine their kids doing that now. But we all did that back then and thought nothing of it.

I think it's more than just just the meds at the bottom of it. Maybe the meds push people over the edge. But that they need meds in the first place to help them cope with life may be the lowest level underlying the problem. Maybe having parents who instill personal competence/confidence through making their kids do everything they're capable of doing for themselves, as soon as they're capable, would produce fewer kids with depression and other mental conditions which require treating with meds.

Kids don't gain self-confidence by winning medals they didn't actually earn. They learn self-confidence by doing, by trying, by failing, by persevering, figuring it out, and then succeeding. Nothing is learned from being given a trophy you didn't earn except the lie that everyone will make your way for you.

 

[BugI02]

I think I have to disagree, Twangr. How would your theory explain Charles Whitman, who was not exposed to SSRIs and whose only known drug problem (to the extent I have researched) was abuse of amphetamines.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Texas-Tower-shooting-of-1966

I think what people really need to have driven through the cocoons they surround themselves with is that evil people exist, and crazy people exist and random multiple murders have always been with us although their frequency is increasing. If you want to talk mass murders, you also need to talk about such things as Andreas Lubitz (the Germanwings pilot who deliberately crashed his airplane) or Zaharie Ahmad Shah and Fariq Abdul Hamid (the crew of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared, one or both of them almost certainly caused that). These were highly trained adults in prestigious, high-paying jobs; not young adults newly shoved into the real world. People need to be reminded it's not just guns, although that is a popular choice. It can be cars or trucks; heck a determined individual with minimal information about the safety systems in place could easily derail a train.

The problem is a subset of the terrorist problem, a determined, motivated killer is the original smart weapon. The people who can be motivated by "religious" or political ideology to randomly murder may be no different from the people who spontaneously reach the same point. Perhaps we need a large scale study over a long period of time (like the Framingham Study on health) that follows peoples lives in detail, but in this case tracking mental health. Perhaps that would give us some tools to better predict who might end up in the role of random murderer and intervene. I see no short term solution that will not be purely feelgood and ineffective (gun bans being prominent on that list).

 

[eldirector]

Folks keep looking for the panacea, the sliver bullet, the ONE THING that will prevent all bad things from ever happening. Hate to break it, but that doesn't exist. If we want to "stop school shootings" (which is pretty narrow-minded IMHO), then it will take several things working in concert. Each on their own would be completely ineffective. For example. if we JUST stop prescribing a certain class of medications, we would only end up with a bunch of un-medicated people.

Do we, as a society, take too many pills? Yep, we do. But, they treat a symptom, not a root problem. Everyone is quick to blame the pharmaceutical company. They only produce what the pharmacies will sell. They only sell what the doctors will prescribe. And, they only prescribe what their patients demand. Let's fix that last one, and the rest will fix themselves.

 

[KLB]

Something in society changed, around about 1990, and SSRIs are it. If we insist that further controls on guns aren't needed, we're going to have to come up with some kind of alternative, and that's true whether you want to accept it or not. Reams and reams of history tell us, when unacceptable events like this keep happening, a scape-goat has to be found and dispatched. Right now, guns are #1 on the list. If we cannot direct this public scrutiny elsewhere, we're going to get the sharp end of the stick.

The other thing that has changed is the 24 hour news cycle. These nut jobs are talked about 24x7. Every aspect of their lives is talked about. How many did they kill? How many did they wound? Their names are known by much of America.

As time goes on, the more they talk about them the more of them there seem to be.

 

[BugI02]

Yep
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...rescribing-exercise-before-medication/284587/
For Depression, Prescribing Exercise Before Medication

Aerobic activity has shown to be an effective treatment for many forms of depression. So why are so many people still on antidepressants?

Depression is the most common mental illness—affecting a staggering 25 percent of Americans—but a growing body of research suggests that one of its best cures is cheap and ubiquitous. In 1999, a randomized controlled trial showed that depressed adults who took part in aerobic exercise improved as much as those treated with Zoloft. A 2006 meta-analysis of 11 studies bolstered those findings and recommended that physicians counsel their depressed patients to try it. A 2011 study took this conclusion even further: It looked at 127 depressed people who hadn’t experienced relief from SSRIs, a common type of antidepressant, and found that exercise led 30 percent of them into remission—a result that was as good as, or better than, drugs alone.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases...in-depth/depression-and-exercise/art-20046495
Depression and anxiety: Exercise eases symptoms

Put down the pills and pick up your bicycle (or running shoes)

 

[HoughMade]

Well. Especially Hough, given his area of practice.

Oh c'mon. What I do is boring paper pushing. Nothing exciting ever happens and I have never been involved in anything remotely interesting or controversial.

https://www.wthr.com/article/indiana-doctor-arrested-in-italy-to-face-charges-in-usa

 

[eldirector]

What has changed in the last few decades:
- even more sedentary lifestyles.
- may more drugs for way more clinically defined diagnoses.
- Even more processed food. Even cooking at home means it comes from a can or box.
- Even more two-earner families, meaning kids raised by someone else (schools, daycares, nannies, etc...)
- even more single-parent families, with the same result as above
- Greatly extending childhood. I had a job at 15, and had done a bunch of "side" stuff even earlier (mowing lawns, delivering papers, etc...). Now, it is not uncommon for adults to be living OFF OF (not just with) their parents through their 20's.
- Social media. You can be connected and completely disconnected at the same time. You can get your 15 minutes of fame doing any idiotic thing you can imagine.
- 24x7x365 news and 350 channels of crap. No need to leave the TV.
- major consumerism, on steroids. You can finance, and get a monthly payment, for ANYTHING. Homes you can't afford, cars you can't afford, $500 phones, $200/month phone/data/TV bills. Anyone can eat steak and lobster, if you don't ask where it came from.
- guns are heavily stigmatized, but there are WAY more of them
- crime, and specifically violent crime, is actually WAY down, but you would think we are nearing Armageddon.
- WAY more government and social intervention into the family. You can drop your kid off at school at 7am and not see them again until 7pm. They will get fed and everything. Drop them off at camp on Saturday, and then leave them at church all day Sunday.

Just my random observations....

 

[jamil]

Folks keep looking for the panacea, the sliver bullet, the ONE THING that will prevent all bad things from ever happening. Hate to break it, but that doesn't exist. If we want to "stop school shootings" (which is pretty narrow-minded IMHO), then it will take several things working in concert. Each on their own would be completely ineffective. For example. if we JUST stop prescribing a certain class of medications, we would only end up with a bunch of un-medicated people.

Do we, as a society, take too many pills? Yep, we do. But, they treat a symptom, not a root problem. Everyone is quick to blame the pharmaceutical company. They only produce what the pharmacies will sell. They only sell what the doctors will prescribe. And, they only prescribe what their patients demand. Let's fix that last one, and the rest will fix themselves.

Exactly. Group problems like this are complicated because group dynamics are complicated. For example, Obamacare is the just-one-problem type of solution for the problem of rising health costs. They said the cause of rising healthcare costs was uninsured people causing hospitals to absorb that costs and spread it to everyone else. Well. That problem was just a small piece of what's driving up the cost of healthcare. So that problem remains unsolved.

Now, it may be that if these kids don't have easy access to firearms, some wouldn't do this. But some would use knives. Others bombs. And still others would just obtain firearms illegally. So that solution is inadequate. It doesn't solve the problem. At best it treats just one symptom, and not effectively. And it's egregious to impose this on the of millions of people who own these weapons responsibly, just because a few dozen are emotionally unequipped to handle the freedom/responsibility trade-off in a civil society.

 

[jamil]

Oh c'mon. What I do is boring paper pushing. Nothing exciting ever happens and I have never been involved in anything remotely interesting or controversial.

Notwithstanding the story in the link. I have to say. I'm a little emotionally shattered by that. It completely destroys my image of what I thought you did. There should be a meme for that.

 

[jamil]

What has changed in the last few decades:
- even more sedentary lifestyles.
- may more drugs for way more clinically defined diagnoses.
- Even more processed food. Even cooking at home means it comes from a can or box.
- Even more two-earner families, meaning kids raised by someone else (schools, daycares, nannies, etc...)
- even more single-parent families, with the same result as above
- Greatly extending childhood. I had a job at 15, and had done a bunch of "side" stuff even earlier (mowing lawns, delivering papers, etc...). Now, it is not uncommon for adults to be living OFF OF (not just with) their parents through their 20's.
- Social media. You can be connected and completely disconnected at the same time. You can get your 15 minutes of fame doing any idiotic thing you can imagine.
- 24x7x365 news and 350 channels of crap. No need to leave the TV.
- major consumerism, on steroids. You can finance, and get a monthly payment, for ANYTHING. Homes you can't afford, cars you can't afford, $500 phones, $200/month phone/data/TV bills. Anyone can eat steak and lobster, if you don't ask where it came from.
- guns are heavily stigmatized, but there are WAY more of them
- crime, and specifically violent crime, is actually WAY down, but you would think we are nearing Armageddon.
- WAY more government and social intervention into the family. You can drop your kid off at school at 7am and not see them again until 7pm. They will get fed and everything. Drop them off at camp on Saturday, and then leave them at church all day Sunday.

Just my random observations....

Some others to include.

-Helicopter parenting. Since the missing kids on milk cartons became a thing, we've been too afraid to let kids explore the world on their own as soon as they're capable.
-Participation trophies.
-Postmodernist collectivism which replaced the individualist need to teach kids personal responsibility.

 

[Drail]

I blame everything on cell phones.

 

[POB]

As long as there are a bunch of libs running the FBI, there will be more shootings. How else they going to push gun control?

 

[Twangbanger]

I think I have to disagree, Twangr. How would your theory explain Charles Whitman, who was not exposed to SSRIs and whose only known drug problem (to the extent I have researched) was abuse of amphetamines.https://www.britannica.com/event/Texas-Tower-shooting-of-1966

My theory doesn't have to explain Charles Whitman. I'm not trying to explain all human treachery. I'm just trying to explain the part of it that went on display in our schools since about 1990, two years after our large-scale beta experiment with Fluoxetine began.

​

...a determined, motivated killer is the original smart weapon...

This I agree with. There is no easy answer. All I want to do, is make Mom and Dad have to go to a psychiatrist, to get Johnny his happy pills. That is all. Stop short-changing your kid's life because you're afraid it will embarrass you to admit he has an issue. If Johnny needs meds to get through reality, Johnny needs to see a mental health professional. That's it. A doctor seeing a stuffy nose before him, and a housewife with varicose veins afterward, has no effing business on this earth prescribing psychotropic medications to a kid he barely knows. The drive-through lane at CVS has become the mental health provider of choice. I'm just asking people to consider, for a moment, whether kids under 18 might, possibly, be worth a little more effort than that.

Twan, I think the medication is part of it. But why do we have so many people who need the medication. Part of the answer to that may be that it's a quick fix to some behavioral problems that would previously have been [STRIKE]solved[/STRIKE] prevented by good parenting.I think another root of the problem, even beyond over/mis-prescribing psych drugs, is that we're cranking out these kinds of kids, incapable of coping with the simple problems in life, like big macs. Why can't kids cope with the things now that were simpler decades ago? Kids make such monumental mountains out of molehills to an extent that we've never witnessed before. Maybe that's because of the fears in parents about their kids. I grew up in a rural area just outside an urban area. At age 9, I used to walk a couple of miles across fields, and then through neighborhoods, by myself, on the way to the Handy Dandy store to spend some of my allowance. No parent these days would ever imagine their kids doing that now. But we all did that back then and thought nothing of it. I think it's more than just just the meds at the bottom of it. Maybe the meds push people over the edge. But that they need meds in the first place to help them cope with life may be the lowest level underlying the problem. Maybe having parents who instill personal competence/confidence through making their kids do everything they're capable of doing for themselves, as soon as they're capable, would produce fewer kids with depression and other mental conditions which require treating with meds. Kids don't gain self-confidence by winning medals they didn't actually earn. They learn self-confidence by doing, by trying, by failing, by persevering, figuring it out, and then succeeding. Nothing is learned from being given a trophy you didn't earn except the lie that everyone will make your way for you.

Rep-attempt-inbound...

...

​

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/...rescribing-exercise-before-medication/284587/​

For Depression, Prescribing Exercise Before Medication...https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases...in-depth/depression-and-exercise/art-20046495

Depression and anxiety: Exercise eases symptoms


Put down the pills and pick up your bicycle (or running shoes)​

It wouldn't let me rep you, either...so I'm going to lace up the Hokas in your honor and head out in the rain
​

 

[two70]

Correlation is not causation. Such a simple concept that so few truly understand and that so many simply ignore. Whether the target is guns, SSRIs, video games or whatever, people always want to point to one, simple convenient thing on which to place blame. Life is rarely that simple and the last time I checked evil predated all of these convenient scapegoats.

While it is true that some GPs may have a tendency to prescribe psychotropic medications as a first resort and without suggesting therapy in conjunction with the medication, it is also true that medication is prescribed for a reason in the first place and that the patients all too often fail to seek out therapy even when recommended or fail to take the medication as prescribed. Therapy still carries a stigma that medication doesn't nor is it as simple or convenient as taking pills. Unfortunately, all to often many of those that need and rely on medications to function in society, are also prone to stop taking the medication once they are feeling better due to side effects and other issues. My wife, who is a psychologist, has seen many of those, that despite tons of experience with the bad results of doing so, will continually cycle between functioning normally while taking medication and going completely off the rails when they decide to discontinue treatment. In the end, no amount of nannying can convince some people to continue needed treatment whether medication, therapy, or both.

Everyone has free will, not everyone uses it in their best interests. Now, most of these people are more of a danger to themselves than to others, even so few, even of these will ultimately choose to act out on their impulses. Much, much rarer, still are those that choose to hurt others. When someone gets to the point where harming others becomes appealing, there's little that can be done to stop them so long as they retain the freedom to make their own choices. There's an old axiom that someone who is intent on harm and who does not care if he lives or not, is virtually impossible to stop. While true, many school shooters are not quite that committed, instead they find the weakness of unarmed victims to be provocative. Either way the only real options to stop them is to eliminate areas where they can be sure to find unarmed victims and to have armed responders to stop a shooter as soon as possible.

 

[BugI02]

And people don't really compass the true nature of the drugs. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. The drugs are meant to subtly manipulate the brain's own feedback loop contolling the levels of neurotransmitters in circulation, that is why the latency in the drugs efficacy is measured in months. You don't want to make ham-fisted changes to a delicately balanced system

So you take people who, if they are diagnosed correctly, make insufficient levels of certain brain chemicals thought essential to happiness/mood/mental balance. You minutely slow the metabolism of one such chemical. The result is a slowly increasing level of "happy chemicals" in the subject's brain; but since production of these chemicals is controlled by a feedback loop, the areas that manufacture them ramp down on production in response to the higher levels in circulation.
Soon a prescribed dose of the drug may not achieve the original effects or not work at all, and the multi-month latency required to maintain the delicate touch just makes fine-tuning even harder.

That set up will never be "set it and forget it" in my estimation but will always require constant tweaking; and if the subject breaks the regimen, now their brain is making drastically less of the chemical in question because of the brain's response to the levels in circulation. Metabolism of serotonin quickly returns to baseline, while production will take months to normalize at what were thought to already be inadequate levels. Clearly a recipe for disaster and functionally not much different from the rush/withdrawal cycle an addict undergoes, just a slower cyclic rate.

Exercise increases the levels of the chemicals in question quickly, and since it is self medication, the patient can quickly and easily control the "dose" to achieve his or her maximum benefit. IMO it should be the first line of intervention in depression but everybody wants that magic pill

 

[Jludo]

My theory doesn't have to explain Charles Whitman. I'm not trying to explain all human treachery. I'm just trying to explain the part of it that went on display in our schools since about 1990, two years after our large-scale beta experiment with Fluoxetine began.
​

Wasn't Charles whitman partially explained by a brain tumor.

 

[BugI02]

Wasn't Charles whitman partially explained by a brain tumor.

Same circular reasoning, smaller diameter

Brain tumor sufferers who go out and set up a sniper position so they can randomly kill strangers are very much the exception, so how to explain why so many don't do this. Same with depression/SSRIs - confusion of cause and effect