My son sent me a message a few days ago about a possible link between antidepressants and violent behavior. This is what he wrote: "The shooter in DC this week was on SSRI's (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). So was Sandy Hook shooter. So were over 90% of all mass shooters! When you find a story about a mom doing something unimaginable to her children, yup you got it - SSRI's in her cabinet! Here is why:"
He went on to list the dozens of side effects of SSRI's that include drowsiness; somnolence; headaches; bruxism (grinding teeth); extremely vivid or strange dreams; mydriasis (pupil dilation); changes in appetite; insomnia and/or changes in sleep; changes in sexual behavior; anxiety; panic attacks; mania; tremors; suicidal ideation; photosensitivity; paresthesia (sensation of tingling, pricking, or burning of the skin); cognitive disorders; violent tendencies; and paranoid reactions.
He asked me if I'd look into it. Since that time I have been immersed in this unsettling topic, but here is what I found.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI's) are a class of compounds typically used as antidepressants in the treatment of depression, anxiety disorders, and personality disorders. SSRI's are the first class of psychotropic drugs discovered using the process called rational drug design, a process that starts with a specific biological target and then creates a molecule designed to affect it. They are the most widely prescribed antidepressants in the world. The efficacy of SSRI's ... has been disputed.
The main indication for SSRI's is major depressive disorder. SSRI's are frequently prescribed for anxiety disorders, such as social anxiety disorder, panic disorders, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorders, chronic pain, and for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They are also frequently used to treat depersonalization disorder, although generally with poor results.
SSRI users with some type of bipolar disorder are at a much higher risk for mania (a state of abnormally elevated or irritable mood, arousal, and/or energy levels. The word "mania" derives from the Greek: madness, frenzy; and from the verb "mainomai" - "to be mad, to rage, to be furious"). Mania varies in intensity, but severe episodes can result in extreme energy, psychotic features, including hallucinations, delusions of grandeur, suspiciousness, catatonic behavior, aggression, and a preoccupation with violent thoughts and schemes. SSRI-induced mania in patients diagnosed with unipolar depression can trigger a bipolar episode.
Critics of SSRI's claim that the widely disseminated television and print advertising of SSRI's promotes an inaccurate message, oversimplifying what these medications actually do and deceiving the public. It has been argued that SSRI's can actually cause chemical imbalances and abnormal brain states. Noted psychologist and neuroscientist Elliot Valenstein claims that the broad biochemical assertions and assumptions of mainstream psychiatry are not supported by clinical evidence.
The SSRI drug duloxetine, marketed as Cymbalta, lists, in addition to the side effects already discussed: decreased interest in sexual intercourse; change or problem with discharge of semen; inability to have or keep an erection; longer than usual time to ejaculation of semen; and loss in sexual ability, desire, drive, or performance. I mention this because acts of extreme violence invariably contain psychosexual components.
One other side effect of SSRI's is fear. Fear is our most basic survival instinct. Fear is hard-wired into our autonomic brain functions. Fear floods our bodies with adrenaline. Fear triggers our fight-or-flight mechanism. A blind kill or be killed reaction.
Another widely prescribed SSRI is Zoloft (sertraline). Side effects again list: decreased sexual desire or ability; aggressive reaction; excited feelings or actions that are out of control; feeling that others are watching you or controlling your behavior; feeling that others can hear your thoughts; feeling, seeing, or hearing things that are not there; and severe mood or mental changes.
http://ssristories.com states the following:
SSRI's, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are the pharmaceutical companies latest cash cows. Their use has skyrocketed in the last ten years. Nicknamed "Chemical Babysitters" and designated as antidepressants, they are causing dozens of murders, thousands of psychoses and are altering the minds of millions of users. All but a very few of the latest "Mass Murderers" have been on these drugs. Schools encourage parents to put their children on these drugs for the smallest signs of "non conformity." Schools receive more money for "disabled" students.
They cite the following case:
Kristine Marie Cushing, age 39, had been separated from her husband for several months. In October 1991, she took a .38-caliber pistol and shot and killed both of her children, Elizabeth age 8, and Stephanie Marie, age 4, while they lay sleeping in their beds, then shot herself, inflicting a non-fatal wound. Prosecutors stated that they "couldn't find one iota of information to show that she was anything but a very giving, caring and sweet human being." After a plea of insanity, she was committed to a mental institution. What made her snap? She had been taking Prozac.
In the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, it was reported that Eric Harris, one of the shooters, was taking Luvox, which, like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, belongs to the SSRI class of drugs. In one out of every 25 children taking it, Luvox causes mania. His partner Dylan Klebold's medical records have never been made available to the public.
Fifteen-year-old Shawn Cooper of Notus, Idaho, fired a shotgun at students and school staff. According to his stepfather, he had been taking an SSRI. Thirteen-year-old Chris Fetters of Iowa killed her favorite aunt. She was taking Prozac. Kip Kinkel, a 15-year-old youth, went on a rampage in Oregon. He first shot and killed his parents, spent the night with the bodies (characteristic of the dissociative reaction these drugs often cause), then killed two and wounded 22 of his fellow students at Thurston High School. He was taking Prozac.
John Noveske, founder and owner of Noveske Rifleworks, just days before he was mysteriously killed in a single car accident, published the following information on his Facebook page:
• 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.
• Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.
• A boy in Pocatello, ID 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.
• 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.
• Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), stabbed his grandmother 61 times.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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..."
Noveske goes on to cite several teenage suicides that I do not want to list here because they are too painful.
• Kurt Danysh, age 18, while 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 __, 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.
• 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.
Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars.com commented on the fact that the mainstream media intentionally ignores the SSRI - mass murder link due to the crassness of the almighty dollar. "Why is the corporate media so disinterested in pursuing this clear connection? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the pharmaceutical giants who produce drugs like Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil spend around $2.4 billion dollars a year on direct-to-consumer television advertising every year. By running negative stories about prescription drugs, networks risk losing tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue."
Dr. Julian Whitaker MD states, "The explosive nature of these drugs is predictable. Studies show that they can cause akathisia, a condition of significant physical and mental agitation. Akathisia is to violence what a match is to gasoline."
Ann Blake Tracy, Ph.D., author of Prozac: Panacea or Pandora?, has been studying the violent, dark side of SSRI drugs for ten years. She has researched 32 murder/suicides that involved women and their children. By interviewing their families and studying autopsy reports, news accounts and medical histories, she has determined that in 24 of these 32 cases, the women were taking Prozac or another SSRI.
The defenders of Prozac say that millions are being helped by it, but this claim is spurious. In the clinical trials submitted to the FDA for registration, Eli Lilly studied the drug in less than 300 people and for only four to six weeks. One out of every seven participants dropped out of the study because of side effects of the drug.
In fact, Germany's Ministry of Health denied Eli Lilly a license for fluoxetine (Prozac). “Considering the benefit and the risk, we think this preparation totally unsuitable for the treatment of depression,” read the statement.
In its review of the book Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression by David Healy, the New York Review of Books says:
Healy is a distinguished research and practicing psychiatrist, university professor, frequent expert witness, former secretary of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, and author of three books in the field. Healy doesn't deny that SSRI's can be effective against mood disorders, and he has prescribed them to his own patients. As a psychopharmacologist, however, he saw from the outset that the drug firms were pushing a simplistic “biobabble” myth whereby depression supposedly results straightforwardly from a shortfall of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. No such causation has been established, and the proposal is no more reasonable than claiming that headaches arise from aspirin deprivation.
Healy suspected that SSRI makers had squirreled away their own awkward findings about drug-provoked derangement in healthy subjects, and he found such evidence after gaining access to Pfizer’s clinical trial data on Zoloft. In 2001, however, just when he had begun alerting academic audiences to his forthcoming inquiry, he was abruptly denied a professorship he had already accepted in a distinguished University of Toronto research institute supported by grants from Pfizer.
Healy concludes woefully:
The FDA is timid, underfunded, and infiltrated by friends of industry; even the most respected medical journals hesitate to offend their pharmaceutical advertisers; professional conferences are little more than trade fairs; leading professors accept huge sums in return for serving the companies in various venal ways; and, most disgracefully of all, many of their “research” papers are now ghostwritten outright by company-hired hacks. Big Pharma doesn’t just bend the rules; it buys the rulebook.
In Talking Back to Prozac: What Doctors Aren't Telling You About Prozac and the Newer Antidepressants by Peter Breggin MD and Ginger Breggin, Dr. Breggin says:
I have now been a medical expert in dozens of product liability suits against pharmaceutical companies, including the manufacturers of drugs examined in this book: Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. Most of the lawsuits have centered on the main issues in this book: antidepressant-induced violence, suicide and mania. In most of these cases, the plaintiffs or the plaintiffs’ families have hired me after individuals have committed suicide, perpetrated crimes, or otherwise ruined their lives while under the influence of an antidepressant.
Most of the antidepressant cases in which I have been an expert have been settled to the satisfaction of the people who brought the suit against the drug company. Sometimes the drug companies have given a million, or even many millions of dollars, to the plaintiffs—of course, always without admitting guilt. Except for one case that was settled for millions of dollars during the trial, in no case has an antidepressant manufacturer chosen to go to court.
Antidepressants generate gigantic revenues for the drug companies. In 2006, antidepressants were the most prescribed among all classes of drugs, with a total of 227.3 million prescriptions in the United States, with a total revenue of $13.5 billion.
Joe Wesbecker had threatened his co-workers in the past, but had never been violent. In 1989, Wesbecker was placed on Prozac (fluoxetine). One month later, he became agitated and delusional. Suspecting Prozac as the cause, his psychiatrist stopped the antidepressant. Two days later, with most of the drug remaining in his system, a heavily armed Wesbecker walked into his former place of work in Louisville, Ky., where he killed eight people and wounded many others.
A 16-year-old boy in Manitoba, Canada, abruptly plunged a knife into the chest of one his best friends, killing him. The youngster, with no history of violence or serious mental illness, had been put on Prozac three months before the murder. When his mother told the psychiatrist that Prozac was making her son worse, the doctor increased the dose. Seventeen days later, with no significant provocation, the teenager killed his friend.
Before he committed the massacre in the theater in Aurora, Colo., in 2012, James Holmes was in psychiatric treatment at his university clinic. It is certain that Holmes was either taking psychiatric drugs or in withdrawal from them at the time he committed murder.
We do not know if the Newtown shooter, Adam Lanza, was taking psychiatric medication at the time of the shootings, but it was reported that he had been psychiatrically diagnosed and treated. A Washington Post article reported that a family friend said “he was on medication.”
The following warning now appears on all SSRI packaging:
WARNING! Withdrawal can often be more dangerous than continuing on a medication. It is important to withdraw extremely slowly from these drugs, usually over a period of a year or more, under the supervision of a qualified specialist. Withdrawal is sometimes more severe than the original symptoms or problems.
The website SSRI Stories: Antidepressant Nightmares ssristories.com comprises a database of over 4800 news stories, that have appeared in the media (newspapers, TV, scientific journals) or that were part of FDA testimony in either 1991, 2004 or 2006, in which antidepressants and violence are mentioned.
The website focuses on the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI's), of which Prozac (fluoxetine) was the first. Other SSRI's are Zoloft (sertraline), Paxil (paroxetine), Celexa (citalopam), Lexapro (escitalopram), and Luvox (fluvoxamine). Other newer antidepressants included in this list are Remeron (mirtazapine), Anafranil (clomipramine) and the SNRI's Effexor (venlafaxine), Cymbalta (duloxetine) and Pristiq (desvenlafaxine), as well as the dopamine reuptake inhibitor antidepressant Wellbutrin (bupropion) (also marketed as Zyban).
The site breaks down the massive index of cases into the following categories:
Soldier Cases
School Shootings / Incidents
Journal Articles
Workplace Violence
Celebrity Cases
Highly Publicized Cases
Won SSRI Criminal Cases
Women Teacher Molestations
Postpartum Cases
Murder-Suicides
Murders / Murder Attempts
Suicides / Suicide Attempts
Road Rage Cases
Mike Adams, editor of http://www.naturalnews.com wrote: "We weren't planning to cover this story until the Associated Press confirmed that Aaron Alexis, the shooter believed responsible for the recent mass shooting at the Navy yard, "had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems"."
This is proof that Aaron Alexis was on psychiatric drugs, because that's the only treatment currently being offered by the Veterans Administration for mental problems. Alexis' family members also confirmed to the press that he was being "treated" for his mental health problems.
Alexis also suffered from PTSD, blackouts, and anger issues – all of which are treated with SSRI drugs. The most common form of treatment for PTSD is Paroxetine, which is listed as the number 3 top violence-causing drug by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP).
Mike Adams refers to the antidepressant - violence link as a "chemical holocaust."
This blog is long enough as it is, and as with all my blogs, this review is intended as an opinion piece only. I always recommend that readers pursue lines of inquiry that interest them most.
There is a clear and alarming causality between SSRI's and violence. Profit alone pushed these psychotropic drugs onto the market without adequate testing and oversight. An aggressive advertising strategy led to the prescribing of SSRI's to children, teens and young adults who were highly susceptible to the serious side effects, and the gross over-prescribing in the general population. Overworked and incentivized physicians turned a blind eye to the emerging link between these quick-fix miracle drugs and the horrendous consequences. While men, women, and children died, legislators and government regulators were being wined and dined by lobbyists with unlimited amounts of money at their disposal.
On a personal note, I myself have experience with these drugs and their insidious effects. From my earliest childhood I suffered from profound depression and suicidal tendencies. Left undiagnosed, I turned to drugs in my teens and later to alcohol in an attempt to self-medicate. Psychiatrist after psychiatrist prescribed one pill after another, each more devastating than the one before. I was finally put on Cymbalta, which has been described as taking a hammer to a lightbulb, with similar results.
The drug so adversely changed my personality, "zoning me out" into a zombie-like state, that I could no longer recognize myself as the person I was. My creativity was taken away, my humor, my intellect, my sexual desire, my will to live. I made the mistake of going off the drug cold turkey and experienced life-threatening withdrawal symptoms, that I just rode out, shivering with chills, sweating, doubled over with nausea, curled up in a fetal position in bed, feeling like I was going to die, and wishing with all my heart that I would.
I was subsequently diagnosed with bipolar disorder and still take a low dose of the SSRI citalopram, but throughout my journey I suffered several suicide attempts, multiple hospitalizations, alcoholism (I'm currently four and a half years sober), police interventions, arrest for domestic assault while suffering a psychotic episode, and very nearly divorce.
Throughout it all, I was fortunate to have an understanding and loving family, a supportive group of close friends, and most especially a wife who went way above the call to stand by me and stick with me. My heart goes out to those affected one way or another by mental illness and the methods used to treat them, who have not been so lucky.
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