Earlier this week (August 21), a 20-year-old gunman entered a school in Atlanta, apparently intending to kill people, but was talked down by a school bookkeeper.
As everyone knows, we’ve had a great many incidents of this sort in the past fifteen years, most of which ended more tragically than this one.
The reporting of these incidents in the media often mentions the fact that the perpetrators of these murders had a history of “mental health problems.”
But the one piece of information that we seldom get is whether or not the perpetrator had any traces of psycho-pharmaceutical products in his blood stream.
Given the propensity for these products (especially the SSRI’s) to induce thoughts of violence and suicide, wouldn’t you think that this question would be high in the concerns of legislators, government officials, and law enforcement officers?
How difficult would it be to find out definitively what percentage of these mass murderers had psycho-pharmaceutical products in their blood streams? Is it 5%, or 50%, or 95%?
And while we’re wondering about that, why is it that the petition on the White House website to conduct such an investigation was removed without explanation in December 2012, only one week after it was posted, even though it was well on the way to acquiring the necessary number of signatures.
Why aren’t Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman and the APA demanding that this question be addressed and answered? After all, they’re the ones who are dishing out the drugs. Wouldn’t you think that just the fact that the question is out there would nudge their consciences? After all, if the drugs are perfectly safe – what do they have to fear?
Instead, they are promoting the self-serving notion that what’s needed to address this problem is more treatment (i.e. drugs).
Something is truly rotten in the State of the Union.