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Congratulations America. In recent months you have managed to claim a few more celebrities to suicide and/or homicide. And there is no sign that the trend is subsiding. Not only are celebrities at continued risk, but you have claimed hundreds and thousands of soldiers and veterans and school kids to your enormous list of suicide and homicide victims, victims that the corporate-controlled media wants us to believe have committed “senseless” acts of violence and self-destruction. 

And, amazingly, despite the evidence all around, your ruling elite (probably among the 1%, I suppose) continue to cunningly obscure the truths of these serious matters, probably in order to avoid embarrassing revelations which could endanger the profitability of any number of their corporate buddies that are considered “too big to criticize” because they are “too big to fail”. Because of what amounts to clever propagandizing, you continue to be ignorant of the root causes of the teen violence and suicide epidemic, which have been staring us in the face since Columbine. 

America is, shamefully, # 1 in the world in the prescribing and consumption of potentially lethal drugs, including both the illicit ones and the legal prescription ones (that are packaged, of course, in sub-lethal doses). Both types of synthetic drugs are known to be addicting. And both of them can be lethal or otherwise damaging when taken in large doses or in combination with other drugs. (Worrisome warning: combinations of any two or more prescription drugs are NOT tested for safety or efficacy before gaining FDA approval, even in short-term clinical trials (or in the rare long-term human trials), not to mention in pre-clinical studies in the rat labs, which are virtually all short term studies testing a single drug.)

America is # 1 in locking up its citizens behind bars (even for non-violent drug offenders). And, partly because of the obscene cost of its cavalierly over-prescribed and cavalierly over-consumed synthetic pharmaceutical drugs, America has the costliest healthcare system in the world, with (and the huge amount of drug use may be explanatory) some of the poorest health outcomes in the world. Americans are some of the sickest, most chronically-ill people in the world. (Perhaps we are being voluntarily or involuntarily poisoned by what we put in our mouths.)

Because of the escalating costs of its medical care (not to mention the stupidity of borrowing trillions of dollars from the investor classes to fund its permanent war machine), America is sliding down the slippery slope towards bankruptcy, both financially, morally and spiritually. 

Of course it is not only the celebrities and soldiers and veterans that are being sickened and are offing themselves with drugs at alarming rates (see http://ssristories.com/index.php?p=soldier), it is also unaware parents, their children and other patients, not to mention their prescribing physicians, who aren’t yet aware of the connections between the ingestion of brain-altering, neurotoxic drugs and the huge incidence of drug-related suicidality, homicidality and irrational behaviors that we don’t want to think about.

It might be easier to understand why celebrities kill themselves or allow themselves to be killed by their personal millionaire Hollywood doctors. Those celebrity docs naturally prescribe the newest and therefore most dangerous drugs to their already addicted clients.  And they always seem to prescribe, in untested combinations of these dangerous drugs when the first drug “poops-out”. Because of the toxic, soul-destroying effects of fame and fortune and fun and hard-living, these sad, worshipped, doomed souls have been driven to “drink ‘n drugs” that are all too easy to access. Bad outcomes are predictable.

So yesterda we heard about another in a long string of school shootings, which seem to uniquely American. Most of the sad, “dissed” and bullied perpetrators (yearning for respect and revenge, which a pointing handgun gives them) have been loners, outcasts, living in homes where abuse or neglect or pampering or punitive parenting are the norm. 

What else but violence and dysfunction could be the expected outcome in a psychologically-traumatizing, militarized culture where the nation’s homicidal violence is accepted without any objection; where empathy-destroying, addictive, violent videogames, entertainment and sports is the norm; where demeaning and abusive age-inappropriate sexuality plays a prominent role in the psychological “growth” of immature children, especially males; where our children are immersed in a culture of ruthless, selfish dog-eat-dog capitalism where greed is understood to be good; where we have a population of adolescent brains that are seriously malnourished since birth; and where Americans don’t question when brain-altering, addicting psychiatric drugs are given out like candy.

We shouldn’t wonder why we are growing a population of confused, under-achieving and increasingly violent or self-abusive children who can’t learn. We shouldn’t wonder about the groups of defiant, amoral adolescents who have lost their impulse control and cognitive abilities and may be condemned to various forms of failure.  If Johnny can’t read, it isn’t the fault of the teachers. The teachers are dealing with damaged goods that are not of their making.

But the elephant in the room that has been purposely ignored by the powers-that-be who want to obfuscate America’s legacy of school shootings is the statistically relevant connection between the school shooters and their psychiatric drugs. 

So I conclude this Duty to Warn column with my most recent Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter and an invitation to concerned health caregivers and others to attend a day-long seminar this Saturday, March 3, 2012 at WITC Conference Center. The seminar starts at 10 am and is entitled “Brain Nutrition for Optimal Mental Health”. See advertising elsewhere in both last week’s and this week’s Reader Weekly for more information or call 218-390-2991.

Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter # 422

A Short List of American School Shooters and Their Psych Drugs 

Following is a short list of recent American school shooters and the brain-altering, spell-binding prescription drugs they were taking. These drugs are commonly referred to by their parents as the “I don’t give a damn” drugs. These drugs are known to diminish empathy, impulse control, creativity and cognitive ability. These drugs can cause mania and psychosis short-term and brain damage long term. Dependence on (ie, addiction to) the drug can commonly cause serious withdrawal symptoms that can also lead to serious side effects, including bizarre or atypical behaviors, such as suicidality, homicidality and criminality and a craving to resume the drug, similar to what happens to people who are addicted to nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, opioids, SSRIs, benzodiazepines, Ritalin, Adderall or street drugs like cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, Ecstasy or dexedrine. 

For thousands of more examples of acts of violence related to psychiatric drugs, including 50 more examples of drug-related school shootings (whose drug connections were revealed in the media), check out http://ssristories.com/index.php?p=school. 

On the www.ssristories.com site, you can read about the 20 examples of psych drug-related female teacher/male student sexual molestations, the 70 examples of psych drug-related road rage, and hundreds of examples of psych drug-related soldier suicides, veteran suicides, murders/suicides, workplace violence, bizarre celebrity behaviors from drugs, etc.

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* Jeff Weise, age 16, was taking 60 mg 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.

* Eric Harris, age 18, was on Luvox when he killed twelve classmates and a teacher in Littleton, Colorado. Both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot themselves. 15 dead, 23 wounded. Klebold’s medical records were sealed.

* Kip Kinkel, age 15, was withdrawing from Prozac when he shot 22 classmates and both his parents. 

* Shawn Cooper, age 15, was taking Ritalin when he fired a shotgun at school. 

* Elizabeth Bush, age 14, was on Prozac when she shot at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one. 

* Mitchell Johnson, age 13, was taking an unspecified psych drug when he shot at fellow students in Jonesboro, Arkansas. 5 dead, many others wounded.

* T.J. Solomon, age 15, was taking Ritalin when he shot six classmates in Conyers, Georgia. 

* Jason Hoffman, age 18, was on Effexor and Celexa when he wounded five students at his Granite Hills high school, El Cajon, California. 

* Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, was on Paxil (which he said 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.

* Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 16 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium.  He had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien.  

* Robert Hawkins, age 19, killed eight people and wounded five before committing suicide in an Omaha mall. He had been on antidepressants and Valium. 

* Asa Coon, age 14, shot and wounded four students at his school before taking his own life.  He was on the antidepressant Trazodone. 

* Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter in the Virginia Tech Massacre in which 33 were killed and 29 were injured, was on an antidepressant pill but neither his toxicology reports nor his recent medical history were ever released to the public.  

* Jon Romano, age 16, shot a teacher with a shotgun.  He had been taking “medication for depression”.