Almost every mass shooter had been taking some form of psychiatric medication shortly before their attack. Lower profile murders often have someone making the “he changed his meds” excuse for the killer as well. All the debates about gun control are missing the point, that if people weren’t deranged, they wouldn’t be commiting these crimes.
Antidepressants have been linked to both suicidial behavior, and violence. I’m starting to think these drugs do more harm than good.
Would limiting the use of these drugs prevent mass shootings? Or significantly lower the general murder rate?
What if you went the other way - made them over-the-counter? Regulate for purity and keep prices down and if someone gets hooked on opiods, at least or she will be able to keep taking medical grade Oxy while holding down a job for as long as possible without having to resort to black-market heroin.
Or, here’s a radical idea, you could have free mental health care where people aren’t just given a script for medication they probably can’t afford anyway and are actually monitored on a regular basis to make sure that they don’t have a psychotic episode. Of course it’s probably cheaper to just put anyone who seems a little off in a rubber room and throw away the key.
I’m not sure if most shootings are linked to these drugs. I would need statistics.
Which is ironic. Some have been used to commit suicide. (There’s a few such drugs that aren’t used on anyone having suicidal thoughts.) On the other hand a lot of these drugs are used for people who might commit suicide for a reason.
That might (also) significantly increase the suicide rate.
I don’t think these particular drugs are the problem. People did things like this before the development of modern antidepressants. I think simply giving a lot of people these drugs and not following up is a problem, and even then, I think vastly more people are getting helped by these drugs than become victims of mass shooters. A lot of people who should be seen by therapists and perhaps using these drugs aren’t doing so. The stigma, the expense, and the lack of availability of therapists probably all play a role in this.
And also, guns should be used be easily available for “well-regulated militias”. Police, National Guard and the military.
Many cancer patients die several months after taking cancer-treatment medication. Do you see the fallacy?
This is America. There has to be a pill to make everything all nice!
You want to take away my meds, because I might go all crazy and kill someone(e)? I have never had violent feelings towards anyone but myself.
There is only 1 person I want kill.
(maybe 2 if it’s a bad day & I haven’t had my coffee yet)
Also, nearly all of these mass shooters, were men. What should we do about that?
And how many people are on these meds and DON’T go on to be mass murderers? Surely there must be at least one or two.
Cosigned. The entire reason these drugs exist and are put on the market to begin with is that they, on the whole, do more good than harm. People taking psychiatric medication are already preselected as mentally unstable. It’s not a huge surprise that, when someone does something unhinged and insane, it turns out they were on meds. If the OP wants to make this argument, they need to bring some actual evidence and statistics.
Also, speaking of the “antidepressants cause suicide” thing, here’s a relevant perspective from a Psychiatrist:
And then there’s depression. I’m trying not to make a big deal about it because everyone associates suicide and depression when in fact the correlation is no higher than many other mental illnesses (although the greater number of depressed people does make absolute numbers higher). I guess all I’ll say here beyond what everyone already knows is that Major Depressive Disorder (classic depression) is an intermittent disease. The average depressive episode lasts less than six months, and the average person with MDD has only four depressive episodes in their lifetime (these numbers are even better if you’re on medication, which many depressed people fail to be). There’s a thing called dysthymia, which is like having depression all the time, but it is thankfully less common and less severe and not where most suicides are coming from.
I am certain that six months feels like an eternity if you are depressed. And no doubt knowing that you’re going to have to deal with the same thing a few more times in your life (ALTHOUGH SERIOUSLY, MEDICATION DOES HELP WITH THIS) must also be, well, depressing. But the average depressive suicide is not a Perfect Philosopher who has calculated, while healthy, that the possibility of another six month depressive episode is too much to bear.
The average depressive suicide is someone in the middle of one of their episodes who, like the teenagers above, is in the place so dark that they’ve forgotten the existence of hope. They’re somewhere so dark that “this will probably go away in a couple of months” has no meaning. Somewhere so dark that one of the main side effects of effective antidepressant drugs is suicide, because a few weeks after starting the patient finally has enough energy to go kill themselves, but doesn’t consider waiting a month or so for the drug to take full effect.
Bolding mine. It’s not that the pills make them suicidal. It’s that they were suicidal to begin with, but now they have the energy to actually do something about it. Which is still a problem, make no mistake, but it’s a very different picture than the simple statement, “Antidepressants cause suicide”. I don’t really have a pithy statement with regards to violence towards others, though.
But with regards to “every shooter was on meds”, a few other things. Firstly, whether they were actually taking their meds is an open question. Much of this is speculation and hearsay; we don’t have their medical records or good evidence of what’s going on. Secondly, the definition of what is a “med” is pretty fucking open - the Charleston shooter was on Suboxone, and that got blamed, but Suboxone has never been linked to violence. How many people aren’t on any form of “medication”, or don’t have any kind of medication (acquired legally or illegaly) around them? How much higher is the rate among mass murderers? Antidepressants are not the same as anti-anxiety drugs are not the same as antipsychosis drugs are not the same as drugs against PTSD. Valium isn’t known for causing suicidal thoughts, and the link to violence is not well-established.
One problem you run into in the US is that some people have trouble affording their meds, and do things like take half a pill a day, instead of a whole pill, and end up breaking a timed-release pill that should not be broken, or they take their medication every other day, instead of every day, and they might have some kind of episode on the day off.
Doctors ask patients about things like being able to afford meds, but people lie, because they are afraid they won’t get a prescription at all if they admit that they do have money troubles.
You need to first of all, get blood levels on shooters, not just the fact that they had a prescription, then, you need to find out other things like how common the prescription is-- did 500,000 people who took the same dose of the same med on the same day NOT go on a shooting spree? or was the shooter on an unusually high dose? or taking it in combination with something else that it should not have been combined with (you MUST NOT, for example, combine SSRIs with OTC cough medicine containing dextromethorphan, or you risk hallucinations and paranoia), but he got the scripts from two different doctors, and had them filled at two different pharmacies? Or did he fail to take it as prescribed? Let’s say he used to forget it for days, then try to make up for it by taking a double dose on the morning he remembered, and he went on a rampage after going off it for a week, then taking a double dose? That’s no reason to deny the med to thousand and thousands of responsible people.
If you know anything about Venn diagrams, you are going to have to expect some intersect with “people who go on shooting sprees,” and “people who have been under psychiatric care,” and also “people who have been under psychiatric care,” and “people with a prescription for a psych med.” So naturally, you will get intersection between “people with a prescription for psych meds,” and “people who go on shooting sprees.” That’s basic logic. It’s no reason to condemn psych meds, because the circle of people who take them is going to be huge.
Certainly, at some point, one of these psycho killers was on Tylenol or something similar. How come those kind of drugs never get blamed??
One of the more commonly cited studies (out of Sweden) found a link between antidepressants and violent behavior, but also a link between subtherapeutic dosages and such behavior. So maybe the real problem is insufficient medication in people who are already violence-prone.*
These links remain tenuous. Severely limiting use of such drugs due to fears of mass shootings is in my opinion not likely to do much good and could harm many people who benefit greatly by using them.
*note that the study only found a significant association in 15 to 24-year-olds, not older adults. And the absolute differences weren’t large. "During the study period, 8377 (1.0%) individuals were convicted of a violent crime. This compared with 40,384 (0.6%) convictions among 7,061,361 individuals from the general Swedish population aged 15 years or older in 2006.
1/6 of the country are or have been on psychiatric meds.
We really need to look into the effect of dihydrogen monoxide on mass murders. I hear it’s been found in all of their blood.
The OP wants to make it hard for people who need meds for their mental health to actually get those meds.
What a cruel, cruel suggestion.
The country has been ravaged by an epidemic of dihydrogen monoxide abuse and addiction ever since it was made available OTC. When it used to be available by Rx only, there were still too many doctors running DHMO mills, prescribing the stuff like it was water. Then for a time the DEA clamped down so strictly that legitimate users couldn’t get it, and suffered greatly for it. Illegal DHMO labs flourished in every neighborhood. There was such a public backlash that the DEA relented (imagine that!), DHMO is now available for all, and our whole society is going to shit because of it.
Once a dihydrogen monoxide addict, always a dihydrogen monoxide addict. Ask me how I know that. A curse on whoever invented the shit! (I’m sure it was the Russians.)
Also messed up that if you use it once, you are hopelessly addicted and will die in 3 days without any.
Not a Russian plot though, they barely use the stuff. One thing they did right is recognize the danger and replaced it with EtOH, with liquid inoculation starting at the age of 5.
Any one who exhibits any depression whatsoever is going to be given drugs. Plain and simple. Even though the script writers know it takes four to six weeks for the drug to have any positive effective, four to six months for the drug to have a full effect, and that’s only for 25% of the population that is effected by them at all.
When I was diagnosed with “situation depression” I was told to stay in the depressive situation and take drugs until I felt better. Fortunately, I had even common sense to see how ridiculous that idea was a I changed the situation. Without taking any drugs.
I’m a DHMO addict. I love that stuff so much that I bath in it. 
I’m the board’s poster child for contempt and hostility towards the field of psychiatry’s efficacy and the usefulness of their [del]drugs[/del] [del]poisons[/del] “meds”. Nearly all of it is bad for you. A large percent of it provokes unintended cognitive and emotional reactions and some of that is permanent, and much of it is also physiologically-neurologically habit-forming (addictive, essentially – the nerve tissue and/or the biochemical regulatory mechanisms adjust to the psych meds so the psych-medicated environment becomes the “new norm”).
But no.
No nanny state bullshit. People should have the right to insert into their bodies & brains whatever chemical modifiers they find useful and helpful. They should have the right to consult with whatever practitioners they wish to consult with. And that definitely includes their right to do damnfool things like going to a psychiatrist (despite the profession’s profound lack of any grounding that makes it non-quackery) and taking psychiatric meds.
OK, one nanny-state provision: fully informed consent. It should be illegal to promulgate medical lies about the efficacy and/or lack of side effects or the outcomes of such treatment as it has affected the populations who have received such treatment. Even then, the patient should not be forced to watch Hurry Tomorrow or Frances before being allowed to pick up their psych meds 
— just provide the info on a fact sheet (and make it illegal to run the misleading ads that some of the pharma companies currently run).