Half the kids I know are on some kind of ‘behavior modificating meds’. How is it that no news has been released regarding the possible pharmacology relationship to the recent rash of gun-wielding teen maniacs?
Does anyone else smell a big money conspiracy?
No.
Old news. Prozac makes people go postal.
Prozac? I thought it was reefer.
Most likely - and I’m going out on a limb here - because no evidence of such a relationship exists?
That’s madness.
No relationship has been proven between violence and violent video games, either – but it certainly doesn’t stop the media from blabbing about it every chance they get. Since when does the conclusion come before all the speculation?
“Half the kids I know”? How many are we talking about here? Two? Three? A hundred? I worked in a group home/hospital for emotionally disturbed children, and not half the kids were on medication.
More likely, 1/2 of all the kids he knows. The lower half. Although how you dose just the lower half of a person, I’ll never know.:dubious:
Suppositories.
There’s a difference between informed speculation based on solid evidence and leading to testable hypotheses and wild-eyed everything but the kitchen-sink inspired nonsense.
I dunno where you’re from, but where the upwardly mobile live, if your kid doesn’t get straight ‘A’s, or they’re not participating in at least three extra-curricular activities, or if they don’t get invited to the other kids’ birthday parties – they spike their juice boxes.
I thought March caused madness.
I don’t know what the current state of the art in Phase III clinical testing is, but I would be very curious. I suspect that not many teens are in such trials and that you don’t start really getting any hard data until what I think is somewhat euphemistically referred to as Phase IV or “postapproval studies.”
Since Public Citizen I think it is recommends that you don’t use a drug until it’s been on the market for at least 7 years, depending on what happens to be all the rage in upper-middle class suburbia, the lead time for documented side effects in teens could be a while.
Yeah, I smell one. I’ve been bringing this up for awhile, both here and among my personal friends. Like the OP says, there seems to be no reluctance to draw tenuous connections to things like video games. But there seems to be very little interest in exploring a connection that is actually documented as a side effect of certain medications.
I started a thread on this very topic here. There are couple of links I posted there you might be interested in having a look at.
There’s also this recently from Sanjay Gupta at CNN.
I find it very hard to believe that people coming home, killing their entire family and committing suicide is just some repeated coincidence. It’s not just teenagers, but I think they are more strongly affected.
And before someone yells “correlation is not causation”, yeah, yeah we all know that here. That doesn’t mean correlations have no value. They indicate things that may warrant further investigation. And I’ll bet that investigation is not going to be spearheaded by a pharmaceutical company.
I think the reason there’s been no suggestion of a link is that most shootings involve people who are known to be mentally ill, were being treated with medication (for that illness), and had missed taking that medication for some reason on the day of the shooting.
If, OTOH, “‘behavior modificating meds’” refers to illegal narcotics, that’s a well known connection, and not news (“So somebody got whacked out on drugs and killed their buddy. yawn Next story.”)
What actual correlation are you talking about here? What is varying with what, precisely?
As a data point, at my job I can see what medications everyone is on, and I’ve seen thousands and thousands of family’s data. The number on any kind of behavoral health medication is less than 1/3rd- 1/4 (and since my job is to rebalance things when the medical and presription systems get out of sync, I see a dispraportionate amount of kids that have huge numbers of medical and/or prescription claims).
Since I don’t see a factual question in the OP, I’m going to close this. Those wishing to propose conspiracy theories on the subject are welcome to start a new thread in Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator