Anti-Depressants

I came across this statement online today:

“Elsewhere, Dr. Whitaker discusses the common thread between the Columbine High School shooters, spree shootings at a community center in Los Angeles, two brokerage firms in Atlanta, and a printing plant in Kentucky: SSRI antidepressants. Every one of those shootings was perpetrated by people taking Prozac, Zoloft, Luvox, Paxil, or a related antidepressant drug.”

I had heard this before, so it was not news. It’s actually amazing how many mass murders are committed by people who were on on antidepressants. Many doctors have argued that there is a link between psychotic behavior and SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, among others). If you do some research and start poking around you’ll discover case after case after case.

Why would an antidepressant lead to murder? It’s really not very hard to figure out. The key feature of an antidepressant is the fact that it improves your mood. Specifically, when you take it you don’t feel bad anymore. It effectively shuts down the part of your brain that makes you feel bad. In fact, that is the entire purpose of the drug.

The problem with this is that there are times in life when you are supposed to feel bad – like when you hurt someone or do something terrible. The drug, however, stops that bad feeling from ever happening. It turns off the conscience. Since the conscience is gone (or severely impaired), the person can do horrific things and not feel bad about it. They no longer have an inner voice that says “that is a horrible thing to do!” It’s simply gone.

So what do people do? They revert to their true inner nature. With nothing restraining them from doing evil, they plunge into it. For some people this manifests itself by outrageous, psychotic behavior. Some people commit suicide. Some people go on killing rampages. In each case their depraved, evil nature came to the surface. The drug didn’t actually make them do anything; all it did was remove the part of them that keeps people from acting like sociopaths. It removed the restraint.

Stop and think about it for a moment: what kind of person would you become if you could do any act of evil and still feel good about yourself? What would you do if the voice inside your head that says “that is evil” was gone, and every option seemed like a good one? You would become like those people who cannot feel physical pain, and who inflict horrible injuries on themselves without even knowing it.

There is tremendous danger in giving someone a drug that stops them from feeling bad. It’s very much like giving someone a pill that prevents them from ever feeling pain again. It may cure the depression but the side-effect is horrific.

In this day and age we have come to believe that behavioral problems can be solved by giving people pills. Is the child misbehaving? Give him a pill. Is the person depressed? Give him a pill. Is the student having trouble paying attention? Give him a pill. Instead of investigating the situation and seeing if there is an actual cause for the misbehavior, or a root issue that needs to be addressed, we just give the person a pill and treat the symptom.

I am not arguing that it is always bad to give someone a pill. What I am saying is that pills have very dangerous side-effects and can cause even bigger problems than what they are trying to solve. It might be a good idea to look into the problem and see what is really going on, instead of just handing them a prescription.