No, it's not.

but when it was a stabbing...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024798603

Just a continuing question that never gets answered.

Offensive as hell.

They are possibly the reason the great Del Shannon shot himself.

except these. Commonly prescribed for ADHD.

http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/stimulantsideeffects/

Amazing, isn't it? This reluctance to even consider the possibility.

Now tell me, how many years ago did these drugs come into fashion? And how many of our young men have been on them for years?

The vast majority of these are prescribed to young males. Probably young white and or affluent males with parental access to healthcare, who can afford them.

Yeah, nothing to see here. At all.

But I'm not sure what value any such speculation might have.

All we really know is the guy was a gun nut and he shot up a lot of people and it's not as if other gun nuts haven't done the same for no other reason than they were colossal assholes.

Do I offend your precious?

Good.

Gun love is sick.

Fortunately I can take powerful meds and be somewhat functional.

I don't know of any meds that work for Gun love.

Here's the source of where this kind of sewage bubbles up from:
http://www.naturalnews.com/039752_mass_shootings_psychiatric_drugs_antidepressants.html

You can also find plenty of references on Alex Jones' site if you want to wade into that shithole.

It's not as if gun nut heros like creme-de-la-dum Wayne LaPierre are creative enough to come up with this bullshit on their own.

meds and do more harm than good with what I think are false statements.
Millions of people are helped by treating mental illness with meds. I am one. My life was complete hell before I got professional treatment. I probably wouldn't be here today with out taking meds.
Nothing is without risks and meds have risks there is no denying that. But neither ignoring risks or making untrained biased statements about meds does us any good. IMHO

But there are always adverse reactions which I think are worth looking at in these cases of extreme violence.

Side effects are typically miniscule, but if you look at the population of males under 30 vs. the number of males under 30 who commit these types of acts, that's a miniscule number as well.

So now we're all in for big Pharma?

Good to know.

Can you understand the difference. Do you understand risk.benefit?

You don't have to be quite so condescending.

I am asking if this is being looked at closely enough as a contributing cause in these individuals.

I don't think it is. Or at least the results aren't being made public.

You don't seem to care one way or the other.

Pharmaceutical companies have a long and storied history of pushing drugs to market with horrible side effects, some of which were discovered during trials but hidden in order to get the drug to market. A lot of these seem to be designed to deal with depression or other mental issues. This is not exactly a secret HERPEVA.

But we are now also speculating that said medication has some kind of undisclosed and purposely hidden side effect that would cause him to murder 10 people.

I can only imagine how ethically convenient is to charge one as an ally of Big Pharma merely for disagreeing with your premise.

Good to know, part two.

that drugs can save people's lives and greatly increase quality of life.
Risk/benefit. Has to be weighed. What's so damn hard for people to understand???

a young male shooting up a school is RARE too?

Do you have absolutely zero interest in exploring common threads in these cases?

If one person commits suicide during a drug trial, the manufacturer may list suicide as a possible side effect whether or not (and usually not) it was a causal factor.

There are instances of antidepressants that trigger odd behavior.. I've seen it in my professional experience.

It is something to consider cause sometimes they are handed out by doctors who also push for the drug companies.

But there have been reports that he suffered from some problems. I would be very surprised if he wasn't on something...his mother, who he lived with, was a nurse.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/us/chris-harper-mercer-umpqua-community-college-shooting.html

Even things that had no connection to the epidemic, like when you were so worried that you thought having the Pan-African meeting at the White House was a bad idea.

*Yet* despite all that and the breathless concerns, you're here trying to avoid talking about guns.

Why is that?

Lol. You need a hobby.

but I seem to remember a post somewhere that one of his internet handles was something about "Lithium".

Drug companies are huge ad buyers, plus there is a lot of cross ownership at the top. Corporate media doesn't want to rock those boats.

From those on the meds. If the person on meds lives in a home with guns owned by someone else the guns still go or the family can lock up the person in a medical facility if their desire to have guns around takes priority over a family's members well being


Problem solved

because the NRA told congress to de-fund any organization that looks into such things and the congress, being obedient little sycophants, did just that.

might have been prescribed, if any. Such information is not usually available for some time after an incident. HIPAA is the reason. Eventually, that information will be available. Until then, it's not a topic that can be addressed, so it isn't addressed.

Perhaps it's just that by the time that information is available, people have moved on to the next big story and don't see that information. But, right now, we have no idea about any diagnoses or medications that might have been involved in the shooting yesterday. Patience is needed for now.

There's really no point in raising the question of prescription or non-prescription medication until we know whether any was involved, and there's no requirement to share that with the public the day after something happens.

Personally, I think anyone with a gun "hobby" is a sick puppy.

Anyone who wants a gun for anything other than a strictly utilitarian purpose probably shouldn't have one, especially hand guns.

I doubt most cops have the mental stability required to safely handle guns.

or by alt-med, anti-pharma loons. There are plenty of idiotic posts at DU, citing ssristories.com after every shooting.

You can site search for them.

Sid

Along with a better understanding of who is at greater risk for negative severe side effects.

God forbid we should look into that.

You're talking to someone who is alive because of SSRIs. Fortunately, I no longer need them.

You want to take them away because people who don't know jack shit about depression, mental health and neurology said "BOO" loud enough on the Internet to scare you. Better that lots of people get no treatment in case an unproven, extremely rare link might be true!

Where your argument goes from insensitive to stupid is believing that the drug companies would not love to have drugs that do the same thing, with fewer side effects (so more prescriptions), with a brand-new and highly-profitable patent.

Profit motive does exactly the opposite of what you imply.

I am saying that there is a CAUSE behind these things, other than to death tool.

No one seems to care about the why. Just the what. And the skin color of the perp. And the political implications. And the religion of the perp.

Whatever.

I've stated my question and have gotten my answer on this thread.

You want to demonize mental health treatment, scare more people into not getting medication for their mental health problems, and prove that these drugs are dangerous in order to......?

but you can't figure out how we could have that...

because, that's not the point of this thread. the point is to get us to talk about something other than the guns because ____________________________________________________.

No one dragged you to this one to discuss possible causes of what made this man snap.

The weaponry he had allowed him to easily kill many more people than other means would have.

does that answer your question?

People need to be responsible for what they do.

The meds made me do it doesn't quite cut it, not for me.

Added on edit:
More to the point, those people in Oregon yesterday weren't killed by meds. They were killed by guns. Let's question the ready availability of guns, and a culture that prefers to let people have their goddam guns, no matter how many innocents are murdered.

And you don't need a gun to be a suicidal mass-killer.

Remember the German pilot Andreas Lubitz?

There was that whole Oklahoma bombing.

Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had to buy fertilizer and racecar fuel across several different states to avoid arousing suspicion, break in to a mining quarry to acquire blasting caps, find bomb-making experts among the militia movement, purchase vehicles, and commit a number of thefts to finance all of this.

The Tsarnaevs had to consult illegal bomb making guides online.

The German pilot had to go through flight school, become a licensed pilot, get a job with an airline, and then crash an aircraft.

All this guy had to do was walk into a gun show or sporting goods store and say "I'll take that one."

All mental disorders are not equal, and consequently, all the various people with all their various disorders are not affected in the same way. In a general way mental illnesses are recognized as disorders related to three domains of dysfunction emotions, behavior, and/or cognition.

These three types of dysfunction don't manifest to the same degree in every mental disorder, and this has important legal implications.

Having a mental illness isn't a free-pass in society at all. People are expected to perform in their jobs and in their activities of daily living to the best of their ability. If they can't they are expected to work at developing skills that better enable them to do so.
In general people with mental disorders are expected to conform to the standards of the law. Employment for mentally disordered persons isn't necessarily protected by virtue of an emergent mental illness as it might be for other illnesses and acquired disabilitites.


With respect to the legal culpability, innocent by reason of mental defect or impairment doesn't happen all that often.

A person may have a mental disorder that impairs their ability to substantially grasp the difference between right and wrong, and/or they may have an inability to control impulsive acts aka 'irresistible urges'. A mentally ill person may also lack the capacity to contribute to decision making regarding their own defense. Such circumstances may alter the progress of a trial and may not protect the mentally ill person from culpability.

Defense lawyers and prosecutors argue over these things. Insanity as a defense must meet criteria and attempts to invoke it don't always work.

Even with rules in place to help make these determinations uniformly and fairly, different courts may react in ways that don't free the mentally ill person from responsibility for their conduct. In some courts, a person may be forced into treatment to become capable of being tried. It's possible in some courts for a person to be declared guilty of conduct but yet not punishable in a prison...sometimes the person can be involuntarily committed for treatment. Historically, some of these commitments have lasted -longer- than would have a prison sentences.

my desire to confiscate all guns makes more sense.

If we're going to say, "Oh, alas, what a shame, the shooter was mentally ill", as if that somehow absolves him, then TAKE THE GUNS AWAY!

And most of the time, the people who do the shooting didn't just crack, and grab a gun that was magically nearby. They planned it. The Oregon guy had bought 13 guns over a period of years. All legally.

Most of these mass murders are with legal guns.

And as terrible as the two incidents you refer to, more people get killed by guns in this country every single week than were killed in either of those two incidents.

While we might be able to say that a certain drug will cause more of X to happen in a large group of people who take it, we usually can't know if the drug was the cause in any specific case.

Hopefully, the doctor prescribing it weighs the drug's pros and cons given her patient's individual situation. But that often isn't done well, and the info that the docs get is often, um, optimistic.

So, the entire thing's a mess.

Robin Williams' suicide might have been linked to the medication he was receiving.

If gun fetishists don't want to talk about guns, so-called liberals on DU don't want to discuss mental illness.

HOWEVER, there is a convincing case that mass shooters are suicidal, whether they are on medication or not.

We should also discuss whether or no people on certain medications should be allowed access to firearms.

Big Pharma is not blameless.

out to all sorts of idiots and jerks and insane people. if only the process of handing out guns was the same process as FDA approved drugs. Sure, the process is not perfect, nothing is, but it's far better than almost any other screening process

Last edited Fri Oct 2, 2015, 07:17 PM - Edit history (1)

for simple thinkers.

Hmmm?

" there are common threads in drug use/sudden stoppage, etc. as a potentially triggering reason, that's hugely important to know"

Are there valid and objective, peer-reviewed research studies not contracted or paid for in any way by a special interest group indicating any such common denominator resulting in mass violence?

If not, then while we're at it, why don't we ever question the alignment of the planets when something like this happens?

Medical professionals are far too quick to write out these types of scrips, especially for children and young people. Not everyone can handle them. But it's cheaper to give someone a pill than to run tests or use other resources.
Not that having guns so readily available as well is not an issue, but definitely the two don't mix
Editing my post to ad: the fame that these shooters attain after their sprees (and their deaths) may also have some attraction for these killers. Why anyone would get excited over the thought you were going to be famous after you've entered the other side is a mystery to me, but that could play a part.

The one single thread that runs through every single mass shooting is that the person responsible owned a gun - legally or not, but often legally. Gun owners can't stand to be treated like potential criminals, but they have no reservations about immediately blaming the mentally ill. This isn't a mental health issue. Period. Full stop. The US is not the only country with mentally ill people, but it is the only country where we have routine, monthly mass shootings. There is a reason for this. We need to find out what it is.