Dubious drug therapy
Another teenager has shot and murdered schoolchildren and mental health movement proponents have offered us the standard explanation and the usual solution. This child was mentally ill, we are told, and if only someone had seen the symptoms and notified mental health authorities, the child would have been accurately diagnosed, given the proper medication, and this tragedy could have been prevented.
If only the child had been placed on antidepressant
medications, psychiatrists say, this murder/suicide would never have happened.
The story is usually followed by calls for more mental health screening and
treatment of schoolchildren.
Eric Harris of Columbine was on the antidepressant Luvox
and Kip Kinkel in Oregon was on Prozac. And the same was true in perhaps a dozen
cases in all. And this may be the tip of the iceberg, since this information is
often kept confidential and out of the papers, even when a murder occurs.
Now news reports indicate Jeff Weise, the murderer of 10
in Red Lake, Minn., had been suicidal and committed to a mental hospital. He
began taking an antidepressant last summer, and his dosage had been increased a
week before the shootings.
In 2003, Britain banned giving antidepressants to
children and adolescents, and last year Health Canada issued a stern warning
about these drugs: "There are clinical trial and post-marketing reports
with SSRIs and other newer anti-depressants, in both pediatrics and adults, of
severe agitation-type adverse events coupled with self-harm or harm to
others."
This year the Food and Drug Administration has mandated
a black box on antidepressants labels, warning of the potential for increasing
suicidal thoughts and behavior in children and adolescents. Yet, as Vera Sharav
of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, has said:
"Journalists continue to be beguiled by speculative
scientific hypotheticals which psychiatrists discuss as though they have been
proven. Misinformation is transmitted to the public about unproven 'chemical
imbalances' in the brain of depressed people -- when, in fact, no evidence
exists demonstrating any chemical or structural brain abnormality in people
diagnosed with a mental illness."
Indeed, the papers are full of quotes of psychiatrists
claiming depression is a serious medical disease caused by a serotonin imbalance
in the brain. But there is no conclusive scientific in support of this theory.
Not surprisingly, psychiatrists have never developed any physical test to detect
depression or any mental illness, and all diagnosis is done based solely on
symptoms. In other words, antidepressants and all other psychiatric medications
are medically unnecessary.
Yet whenever anyone criticizes the drugs, psychiatrists
shout about the increased risk of suicide if patients stop taking their
antidepressants, though no antidepressant has ever been tested on suicidal
patients and therefore never approved by the FDA as safe and effective in
preventing suicide.
President Bush included an unprecedented call for
mandatory mental health screening of schoolchildren in his recently passed
budget bill. Violating the rights of parents to just say no to psychiatric
diagnosis and treatment of their children, this idea originated in the
President's New Freedom Commission.
With 8 million children on psychiatric drugs, all signs
indicate this method of dealing with our children is not working.
It is time both parents and schools find a different way
to deal with troubled children. To paraphrase Shakespeare's "Julius
Caesar," the fault is not in our children's brains or genes, but in
ourselves, and it is to our own treatment of children we must look to find an
answer to their problems -- and ours.
Keith Hoeller is editor of the Review of Existential
Psychology & Psychiatry, Seattle, Wash.
