The downside of drugs

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I thought about this after the Newtown and USCB shootings:

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/comm ... 63981.html

I'm glad to see it acknowledged.

Exactly why I refuse to consider Big Pharma's Frankenstein Pharmaceuticals:

Psyche Meds Drove My Son Crazy


SSRI Antidepressants, Homicide and Suicide

When the FDA approved SSRIs, they knew a small percentage of patients suffered from homicidal and suicidal impulses, but felt the number was an acceptable risk. They did not expect that doctors would start passing them out like candy, until that small percentage was a sizable portion of the population.

Just do a search for: "SSRI + violence" and see how many cases have been directly linked to SSRI meds, especially in patients under the age of 25.

When they work properly, they work great. When they don't, people die. Its neurochemical Russian Roulette.

Last edited by will@rd on 15 Apr 2015, 2:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

SSRI antidepressants do next to nothing to alleviate depression according to Scientific American magazine ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -dont-they ).

The manufacturers, prescribing physicians and regulators of SSRIs must certainly know this. So, what advantage do they gain by continuing to sell and prescribe them?

Meanwhile, most notable killers are quickly discovered to have been prescribed SSRIs by their physicians and/or psychology therapists.

I feel sorry for all these people who take around 50 thousand pills a day. It's going to bite our pill-popping generation in the ass at some point

I think I was up to 14 pills a day at one point. I would've been 16 or 17 at the time. Ward of the court, hidden away out of state so as not to inconvenience my social worker with trivialities such as whether I getting an education or just shuffling around in a drugged stupor.

I cut that number down to zero just as soon as I was permitted to have a say in the matter but my ass has already been bitten. Side effects don't always go away.

Isn't this more likely to be a consequence of them having depression or other mental conditions, rather than a cause of their violent behavior?

SSRIs are far from the worst thing out there. I was on about a month each of a bunch of them around 2nd grade, and all they did was make me giggly and almost "high" because of my subclinical bipolar tendencies. They never caused any "dark" sort of moods or worsening depression. Benzodiazepines are much worse, as they produce strong dependence and many people find them like torture to taper off of. Quitting them "cold turkey" can even be fatal. Antipsychotics (which I luckily have never taken) are also bad because they dull creativity and in some people produce extreme restlessness. So I wouldn't be blaming SSRIs.

I've taken a couple different meds in the past, but like the author of the article - when I took Paxil (one sample pill from my GP) it may as well have been a suicide pill w/ how it made me think & feel. I had to constantly remind myself that I was just having a bad trip and it would pass in a matter of hours once the drug wore off. I can see how others might not be capable of getting themselves through a trip like that & safely back to sobriety.

I believed in and used SSRIs for seven years before I learned enough about them to titrate myself off them and take the remainder to the local law-enforcement agency drug-burn unit. They are useless at best and vastly dangerous at worst.

I have a friend who's still in that position

I'd add "anti-psychotics" (better called tranquilizers) to the list of useless, dangerous drugs. Risperidone is neurochemically similar to alcohol. Would you put a gradeschooler on a 24/7 slow-drip of whiskey?

I'm just curious where you get the similarity to alcohol from. From what I understand ethanol actually stimulates dopamine production, which if anything is the exact opposite of antipsychotics.

I actually would put a gradeschooler on a 24/7 ethanol IV before subjecting them to Risperidone, and I am not at all a fan of alcohol. But, unlike the scumbag doctors who get rich drugging helpless kids, I actually have personal experience of what tardive dyskinesia is like, and - with the exception of said scumbag doctors and their pharma sales reps - I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Now that I look, I can't find it. I must have mixed it up with another drug. I thought that it had been on the Wikipedia page (which would admittedly have not been the most authoritative source anyway).



I have it also, and would say the same.

I started risperdal at age 26 and didn't develop TD. But by that time a person's brain is pretty much fully formed. Young teens are being given it while their brains are still forming, and it seems to often cause TD in such circumstances. I should note that risperdal was never approved for use in people younger than early 20s, and giving it to such is an off label use. But it's legal since American medicine is pretty much the Wild West when it comes to drugs. Giving an elementary school age kid risperdal is just asking for trouble, including tardive dyskinesia.

We shouldn't see drugs as black and white.

All meds can have side effects, and they can often be very bad. However, doctors wouldn't prescribe them if they didn't work on some people. I've heard of people for whom the right psych med has been a godsend, and even if they don't fix everything, sometimes they can help. (My brother has chronic depression. His antidepressants have not managed to get rid of his depression completely, but if he forgets them for two days in a row, we definitely see the difference in severity of his depression.)

I'm pretty much in the same boat. For some, it's not an option to avoid them.

I actually did have bad reactions to the prozac-generation of antidepressants, so I'm on a really old one from the 1950's. One upside of that is decades more experience and research. (It's also dirt cheap.) If the drug was going to start a zombie apocalypse we'd know by now.

There is not a direct link between taking an SSRI and committing violence in my view. I know what akathisia feels like from experience. I know what mania feels like from experience. I know what hearing voices feels like from experience. These things do not cause violence. Correlation doesn't prove causation, blah blah blah. You can skew a study any way you want to prove your point. Likewise, there will always be people who say that antidepressants don't do a thing to relieve depression (in anyone). These people will always be wrong of course.

I have very strong views on this though. I don't think alcohol or crack or even PCP actually impair function enough to cause violence. Violence is a willful action, not a passive reaction. You can probably guess I don't have a strong opinion on alcoholics who blame alcohol on their getting in bar fights.

This doesn't mean we should go out of our way to prescribe PCP to patients. This will of course cause an indirect rise in violence most likely. I have a problem with linking the ingestion of a drug to murder. There is a lot that goes on in between.