Posted on 12/18/2007 1:06:45 PM PST by neverdem
Associated Press
Attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case of a teen sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing his grandparents when he was 12, arguing that the sentence is cruel.
Christopher Pittman shoot his grandparents Joe and Joy Pittman with a shotgun in 2001, then set fire to their home. During his trial four years later, Pittman's attorneys unsuccessfully argued the slayings were influenced by the antidepressant Zoloft - a charge the maker of the drug vigorously denied.
In the brief submitted to the high court late Monday, attorneys from the University of Texas School of Law argued that the 30-year sentence violates Christopher Pittman's Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
Such a lengthy sentence is "unconstitutionally disproportionate as applied to a 12-year-old child," according a copy of the petition provided by the Juvenile Justice Foundation. It said Pittman "is the nation's only inmate serving such a harsh sentence for an offense committed at such a young age."
Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia set the minimum age at which a juvenile may be tried as an adult above 12, so in more than half the nation, Pittman's attorneys argue, Pittman could not have been tried as adult and could never have been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Each year about 200,000 defendants under 18 are sent to the adult system, according to the National Center for Juvenile Justice. Most end up there because of state laws that automatically define them as adults, due to their age or offense. Those numbers escalated in the 1990s as juvenile crime soared and legislators responded, with 48 states making it easier to transfer kids into criminal court, according to the center.
Zoloft is the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the United States, with 32.7 million prescriptions written in 2003. In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration ordered Zoloft and other antidepressants to carry "black box" warnings - the government's strongest warning short of a ban - about an increased risk of suicidal behavior in children.
Yup, folks use modern medicines; other folks visit root workers, shamen, witch doctors, Scientologists, and so forth.
Take your pick.
Mental and emotional problems of a most serious nature existed long before the development of Prozac, et al, and they'll be around in the future. The modern drugs do help a large percentage of the afflicted better cope with the problems.
The Rio flows through country rich in carbonate rocks of all sorts ~ including lithium carbonate.
Water coming right out of the tap is apparantly sufficiently rich in the stuff to help hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise be afflicted with some degree of schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder.
You've read my post on SSRI's before I think. The doctors are no where near careful enough prescribing them. Look at even a GP's office these days and you'll see a Pharm Rep likely even two from the same company with the same drugs. Serotonin Syndrome is a reality. Even the most timid can be a harm to others or themselves in that stste. What the poor soul who goes through it hallucinates about is their reality. I saw it twice in a week in the same person and 6 clueless doctors including two shrinks.
Thanks to some FR posters and some prayer I typed in Zoloft +Trazodone +Adverse reaction and got the answer I needed in seconds. It saved my wife's life. If any patient has any form of motor sensory damage they seem to be more prone for some reason. I nearly went there myself as I have GAD of Vestibular Disorder origin. IOW Motor and sensory processing damage. My Inner Ears re shot, I have Menieres, and Tinnitus too boot plus a life long eye /muscle coordination issues. I finally found a sympathetic doctor who got me on the right maintenance dosage of Xanax. The ones insisting on SSRI therapy nearly did me in.
Xanax is what got “W”’s niece in trouble.
k the basics on Xanax. Most doctors are clueless as to how to prescribe it and simply make matters worse. Many prescribe 1-2mG twice a day. Heres the problem it has a 6-8 hour active life. Meaning for the rest of the time you have nothing and will have a major crash in between. It's also a good risk for addiction. However a .25mg-.5 {depending on persons build} pill taken 3-4 times per day gives a consistent but small level in the blood stream and helps tone down sensory flooding a major cause of Anxiety Disorder. My wife has taken it for 22 years I have taken it for 14 years with no ill effects.
My wife got in trouble because a doctor to try and treat her for PTSD {over a doctors medication mistake with a pain killer that pout her in a Coma} was given Trazodone the Zoloft as well. As I posted persons with Motor or sensory damage are at higher risk. She is an incomplete quadriplegic. The amount of Xanax she was taking a very low dosage likely kept the serotonin syndrome from killing her. Benzos are the counter agent to it.
BTW she had to be tied down to a hospital bed because she was beating herself black and blue. She was also seeing Satan at one point. She as well thought she was Tess on Touched by an angel. My wife and I are white BTW LOL.
It was a week of pure hell for both of us. Even when I figured it out the doctors would not believe it calling it junk science. He had to back down when I pointed out it was his hospitals pharmacology professor who wrote the paper. Same university different city. Every medical indication including being in a partial COMA in the ER from it begged for a closer look. None was given. Accute pyschosis increase her Zoloft was the order.
You can check my posting history on antidepressants. I used to call those questioning their usage tinfoilers. I did till I saw it myself. I am not anti SSRI. But I do think there needs to be some education of medical professionals and patients as well as their families.
Now that’s an interesting post...perhaps much of our nation’s issues stem from a deficiency in these natural carbonates. I mean much of our nation’s water supplies come from filtered and highly clorinated municipal water systems and the explosion of the usage of bottled water. Many homes on wells use water softeners, there by reducing natural carbonates as well.
I'd like to add that proctologists should verify that their patient has no relatives with diagnosed celiac before using a colonoscope on 'em.
You can't make the diagnosis if you don't know it exists. I saw a patient in the hospital on multiple antidepressants complaining of palpitations with an abnormaly fast heart rate, a supraventricular tachycardia. I didn't know about serotonin sydrome at the time, but I could check with the pharmacy and find that a number of her meds can cause tachycardia. I called her shrink who insisted that the patient had to remain on her meds even though she was symptomatic.
A Mix of Medicines That Can Be Lethal my thread
A Mix of Medicines That Can Be Lethal the NY Times printer friendly version
The Serotonin Syndrome pdf link to the NEJM article
The incidence of the serotonin syndrome is thought to mirror the increasing number of proserotonergic agents being used in clinical practice. 7 In 2002, the Toxic Exposure Surveillance System, which receives case descriptions from office-based practices, inpatient settings, and emergency departments, reported 26,733 incidences of exposure to selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that caused significant toxic effects in 7349 persons and resulted in 93 deaths. 8,9 The assessment of the serotonin syndrome in therapeutic drug dosing has relied on post-marketing surveillance studies, one of which identified an incidence of 0.4 case per 1000 patient-months for patients who were taking nefazodone. 10 Performing a rigorous epidemiologic assessment of the serotonin syndrome, however, is difficult, since more than 85 percent of physicians are unaware of the serotonin syndrome as a clinical diagnosis. 10 The syndrome occurs in approximately 14 to 16 percent of persons who overdose on SSRIs. 8
You seem to have some kind of deep seated problem with somebody or something. But nothing I know is based on witch doctors or ‘root workers(?)’.
I don’t know what you are trying to imply with this list unless you think all of these groups have something in common. And they don’t have anything to do with pharmaceuticals.
I’m not a doctor. I don’t claim to be one myself. I was a director of a nationally accredited drug rehabilitation center. As part of my accreditation, I had to study addictionology as well as pharmacology. I’ve had to get people off of virtually every drug you’ve ever heard of. I have real life personal experience with all of them including most psychotropics.
But these drugs were prescribed to kids by real doctors. doctors who have licenses and DEA approval to prescribe controlled substances. And these kids become suicidal and homicidal - something they were not before they were put on these drugs.
Did you know that Eli Lilly did a trial of Prozac in Britian back in the 1980s before they submitted it to the FDA for approval where 14 of the trial subjects killed themselves? They didn’t submit THAT to the FDA. But suicide IS on one of the side effects of the drug. Its not like you can take a beta blocker or an anti-imflammatory and start thinking about killing yourself.
And I defy any expert to publicly prove there is a difference between a half dozen of the most popular conditions listed in the DSM IV. There can’t possibly be thousands of mental illnesses if none of them can be medically distinguished or proven by a medical to exist.
But even if I were a witch or a Scientologist, nothing
would be any different and none of these dead people would come back to life. I never heard of witches, Scientologists, shaman or any root workers out killing people in a mall or an elementary school.
To call this ‘modern’ is irrelevant. Just because its new doesn’t mean it is medically valid or healthy. In fact, most of the things medical doctors have historically given people to cure mental ills have been either lethal, like mercury, or just pain harmful like lithium or thorazine.
My mother was a bit more devious. Anyone caught moping was put to work cleaning the bathroom, diapering babies, mowing lawns, or any one of a list of 2000 household chores. This had a way of clearing the kids out of the house for the rest of the day.
As the anti-deppressant takes effect, the depressed person’s mood energy and ability to mobilize oneself to inner directed action increases. Two weeks into therapy, one had better be in a supportive therapeutic atmosphere, group, family, psychologist or otherwise for at that point a person who has been suicidal in the past may actually have gained the psychic cajones to follow through...especailly if there is some type of set back or upset experienced by that person at the time.
Now what is especially dangerous about these drugs is the unmasking of underlying mania,psychoses, or schizophrenia kept hidden by depression. The anti-depressant alleviates the depressed mood, which may have come about by the individual spending a lot of mental effort in suppressing his increasingly diseased thought processes and irrational urges. The individual, in a falsely “amped up mood” then loses control of his inner tormented state and all hell can break loose.
Certainly, folks can have bizzare reactions to drugs out-side of any other schizoidal disease which may not even be present...but what is more likely is that the anti-depressants simply unmask what is more complicated mental illness other than simply “depression”!
Respectfully Submitted,
Michael Mathis RN Thanks for explaining this.
Now, was it the fault of some drug they might have been prescribed, or the inability of the diagnostician to determine they had conditions that would be unaffected by the medications?
Hard to tell isn't it.
Again, long before any of these drugs came along we have had the "nut in the mall" problem. Else we'd not had all those entertaining adventure stories filled with berserkers.
How many spree killings can you list prior to 1979 which weren’t serial murders(which have an entirely different pathology)? The last 28 years has seen an incredible increase in seemingly random killings of total strangers. The only things which are in common appear to be: 1) guns 2)killers who are on or just came off of psychoactive drugs.
Why aren’t the supposedly crazy people who aren’t treated running around shooting up office buildings or high schools? The answer is that you typically need to really push somebody way beyond the boundaries of reality to get them to do something which so inately violations their nature. That disconnect can be achieved through torture, incredible physical or emotional trauma or drugs. PCP did it in the 1970s but since then we’ve mostly seen it through prescribed medications.
And if it is so hard for a diagnostician to determine which factors might be troubled by prescribing these medications, sounds like you are joining my argument that these drugs are overused and entirely too unpredictable.
The idea that we understand how the brain or, if you really want to piss off the researchers, the mind function well enough to spray it with some chemicals to interrupt its electrical function randomly is just mindbogglingly arrogant. Yet it is done as though this was completely understood, predictable and easily duplicated across the entire population.
Hell, we don’t even know for sure why some people don’t get sleepy from pseudophedrine while most do and we think we can tell you what is going to happen if I chemically interrupt your serotonin uptake rate??
I can make any crazy person happier for an hour using a hand puppet more predictably than these drugs can. But I know that I am not going to stay around for the next weeks or month to see if the patient stays happy. By using these drugs, the patients are just let loose into society to see what happens.
Do they emotionally shut down? Do they become wooden? Do they stop feeling any joy at all? Do they live in a cloud permanently or stop ‘feeling’? Do they suddenly start questioning the reason for living? Do they become paranoid as to the cause of their unhappiness and secretly blame the people around them?
All those things happen from the same drug which ‘stops depression’ (and treats: premature ejaculation, excessive salivation in dogs, anxiety, obsessive compulsions, fear of flying, chronic proscastination, gambling, binge shopping, etc. etc).
Want to know why Utah has one of the highest suicide rate in the nation in a place where otherwise you see some of the happiest people ever? Psychiatric drugs. The LDS community favors, as a cultural fix, drugging children and wives who have difficulty keeping up the appearance of being the perfect wife/child/family. Instead of counseling and creating an outlet for failings or transgressions (like atonement, confession, etc), they have settled on taking pills at - here is the shocker - about four times the national average.
And many of my Jewish brethren are the ones handing out the pills. I think we inherited the love of psychiatry from the Nazis which is a cruel joke considering that they used to experiment on us for their own psychiatric research and pharmaceutical trials.
Television coverage us up, particularly when it involves a guy going on a killng spree.
True. But it's the doctor's responsibility to know that this is a possible diagnosis. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a rep. Though I've never sold SSRIs I have come across serotonin sydrome in the literature as I was reading up on my own medication (CNS, but not antidepressant). So it's not Lilly's fault that the 85% of doctors (staggering figure) are unaware of serotonin sydrome as a diagnosis. We could debate the responsibility of a drug manufacturer to educate the doctor on AEs, but the final responsibility does not lie with the pharma company. The syndrome has been around for some time and it's appearance in NEJM and NYT would make me as a doctor want to do some additional research (maybe that's just me).
The article in NEJM certainly does not lay the responsibility at the feet of the drugs. Nor does the Times article. It appears most of the cases are from drug interactions, not the result of administration of SSRIs on their own (at the proper dosage). Secondly, the rate in the footnotes of 14-16% who OD on SSRIs developing serotonin sydrome would seem to be some sort of large percentage (at least on the face) of the serious adverse events. If a large portion of the AEs is improper administration of the drug or avoidable drug interactions, then Big Pharma isn't quite the bogeyman that some people would wish to make in this scenario.
As far as psychs, they are a strange lot. They seem to have no established logarithms for treatment and prefer what I call "alchemy." Thus the reluctance of the psych to switch the patient with obvious AEs off their meds.
You used an incorrect word there. I don't know any drugs which caused people to run off and kill strangers, en masse or otherwise. Your supposition that this is the case does not make it so. The increase in public shootings is not really even linked to SSRI usage. We have no evidence that the last shooters (Colorado or Omaha) had taken SSRIs in the previous weeks. Just that they'd taken them in their life. Now if you have a severely troubled person, you'd expect them to have been put on a psych drug at some point in their lives. That doesn't mean that 4 years later that the SSRI plays even the slightest role in the killing. Correlation is not causation. I'm sure this won't deter you a bit.
I believe the study was actually in Germany and it was 16 attempts, 2 successful. I could not find any literature with the information you're suggesting.
There has been at least one study done on rates of suicide attempts in depressed patients. The highest rate of the attempts was the month before starting therapy, the second highest rate was the month after starting therapy and declining therafter. This was independent of the use of pharmacologic agents. Even patients who simply started therapy (with no drugs) had the highest rate of suicide attempts the month before starting therapy, the 2nd highest rate the month after starting therapy.
Backwards
“The mall killer in Omaha was on anti-depressant drugs — which he did not take.”
Taking them sporadically is much worse than not taking them at all. I suspect that is the case for many of the ones who are not taking them when they engage in violence.
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