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.
Backwards
Man, that sounds like something right out of a Walker Percy novel.