Posted on 08/14/2007 7:07:09 AM PDT by SkyPilot
"When I was lying in my bed that night, I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them."
You're reading the words of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, struggling to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability in his turbulent life. He was angry with his grandfather, who had disciplined him earlier that day for hurting another student during a fight on the school bus. So later that night, he shot both of his grandparents in the head with a .410 shotgun as they slept and then burned down their South Carolina home, where he had lived with them.
"I got up, got the gun, and I went upstairs and I pulled the trigger," he recalled. "Through the whole thing, it was like watching your favorite TV show. You know what is going to happen, but you can’t do anything to stop it."
(Excerpt) Read more at worldnetdaily.com ...
But is that true?
I think you're quite mad....or is it that a demon is attacking you? What's that behind you?
Are you a scientologist? Do you in any way represent scientology?
I am not 100% positive, but I am convinced the evidence he presented makes a strong argument that it is at least partially (if not completely) true.
I thought the testimony of the woman who had take anti-depressants and was basically turned into an unfeeling and uncaring "Stepford Wife" who was numbed emotionally and spiritually to be plausible.
The antidepressants, she concluded, had "blurred the ends of the emotional spectrum, so that I experienced neither deep sadness nor great joy.
First and foremost, I approach this from a Christian vantage point, in that I have a Christian faith. Secondly, I think there is "value" in suffering to the degree that there is value in our nerve endings telling us to remove our hand from a stove. Physical pain serves a function in the human body - to wit, to prevent us from further injury by making us acutely aware of the damage we are doing to our bodies.
In the same way, the suffering we may endure from sinning or doing wrong serves a purpose - it lets us know we have transgressed.
Ever hear of a "seared conscious?" Liberals seem to have it in spades. Abortion.....perversion.....envy.....covetness.....etc...."No problem."
The possibility that psychiatric drugs could impair our conscience should not come as a shock. We know people do bad things under the influence of alcohol, crack and meth that they wouldn't do otherwise. Is it so hard, then, to comprehend that some legal drugs can also obscure or eliminate our awareness of conscience?
From the article:
She added: "In the beginning, the drug was good, because it enabled me to think rationally and come out of my basement. If I had used that rational thinking to get a grip on the sin that was pulling me down into depression, I could have dealt with it biblically, and been off the drug in short order. But I did not. I became dependent on those pills and was gradually numbed to the seriousness of my sin. By God’s grace, I came to the recognition that this drug could be stunting my spiritual growth, and that turned out to be exactly the case."
dmz: You are so right. Those who scoff at pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatric disorders have no idea what depressive disorders are really like.
All: I am a diagnosed depressive (Major Depressive Disorder, aka Chronic Depression). My problem is not spiritual, as I am quite happy as a Catholic; in fact, I’m a happy person, period. I can be happy because my brain chemistry is something close to normal when I’m on the stuff. I “have Jesus”, and yet I still have to take Paxil.
Before I started taking Paxil, I was incapable of normal, appropriate emotional responses. I had three emotional gears: Ecstatic (and sociopathic), Morbid (and near-comatose), and Numb. I lived for almost forty years without drug therapy, and I never killed or raped anybody during that time, thank God, but you could ask my wife about what I was like when the Fog came down. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of during those years, and hurt myself and others in ways most people cannot imagine. I was cruel, amoral, and out of control. I hated myself and felt that there was no point to anything. Only the the concern of my loved ones, the prayers of the saints, and the Divine Mercy kept me from ending up in jail or dead.
Now? I can live a normal life, and it’s because a medical doctor prescribed a drug that keeps the Fog at bay. Paxil does not make a person happy; it simply enables some people to be happy when it’s normal to be happy, and to be sad at appropriate times instead of suicidal. Critics can call it witch doctoring, placebo effect, or whatever they like; I call Paxil a mercy, and am glad that I lived long enough to see a day when drug therapy for clinical depressive disorders is available. My mother and her late mother had depression as well — it’s thought to be a congenital disease. My grandmother’s only therapy was extreme holy-roller Christianity; she was a sharecropper’s wife raising eleven children in Mississippi during the Great Depression, and the only Jesus she could believe in during her down cycles was the Wild-Eyed Crazy Jesus, like something out of a Flannery O’Connor story. As for my poor mom, all they could do for her in the late 1960s/early 1970s was run a few zillion volts through her head and prop her up with tranks. The fact that my grandmother was a great lady (and my mom still is) without having had recourse to the Happy Pills is a testament to their strength of character and the sustaining power of the Great Comforter.
Today, we nutjobs have options, thank God. All I have to do is take a couple of little pills every day and I can live a normal, happy life. If some people think that taking Paxil makes me weak or deluded, then that’s fine with me. I’m nobody’s victim and deserve no special consideration due to my scrambled brain. All I ask is that people know what they are talking about before they go spouting off their opinion.
Thanks for writing that post, dmz. It meant a lot.
Fascinating. This article prompted a quite lengthy introspection.
It’s true for SOME PATIENTS. Not all. Not NEARLY all.
One thing they all had in common...they were not right prior to starting the medication.
OK.
Do you know the percentage of what is not 'nearly all'?
Can you tell me what percentage are not really helped by these drugs, but are just numbed emotionally, or worse?
The author argued this:
In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added "homicidal ideation" to the drug's list of "rare adverse events." The Medical Accountability Network, a private nonprofit focused on medical ethics issues, publicly criticized Wyeth, saying Effexor's "homicidal ideation" risk wasn't well-publicized and that Wyeth failed to send letters to doctors or issue warning labels announcing the change. And what exactly does "rare" mean in the phrase "rare adverse events"? The FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. But since, according to an Associated Press report, about 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S. alone in 2005, statistically that means thousands of Americans could experience "homicidal ideation" – murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug. Effexor is Wyeth's best-selling drug, by the way, bringing in $3.46 billion – with a "b" – in sales worldwide in 2005, almost one-fifth of the company's total revenues.
He also said this:
Before we go on, let's state the obvious: There are genuine, organic brain diseases that may benefit from drug therapy – but these are relatively rare. And there are also instances where an individual is so psychotic as to pose a direct danger to him/herself and others, where sedation might be appropriate. But what I'm writing about here is the overwhelming majority of cases where psychiatric drugs are unwisely relied on to fix Americans' mental-emotional-spiritual problems. In search of a quick, painless fix for the problems we develop when we fail to deal with the stresses of life properly, we've become a nation of drug-takers. Millions of us "medicate" the pain of life away by taking illegal drugs. And millions more take prescription drugs to accomplish much the same thing. As Fortune magazine reported in November 2005: Nearly 150 million U.S. prescriptions were dispensed in 2004 for SSRIs and similar antidepressants called SNRIs, according to IMS Health, a Fairfield, Conn., drug data and consulting company – more than for any other drug except codeine. Perhaps one out of 20 adult Americans are on them now, making brands like Zoloft, GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil, Forest Laboratories' Celexa, and Solvay Pharmaceuticals' Luvox household names.
What is your argument against his?
Thanks.
These drugs save lives...mine included.
Most of the opposition to them is based in Scientology, scumbag ambulance-chasing lawsuits, and ignorance.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1878671/posts?page=19#19
Post #19 Unexperienced in this area, I still have always felt many mentally ill people suffer from some form of possession.
Can you answer my question, however, as to the percentages of what you meant by when you said:
It’s true for SOME PATIENTS. Not all. Not NEARLY all.
As I pointed out, the writer argued that: Before we go on, let's state the obvious: There are genuine, organic brain diseases that may benefit from drug therapy – but these are relatively rare. And there are also instances where an individual is so psychotic as to pose a direct danger to him/herself and others, where sedation might be appropriate. But what I'm writing about here is the overwhelming majority of cases where psychiatric drugs are unwisely relied on to fix Americans' mental-emotional-spiritual problems.
Can you refute this? I am not talking about your specific case.
Refute what? It's his premise, let him offer proof first.
It's not true simply because he says so.
Are you connected in any way to Scientology? Is the author?
Good heavens.
No sir/ma'am, I am not. I cannot speak for the author, but I would suspect he is not a Scientologist either.
Since you asked - I am a bible believing Christian and I believe the only way to go to heaven is by the salvation through accepting Jesus Christ.
I understand that was his premise, and you refuted it. I asked on what basis, and you gave me your personal account.
Here is one Google search for article about the over prescribing of anit-psychotic drugs.
Moreover, a psychiatrist freep mailed me regarding this thread and admitted there is an over prescription for certain condition like ADD and ADHD.
thanks, bfl
Merck doesn’t make Effexor.
I meant Wyeth.
A species of sea slug has a couple of relatively huge and simple neurons that are easy to work with in the lab.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.