Every time something controversial is brought up on these forums, there is this small group of people who join in with the chorus of "Take Your Meds". Usually these are those people who are on MilesCity.com for what seems like all of their waking hours that aren't spent at work (which leads one to wonder if they have any friends or activities out there in the "Real World"....but I digress.....) Anyway, just for the record, I am not on any meds whatsoever and never have been (or have needed them). I would assume the chorus of "Take Your Meds" is echoed by some people who are heavily medicated in order to cope and think everyone else should be.

In light of recent assaults, especially mass murders or suicides, there has recently been a lot of evidence tat the meds are somewhat implicated in many, many violent outbursts and suicides....so why is there this huge chorus of "take your meds" as a solution? Do any of you think that maybe you or others have been brainwashed by the Mainstream Media and the Big Pharaceutical Companies to do something that is detrimental to your health (or that of the children and/or other family members that you insist need to be medicated?)

Prescription drugs are connected to school shootings and other violence, yet more drugs are touted as the solution

http://www.naturalnews.co...fects.html

Here are a "few" instances recently where the meds either didn't work (or maybe worked in a detrimental way):

Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold's medical records have never been made available to the public.

Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather's girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.

Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.

Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.

Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..

A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.

TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.

Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.

James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania

Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) - school shooting in El Cajon, California

Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic's file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.

Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.

Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.

Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide - hanging from a tall ladder at the family's Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.

Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara's parents said ".. the damn doctor wouldn't take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil.")

Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002,
(Gareth's father could not accept his son's death and killed himself.)

Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family's detached garage.

Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.

Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.

A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.

Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and "other drugs for the conditions."

Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School - then he committed suicide.

Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.

Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his
New York high school.

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[This message has been edited by Cheryl Pieters (1/13/2013)]

Cheryl,
The mental health community is very aware that new generation medications for treating various forms of mental illness may have unintended side effects for a very limited number of users, especially among children and adolescents. That said, you seem to be making the age-old mistake of attributing a causal relationship to what in actuality is association. Each of the individuals you listed was very disturbed prior to seeking medical intervention. There is no way to know if medication was in any way the cause of the actions they took.

The fact is, the medications you attack are having a very beneficial effect for hundreds of thousands of users. Disparaging comments aimed at people who have sought mental health treatment, like the ones you make in your diatribe above, do nothing to advance the issue you claim to be concerned about. On the contrary, they prolong the stigma that keeps hundreds of thousands of people who could benefit from these and other medications from seeking help.

Whether you intended to or not, by using mental health issues to attack those MilesCity.com users you despise, you have done much more harm than good - and that's a real shame.

I have been taking anti-depressants for 30+ years and credit my current survival to those drugs. Not every drug works for every person, especially for adolescents. There is also the problem that you can't list the thousands up on thousands of persons for whom the drug HAS worked because they are not reported.

Every drug doesn't work on every person. Every drug has side effects. But to deny everyone a life-saving drug because it failed 1% of the time for the person taking it because that person wasn't correctly monitored or their body chemistry did not respond is to condemn hundreds of thousands of other people to suffering and possibly death.

My father remembered when Lithium was first introduced. A long time patient of his came into his office and smiled. She told him it was the first time she felt happy in twenty years. Lithium does not work for everyone and can have terrible side effects but for that patient, it literally saved her life, just as my medications literally saved mine.

Steve - I think Cheryl's intent is the same as most ant-gun control absolutists. Making these shootings a mental-health issue draws attention from gun control being the issue. You know - guns don't kill people. People kill people.

Anyone wth a modicum of intelligence should realize mental health issues and gun control issues are not mutually exclusive. Because someone is on meds when he/she pulls the trigger does excuse the fact that anyone, and I mean anyone, can legally obtain large capacity magazines and automatic firepower without much effort. Thank you, NRA, for making this possible. Dozens of dead school children is a small price to pay so people can obtain theses tools toys.

And thank you, Amorette. I've known many many people, including family, that have benefitted from these types of medications. They are NOT the issue. The issue is the ease at which ANYONE can get these weapons whose only real purpose is to kill.

[This message has been edited by Bob Netherton II (1/13/2013)]

Did I dream this, or was there a time when the NRA's purpose was firearm safety as opposed to all of this phony constitutional B.S.?

The solution HAS to include every aspect. Gun control, mental health funding, open and honest discussion of our violent, gun-lovin' society. Different things have to be, at the very least, tried. If they fail, then we try something else.

Just screaming you can't take my gun from my cold dead hands and pretending these tragedies didn't occur solves nothing.

Yes, the drugs Cheryl mentions may have negative side effects, esp. for teens at the beginning of their treatment but the percentage affected is very low.

All Cheryl's list does is prove that folks who engage in the violence she describes may have serious mental health issues. In fact, her diatribe supports stricter gun control laws to prevent those with serious issues from obtaining ridiculously lethal weapons. Thanks, Cheryl. You are finally being reasonable.

"In fact, her diatribe supports stricter gun control laws to prevent those with serious issues from obtaining ridiculously lethal weapons."

Just what I was trying to say, only a little better.

It's time to realize that the answer will not be in taking our guns away, or banning them, or anything silly like that. We simply have to keep them locked up better and have consequences if we don't. We need to be more responsible with their handling and storage, to start with. Who could have anything wrong with that?

excellent awesome post Cheryl ... legal drugs and chemtrails are the issues and the local governments and media are snuggled in with the Satanists!

Commenters above go get your flu shots ...

this is a wicked brew of the flu ... stay the hell away from the snow ... Broom Ryder go make some snow angels (intelligent design by Broom Ryder) ... post the pictures in the Star and say see Cactus Plains is full of it ... seee hehhehe ... "there is no man made flu germ in the snow like Pseudomonas fluorescens" ... see the prickly pear is a fear monger!

Hopefully you understand that I am just kidding about you making angels.

kids on legal drugs is just total insanity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cactus Plains

Any one besides me notice that in not one of the above mentioned tragedies did anyone prescribed medical marijuana play a role. Doesn't it stand to reason that the answer for these "loonies" is to get them some weed? Forget Prozac...instead try the "banana kush" or "northern lights x skunk #5." Take your meds indeed, and let my assault weapon buddies keep their 30 round clips. Don't worry...they ARE heavily medicated.

One of the dozen side affects on my daughters anti depression medication states that it can cause you to WANT to hurt yourself or others. Its great if your meds work for you, but this side affect warning should mean that people on them should be monitored especially children.

meds as mentioned in these posts can be a great tool if there is a proper diagnosis and proper monitoring. An in-law's sibling was misdiagnosed for years as schizophrenic when she was really bi-polar....different meds, protocol,etc. Eventually a family member who had obtained a nursing degree helped get things straightened out but what a disaster! A friend's relative was prescribed multiple meds by different providers and no one was keeping track. Relatives noticed her having hallucinations and got involved to get things sorted out but it became a disaster first. Much in the way things like autoimmune disorders or heart attacks or other medical conditions/diseases can be misdiagnosed or mistreated, so the same can be true with mental illness. I do think it's complicated but I also think it becomes more complicated when the government shows that it's health care priorities elevate Sandra Fluke getting her birth control paid for while the mention of mental health and how the mental health community needs more support is never spoken of until disaster strikes. And even now, it is in the shadows of gun control and gaming...it needs to be out of the shadows.

[This message has been edited by cbt (1/14/2013)]