It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Peter Hitchins (he writes for the Daily Mail in the UK and I imagine we’re poles apart politically). However, the one thing we agree on is the potential danger of antidepressants – SSRIs.
Mr Hitchens has written about SSRIs and their attendant problems in the past and he returns to the subject in his review (hat tip to the Truthman for this) of the upcoming film ‘We need to talk about Kevin’. The movie is about the perpetrator of a High School massacre in a fictional American town.
In the movie it transpires that Kevin had been taking prescribed antidepressants and uses the fact as part of his defence. However, it seems to be to be a great shame that the film lightly dismisses Kevin’s acknowledged use of SSRI drugs as no more than a cheap defence attorney’s get-out.
Hitchins writes: “I’ve mentioned here before (see index) the extraordinary correlation between such killings and SSRI ‘antidepressants’. (Yes, I know correlation isn’t causation. That is precisely why I call repeatedly for a proper investigation into the apparent link). I’ve also mentioned the growing doubts (see index, under ‘antidepressants’) among doctors about the nature and real effect of these drugs, notably the powerful articles by Dr Marcia Angell, of the Harvard Medical School, recently published in the New York Review of Books.”
I agree – and I believe that antidepressants can cause extreme violence.
All too often in the past, it seemed that the only other people in the world who would ever begin to entertain the possibility were people such as Michael Moore and Dr Peter Breggin in the USA – and in England David Healy, Andrew Herxheimer and David B. Menkes, who co-authored a paper on the subject in 2006 – Antidepressants and Violence: Problems at the Interface of Medicine and Law.
If you want more information, then you can read follow up with these links (or just type ‘Violence’ in the search box on the left of your screen:
Nebraska shooting – antidepressant connection yet again?
Lost in translation – were Anti-Depressants Involved In Finland School Massacre?
A brief history of school shootings
There simply has to be a proper investigation into this issue – and I believe that the drug companies (such as Glaxo) know the problem exists, but have done nothing about it as it would have affected their profits.
