Antidepressants, Violence, and Kazmierczak

Ed Silverman at Pharmalot has this post on the emerging (albeit very 
preliminary) evidence that gunman Stephen Kazmierczak had stopped taking 
his psychiatric medication before the killings at Northern Illinois 
University. As ABC news re****ts, there's evidence that Kazmierczak had a 
history of mental illness, which seems to have included depression, 
violence, and self mutilating behaviors.


The comment thread of the Pharmalot post is particularly revealing in 
its predictability of responses from those who blame antidepressants for 
violent behavior among those with mental illness. Those critics, 
however, want it both ways: to blame antidepressants for violent 
behavior if someone takes them and to blame them as well if someone 
stops taking them and becomes violent due to the amorphous 
discontinuation syndrome pur****tedly associated with some of these 
medicines. But as mentioned previously, antidepressants have become a 
popular target by those who wish imbue the pharmaceutical industry with 
evil for their supposed malfeasance and deception rather than focusing 
on the simple fact that sometimes people engage in very violent conduct 
which itself imbues evil- and this seems to occur more often among those 
with mental illnesses.


This should hardly be surprising. For all rhetoric we've been told that 
those with mental illnesses are no more likely to become violent than 
anyone else, intuition dictates that when an illness robes people of 
their rationality - as it often does with mental illness - bad outcomes 
are to follow. It is true that most people with mental illnesses are not 
violent; but we're not taking about most people when we're discussing 
incidents like Kazmierczak or Kendra Webdale. Rather, what comes into 
focus when we examine cases like these is the inconvenient truth that 
untreated mental illnesses can be harbingers for tragedies from the 
personal to the infamously public.

Links:

http://www.pharmalot.com/2008/02/finger-on-the-trigger-meds-school-
shootings

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=5959663

http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/2008/02/the_ubiquity_of_substance_ab
us_1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendra_Webdale