Violence

“Although there is no established connection between autism and murder, some eagerly leapt to causality and scapegoating,” Andrew Solomon writes in the New York Times. “Tarring the autistic community in this manner — like presuming that most black people are thieves or that most Muslims are terrorists — is an insidious form of profiling. It exacerbates the tendency for people with autism to be excluded, teased and assaulted in childhood and adulthood.”

One of psychiatry's most obvious vulnerabilities is the fact that various so-called antidepressant drugs induce homicidal and suicidal feelings and actions in some people, especially late adolescents and young adults. This fact is not in dispute, but psychiatry routinely downplays the risk, and insists that the benefits of these drugs outweigh any risks of actual violence that might exist.

Nunavut, Canada’s largest and northernmost territory, is suffering from a suicide rate that is 10 times the national average. “In the case of Inuit boys 15 to 19,” CBC News reports, “the suicide rate is 40 times higher than those of their peers in the rest of Canada.”

Writing for the Atlantic, David Dobbs examines how much harm has been done in the 14 years since Paxil was wrongly determined to be safe and effective. “Study 329, as it became known, helped spur a huge increase in Paxil prescriptions,” Dobbs writes. “In 2002 alone, over 2 million prescriptions were written for children and teens, and many more for adults.” “Thousands of children, teens, and young adults attempted or committed suicide while on Paxil,” and the reanalysis of Study 329 in BMJ makes it seem “more likely than ever” that many did because of the drug.

Individuals between the ages of 15 and 24 are more likely to commit a violent crime if they are taking an SSRI antidepressant than if they are not, according to new research out of Sweden. The study published in PLoS Medicine on Tuesday, suggests "warnings about the increased risk of violent behavior among young people taking SSRIs might be needed.”

“In Gallup's annual measure of 25 major U.S. business sectors, the percentage of Americans with a positive view of the pharmaceutical industry dropped from 40% in 2014 to 35% this year, while the percentage with a negative view rose from 36% to 43%.”

In exchange for pleading guilty to murder, a young soldier received a 45-year sentence with the possibility of parole. The plea resulted from evidence that Chantix, a smoking cessation drug manufactured by Pfizer, can increase hostility and agitation, according to the SunHerald. “Several experts provided some evidence that Chantix affected (the soldier’s) ability to appreciate the nature and quality or wrongfulness of his acts,” the SunHerald noted.

According to an analysis by the Washington Post, “On average, police shot and killed someone who was in mental crisis every 36 hours in the first six months of this year.” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum called it “a national crisis.” “We have to get American police to rethink how they handle encounters with the mentally ill. Training has to change.”

In an opinion piece for care2, Katie Medlock discusses how “mental illness” awareness campaigns have shifted, dangerously, “and ended up insinuating that people with mental illness could turn on ‘us’ at any time and should be feared.”

Jeffrey Lieberman, past-president of the American Psychiatric Association, authored an Op-Ed in last Friday’s New York Times, calling for improved mental health screenings in schools and emergency rooms in the wake of the murder of Virginia journalists Alison Park and Adam Ward. In support of forced treatment mechanisms, Lieberman claims: “Almost every mentally ill perpetrator of mass violence had been symptomatic and untreated for lengthy periods of time before their crime, because they (or their families) did not seek treatment or they refused it.”

-National Journal reports that some Republican and Conservative senators alike recognize a need for gun control legislation, but say it's easier to focus on restrictive mental health regulations instead.

-Vox interviews Jonathan Metzl about his research into the relationships -- and lack thereof -- between gun violence and mental illness.

-Interviews with people who murdered their own loved ones while taking SSRI antidepressants are included in the documentary, "Dark Side of a Pill."

-Anthea Butler hopes that the common media narrative portraying mass shooters as "lone, disturbed or mentally ill young men failed by society" does not supplant discussions of the deep racism that still exists in America.

-Discussion of the Charleston massacre was very different in Salon, Fox, and Newsweek.

Taking antidepressant or benzodiazepine medications increases the risks that a person will commit a homicide, according to a study from Finland published in a World Psychiatry letter.

The man who deliberately crashed a Germanwings commercial airliner with 150 passengers aboard was actively in psychiatric treatment at the time, reported the New...

-Medical professor Norman Paradis gives a primer on the poor reliability of even the best screening tests -- let alone psychological ones.

-Correspondence in The Lancet Psychiatry suggests that a study linking depression to acts of violence should have examined antidepressant medications as possible causes.

The pilot who deliberately crashed a Germanwings commercial airplane was questioned by the Federal Aviation Administration and denied a license to fly. The Agency...

-Psychologist Laurence Palfreyman critically reviews a recent study that made global headlines, purporting to have found that depression made people three times as likely to commit violent crimes.

The person living on the streets with whom no one will make eye contact, or who the police hassle for requesting spare change from passersby. The individual who has learned to cut themselves to manage emotional pain, and so is punished by emergency room staff who sew them up without anesthetic (both physical and emotional pain disregarded), or confuse their efforts for suicide and contain them against their will. The person of color who some might cross the street to avoid, or who is arrested for lashing out when another is murdered at the hands of those employed to ‘serve and protect.’ Each is only looking for a way to survive, but instead finds themselves ignored or blamed.

-A selection of recent commentaries from around the web about the Germanwings plane crash...

-Pacific Standard examines the research into teenagers who commit violent crimes, and finds that their "brains" seem less to blame than their economic status.

I thought I would make a small contribution to the discussion about how coverage of the recent airline tragedy focuses so much on the supposed ‘mental illness’ of the pilot and not so much on the possible role of antidepressants. Of course we will never know the answer to these questions but it is important, I think, to combat the simplistic nonsense wheeled out after most such tragedies, the nonsense that says the person had an illness that made them do awful things. So, just to confirm what many recipients of antidepressants, clinicians and researchers have been saying for a long time, here are some findings from our recent New Zealand survey of over 1,800 people taking anti-depressants, which we think is the largest survey to date.