Sunday, April 22, 2007
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Saturday Cat Blogging
Sniff, It's been a bad week Wolf! 32 dead in Virginia and over 500 dead in Iraq.When will we ever learn? - Pook
With These Hands I Demand the Future
CIW, McDONALD'S AND McD'S SUPPLIERS REACH AGREEMENT TO IMPROVE FARMWORKER WAGES, WORKING CONDITIONS!.
Rule by Secrecy
Jim Marrs tells about UFOs, ancient history, secret societies and hidden power structures, the secret of Rennes-le-Chateau, the Annunaki and how they are all connected.
I've read the book, watch the video, gets good after the UFO stuff
I've read the book, watch the video, gets good after the UFO stuff
Friday, April 20, 2007
Virginia Tech Aftermath: Did Legal Drugs Play a Role in the Massacre? | The Huffington Post
The Blog | Arianna Huffington: Virginia Tech Aftermath: Did Legal Drugs Play a Role in the Massacre? | The Huffington Post
Please go to the link and read the whole story.
Three Questions that need Answers....
1. It's been reported by the New York Times that Cho was on prescription medications. Which ones? Who prescribed them? How long had he been taking them?
2. If the drugs were prescribed when he was admitted to the New River Community Services center near Virginia Tech in December 2005, which doctor kept refilling his prescriptions? And what was the diagnosis?
3. What kind of medical and/or psychological follow-up was there? Or was Cho one of the many people put on antidepressants without a thorough and ongoing monitoring of the results and side effects?
Dr. Peter Breggin
The Real "Mental Health Lessons" from Virginia Tech
Focusing on Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho as a disturbed mental patient has led media analysts to ponder how he could have been more readily identified by the mental health system. But Cho is not someone who slipped beneath the psychiatric radar. Instead, he was frequently detected as a large object on the screen.
On separate occasions, he was involuntarily hospitalized, sent for psychological evaluation, and referred to the university counseling center. Consistent with getting him more psychiatric "help," experts have also opined on how he might have benefited from medication. These are all the wrong lessons.The mental health system was fully alert to Cho's existence and to serious manifestations of dangerous behavior. A faculty member of the English department was so frightened by Cho's behavior that she insisted on having him pulled him out of class. The police and the counseling center were notified and ultimately Cho was given individual tutoring, instead of quick removal from the campus. Also, a number of students called the campus police, probably at least twice in regard to his stalking behavior. Furthermore, he had previously been involuntarily hospitalized in Virginia as a danger to himself and others.
The answer to vengeful, violent people is not more mental health screening or more potent mental health interventions. Reliance on the whole range of this system from counseling to involuntary treatment failed. There is not a shred of scientific evidence that locking people up against their will or otherwise "treating" them reduces violence. As we'll see, quite the opposite is true.
So what was needed? Police intervention. Almost certainly, the police were hampered in taking appropriate actions by being encouraged to view Cho as a potential psychiatric patient rather than as a perpetrator. It's not politically correct to bring criminal charges against someone who is "mentally ill" and it's not politically correct to prosecute him or to remove him from the campus. Yet that's what was needed to protect the students. Two known episodes of stalking, setting a fire, and his threatening behavior in class should have been more than enough for the university administration to bring charges against him and to send him off campus.
Police need to be encouraged and empowered to treat potentially dangerous people more as criminals than as patients. In particular, men stalking women should be handled as definitively as any perpetrator of hate crimes. Regardless of whether the victims want to press charges, the police should. Cho shouldn't have been allowed to get away with it a second time.
How would a police action have affected Cho? Would it have humiliated him and made him more violent? There's no way to have certainty about this, but anyone with experience dealing with threatening people knows that a good dose of "reality," a confrontation with the law, is much more of a wake up call and a deterrent than therapeutic coddling. Furthermore, involuntary psychiatric treatment is one of the more humiliating experiences in American society, and tends to make people more angry, not less.
Mental health interventions do not protect society because the person is almost always quickly discharged because his insurance coverage has run out or because mental health professionals, who as a group have no particular capacity to make such determinations, will decide that the patient is no longer a danger to himself or others. Indeed, in December 2005, when the university obtained a temporary detention order against Cho, a magistrate referred him for a mental health evaluation that found "his insight and judgment are normal." Need I say more about the hazards of relying on mental health screening and evaluation to identify dangerous perpetrators--even after they have already been threatening people?
Psychiatry's last resort for presumably violent people is involuntary hospitalization. Not only does it almost always lead to rapid release, it does not help the involuntary patient. Coerced treatment is not perceived or experienced as "helpful" by the recipient but as unjust bullying. If coercion accomplishes anything, it teaches the "patient" to stay far away from all providers of mental health services.
And what about drugs for the treatment of violence? The FDA has not approved any medications for the control of violence because there are no such medications. Yes, it is possible to temporarily immobilize mind and body alike with a shot of an "antipsychotic" drug like Haldol; but that only works as long as the person is virtually paralyzed and confined--and forced drugging invariably breeds more resentment.
Instead of offering the promise of reducing violence, all psychiatric drugs carry the potential risk of driving the individual into violent madness. For example, both the newer antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Celexa, and the antipsychotic drugs such as Risperdal and Zyprexa, cause a disorder caused akathisia--a terrible inner sensation of agitation accompanied by a compulsion to move about. Akathisia is known to drive people to suicide and to aggression. Indeed, these tragic outcomes of drug-induced akathisia are so well documented that they are described in the most establishment psychiatric book of all, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
For the past fifteen years or more, I've been writing about the capacity of psychiatric drugs to cause mayhem, murder and suicide. In early 2005 the FDA finally issued a warning that antidepressants cause both suicidality and violence. For example, the FDA's new mandated warning label for antidepressants states that these drugs produce "anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania."
Note the reference to "irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity" in the label or package insert for antidepressants. That's a formula for violence. Note the mention of akathisia, another source of both violence and suicide. And finally, note the reference to mania, yet another drug-induced syndrome associated with violence and suicide.
As a psychiatrist and medical expert, I have personally evaluated dozens of cases of individuals driven to violence by psychiatric drugs of every type, but most commonly the newer antidepressants. One of the cases I evaluated, the Columbine shooter Eric Harris, looks the most like Cho. Both were very emotionally disturbed in an extremely violent fashion for a prolonged period of time. For the entire year that Eric Harris was evolving his manic-like violence, he was taking Luvox, a drug known to cause mania at a high rate in young people
In my book Reclaiming Our Children, I analyzed the clinical and scientific reasons for believing that Eric Harris's violence was caused by prescribed Luvox and I've also testified to the same under oath in deposition in a case related to Columbine. In my book the Antidepressant Fact Book, I also warned that stopping antidepressants can be as dangerous as starting them, since they can cause very disturbing and painful withdrawal reactions.
We have not been informed whether or not Cho was taking psychiatric drugs at the time he unleashed his violence; but even if he wasn't, he might have been tipped over into violent madness weeks or months earlier by a drug like Prozac, Paxil, or Zoloft. He could also have been undergoing severe drug withdrawal. Investigators should set a high priority on obtaining and publishing Cho's psychiatric drug history.
To focus on Cho as a "mental patient" or "schizophrenic" distracts from the real need to enforce security on college campuses, or in any setting, by reacting definitively to lesser acts of violence before they escalate. It also maligns people with serious mental problems, the vast majority who are, above else, inoffensive and overly docile.
The violence unleashed on the Virginia Tech campus should not lead to calls for more mental health screening, more mental health interventions, or more drugs. Instead, the violent rampage should confirm that psychiatric interventions don't prevent violence and instead they can cause it. Early on, Cho should have been confronted by the police and by university administrators with the reality that his behavior was unacceptable and he should have been suspended. In other words, he should have been treated as a criminal who was stalking women, and as an obviously threatening individual, not as a potential mental patient. These measures might have confronted him with sufficient reality to nip his violence in the bud and more certainly would have removed him from the circumstances that the he found intolerably stimulating, while also removing him from so many targets of opportunity.
My scientific papers describing medication-induced violence and some of my cases can be found on www.breggin.com/Thursday, April 19, 2007
Things that make you say what the F%^K?
From America Blog
Why does the Bush administration have a list of everyone who has ever used anti-depressants?
Guess what? They do. From ABC News, regarding the VA Tech shooter:Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government's files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.
We don't even have a list of gun owners, and we have a list of everyone who has been prescribed anti-depressants? And in fact, the article suggests that this isn't just a database of patients who use anti-depressants, it's a federal database of every prescription drug you've ever bought.
What exactly do the Bushies do with that list? And what other lists do they have of which medications you've ever taken?
What an Idiot
‘Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.’
I thought only Jim Quinn used this Sound bite on his right wing radio talk show. I never expected to hear it coming from a Presidential candidate.Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in South Carolina: “Another man — wondering if an attack on Iran is in the works — wanted to know when America is going to ’send an air mail message to Tehran.’ McCain began his answer by changing the words to a popular Beach Boys song. ‘Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,’ he sang to the tune of Barbara Ann. … He stopped short of answering the actual question.”
And then this stupid statement from one of his spokespeople.
“McCain campaign spokesman Kevin McLaughlin points out that the Senator’s song was not serious and the people in the room were laughing. ‘He was just trying to add a little humor to the event.’”
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
MADMAN?????????????
MADMAN is how Fox News.com is now describing the shooter. I wonder if they even read what it says in their own story... According to court papers, on Dec. 13, 2005, a magistrate ordered Cho to undergo an evaluation at Carilion St. Albans Hospital. The magistrate signed the order because of evidence Cho was a danger to himself or others as a result of mental illness. The next day, according to court records, a special justice approved outpatient treatment for Cho. A medical examination conducted Dec. 14 found that Cho's "affect is flat. ... He denies suicidal ideations. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder. His insight and judgment are normal." It is unclear how long Cho stayed at Carilion, though court papers indicate he was free to leave as of Dec. 14. Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said Cho had been continually enrolled at Tech and never took a leave of absence. --
My friends at Mindfreedom.org sent this out in a e-mail today
MindFreedom is calling for an immediate and complete investigation of all aspects of the involvement of the mental health system with Cho Seung-Hui, the apparent shooter in the Virginia Tech Massacre.
What psychiatric drugs were prescribed? What role if any did
prescribed psychiatric drugs play in this tragedy? How effective was
the care offered to Cho Seung-Hui? What else could have been done?
---
I have a problem with the shooter being called a madman. I have dealt with mental illness for greater part of my life from both the patient and professional side. I had to deal with the stigma of mental illness for many years. People seem to believe that people suffering from these illness are violent and that is just not true. In fact 99% of folks that deal with mental illness every day in their lives are not violent. In most cases they are the ones that are being abused in hospitals and MH programs every day. A possibility that if Cho was on Psychotropic drugs or withdrawing from them, they might have cause him to kill. There have been many studies done about some of these newer drugs and the FDA has issued warning to this fact. That is what Mindfreedoms statement is alluding to.
---
More info on MindFreedom...
MindFreedom is a nonprofit human rights group that unites 100 sponsor
and affiliate groups with individual members, and is accredited by
the United Nations as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) with
Consultative Roster Status.
MindFreedom is one of the very few totally independent groups in the
mental health field with no funding from governments, drug companies,
religions, corporations, or the mental health system. While most of
MindFreedom's members are psychiatric survivors, *all* who support
human rights are invited to join and become active leaders.
ITS TIME FOR TEARS NOT HATE
Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer who survived the Nazi killings and later escaped from Communist Romania, was one of several foreign victims of Monday's shootings, which coincided with Israel's Holocaust remembrance day.
Librescu, who was 76 when he died, found work in Romania at a government aerospace company. But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to the Communist regime, his son said.
"My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee," Librescu's son, Joe Librescu, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home outside Tel Aviv. "Students started opening windows and jumping out."
I write these words in anger. I do not want to offend anyone except the person who belittled a hero last night because he was a Jew. Liviu Librescu was a holocaust survivor, is that a crime? I heard the person say "What is the big deal?" "Why are they talking to Rabbis in Israel about him?" I'll be honest with you, my readers; I just can't understand the hate. Last night and this morning as I watch the news I see the stories of other heroes and the victims. No one is holding Professor Librescu above the others in what he did while he lived or what he did as he died. Yes, there were many heroes that day. One happened to be a Jew that survived the Nazis. I ask again, is that a crime?
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
