The idea that humans are born naturally violent, beyond the title of an Oliver Stone film, is certainly the fuel of all right-wing political movements, because the success of a product depends largely on the market to which it is offered.
For example, to sell weapons you need wars, but to wage wars you need an enemy, and the enemy generates insecurity, which generates fear, which induces people to buy weapons, which increases violence, which generates new wars, which..
In short, we understand each other.
If your product is safety, you advertise fear.
Since it’s enough to see children playing with each other to understand that it’s all nonsense, one could hypothesize that at a certain point in their development one or more genes become activated and then start freaking out (something like those spy movies) or that due to excess dopamine they become very aggressive (like the story of the Doberman’s brain, that grew grew until he went crazy) except that there are no tests capable of measuring the levels of neurotransmitters for which..
Ah, there, I think I get it.
Since tests don’t exist, we need to get the hypotheses right.
Of course you might ask “Yes, whatever, what about those who then enter schools and shoot their classmates and teachers?”
“Well, in those cases it could be a very serious mental illness..”
“Yeah, so you’re saying that the mentally ill are violent, so you’re the fascist!”
It really seems that with this story of “we’re all a little’ crazy” we don’t wrong anyone and in fact we get along but.. if we get along so well because all these wars!!
Nice dilemma..
Is it worth trying to better understand at least the “shooting mass” thing in schools?
Let’s try the numbers..
At least 11 of the recent shootings committed by teenagers have one factor in common besides the use of guns.
Everyone, in addition to holding rifles, was taking antidepressants.
“But how come, then you’re saying that psychotropic drugs can turn kids into deadly killers?”
Not at all, I’m just reading it.
A study of 950 acts of violence committed by people taking antidepressants found 362 homicides, 13 school shootings, 5 bomb attacks, 3 pilots crashing their planes, and more than 350 suicides and attempted suicides.
But above all, and this is the most interesting data, there were no significant statistical reductions; in fact, several patients stated that suicidal thoughts began immediately after starting treatment.
“Here we go again, now you’re the one complaining about fear! Why do you have to say that antidepressant drugs can be so dangerous?”
Well, to help the pharmaceutical companies..
For several years now they have written it directly on the boxes, something like “smoking kills” on the cigarette pack: in the black box* made mandatory by the FDA, in fact, the wording ‘can increase the risk of suicide in children and adolescents’ stands out.
One might think, well, curious, it’s a bit like writing that an obesity drug can make you gain weight, but come on, you can see they do it to warn doctors and patients.
Sure, but also to discourage million-dollar compensation lawsuits.
In the ‘90s, Prozac, renamed “happiness pill”, ended up at the centre of controversy and courtrooms precisely because of the surge in suicides in patients who had started taking it.
More recently, the New York Times revealed that the 2013 Washington Navy arsenal massacre was yet another committed under the influence of Trazodone, another drug indicated for the treatment of depressive symptoms.
Perhaps the problem, at least for school shootings, isn’t just psychotropic drugs, but what’s behind prescriptions-diagnoses.
According to the DSM 5 criteria, in fact, the most well-known and used diagnostic manual by psychiatrists, the main symptoms of depression are largely superimposable on the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, such as a reduced ability to experience pleasure from the usual activities of one’s own interest (anhedonia), poor speech (alogy) or a lack of interest in relationships with other people.
Everyone, associated with a general loss of motivation to achieve goals and objectives (apathy), can lead to a progressive social withdrawal which, however, in the absence of delusions or hallucinations that have been ongoing for more than 6 months, is not considered a possible onset of a psychotic break, despite studies on the basic symptoms typical of European psychopathology.
That the activating effects of antidepressants, as with suicidal ideas, are capable of slatentizing very serious but still ‘covered’ psychoses?
A few weeks ago, during a conference presenting another well-known diagnostic manual that, unlike the DSM5, still takes into account dynamic-relational aspects in the development of mental illness (PDM 3), I heard that psychodynamic diagnoses should also take into account patients’ unconscious experiences, but that unfortunately the unconscious is not diagnosable…
Well, in the meantime we could try to get to know him better, given that means and tools have been discovered and theorized for some time.
One of the most famous and tragic stories, which inspired the film by Oscar-winning director Michael Moore, is in fact that of Columbine High School.
That morning, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two boys aged 16 and 17, entered the school and killed 12 classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on them.
Harris was taking Luvox, an antidepressant, and they both used the acronym “NBK” to refer to their “mission”: Natural, Born, Killer.
It was April 20, 1999, the birth theory had existed for almost thirty years.
Marco Randisi
*The black box is a very visible warning, framed in black, the FDA – Food and Drug Administration – is the US pharmaceutical authority
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