Behaviorism and Mental Health –
January 6, 2014
By Phil Hickey, Ph.D.
On December 27, 2013, Connecticut State Police issued a 7,000-page, heavily redacted, report on the massacre that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School just over a year earlier (December 14, 2012). For the record, I have not read the 7,000-page report, but I have read the Wikipedia article Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, last updated January 4, 2013, and several media reports on the matter, including reports from the New York Times, the Hartford Courant, and the Washington Post.
Obviously there is an enormous volume of material in the official reports and in the various media reports and comments. But there is still one major unanswered question. Was Adam Lanza under the influence of a psychopharmaceutical product(s) at the time of the shooting or in the period immediately prior to the shooting? There is a report in the record that he took Celexa (citalopram) for a short while in 2006, but no reports of psychiatric treatment since that time. But there are some reasons for doubt.
ABLECHILD’S FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST
On August 22, 2013, Connecticut Assistant Attorney General, Patrick B. Kwanashie, during a freedom of information hearing on this matter, stated that releasing this information could “… cause a lot of people to stop taking their medications.” He made his statement in response to AbleChild’s request for Adam Lanza’s medical records, especially with regards to any psychiatric drugs that he might have taken. The hearing was videotaped. Here is an excerpt, transcribed verbatim, from Mr. Kwanashie’s response. The excerpt begins at about 1 hour 4 minutes into the tape.
Freedom of Information Hearing – Left to right: Connecticut Assistant Attorney General, Patrick B. Kwanashie; AbleChild Co-Founder, Sheila Matthews, AbleChild’s Attorney, Jonathan Emord
“Therefore it is simply not sure that if you don’t fall into one of those categories, what you have to advance reasons that you actually do have a real interest in the [unclear] medical records. The plaintiff, the complainant have not shown any such interest. The complainant is proposing that they can make generalizations, generalized from one single incident, no matter how the uh outcome of the use of antidepressants, or thee thee thee causal link between the use of antidepressants and the kind of violence that took place in Newtown. You just can’t, that’s not a legitimate use of information, of that information. You can’t generalize just from one case. Even if you can conclusively establish that Adam Lanza, his his uh his murderous actions, were caused by antidepressants, you can’t logically from that conclude that um um in others would uh, would uh commit the same actions as a result of taking antidepressants. Um, um, so it’s simply not legitimate, and not only is it not the use to which they are proposing to put the information not legitimate, um it is harmful, because you can cause a lot of people um to stop taking their medications, stop cooperating with their treating physicians, um um just because of the heinousness of uh what Adam Lanza did. As thee, as thee thee material, the FDA material that they submitted show, it would take a lot of studies uh over a long period of time and among, and within various demographic groups to even begin to uh establish causal links between antidepressants and uh uh aggressive actions or suicidal behavior. And thee thee informed uh uh, the informed opinion has not quite reached that the point to to say definitively that there’s a causal link between uh between uh the use of antidepressants and uh and uh violent behavior. Having correlations, there are correlations, but to say there are correlations doesn’t necessarily mean there is, the relationship is causal. And uh uh this is an issue the FDA is still grappling with, and so far it’s been willing to do is is ask the drug makers to put warnings on their on their products and to advise physicians, treating physicians, to follow monitor their uh their uh patients closely uh uh at the uh the beginning of uh uh the taking of antidepressants. Um so it’s a complex issue, um and to pretend that you can just based on this one case make uh recommendations as to how people should uh uh how we should make judgment choices is a disservice to the public and illustrates why these types of reports should not be made available, because in the wrong hands they can be the source of the source of mischief.”
The hesitancies make the material a little difficult to read, but I think the message is clear: AbleChild should be denied access to the documents in question because they are likely to draw and publicize unwarranted assumptions from these documents, and this might induce large numbers of people to stop taking the drugs in question.
Mr. Kwanashie’s statement is extraordinary for three reasons:
1. The issue on the table was whether or not AbleChild had a “legitimate interest” (as defined by the statute and regulations) in the material. This was essentially a legal/technical matter, and the complainant’s attorney Jonathan Emord had outlined various legal reasons in support of their right to the information.
What appeared to be expected from the Assistant Attorney General, who represented the State of Connecticut, was a rebuttal also based on legal issues and technicalities. Instead, he launched gratuitously into these controversial waters, and provided, in my view, a glimpse of what seems to be going on behind the scenes.
It is of note that when he had finished these remarks, the hearing chairperson drew him back to the legal issues and asked him some clarificatory questions on those matters.
2. Mr. Kwanashie has unquestionably conveyed the impression that there is some information that is being suppressed, and that it is being suppressed for the reasons that he outlined; i.e. so that people would not stop taking their pills.
3. Mr. Kwanashie was not speaking as a private individual, but rather as the representative of the State of Connecticut. He had almost certainly been authorized by his superiors to make the statement in question, and presumably the statement reflects the state’s stance on this issue generally, i.e. not just in the Adam Lanza case.
It’s possible, of course, that Mr. Kwanashie was confused or inadequately prepared for the hearing. But that seems unlikely. He is 59 years old, has been licensed to practice law in Connecticut since 1988, and draws a salary of $142,000. Denying a freedom of information request is not a trivial matter, and the notion that he would go to such a hearing unprepared is hard to credit. This is especially the case in that the Lanza shooting is probably the highest profile case that the State of Connecticut has encountered in decades.
So what we have is a credible indication that Adam Lanza was taking psychoactive “medication” around the time of the murders. But the State of Connecticut will not release this information because such a release might induce large numbers of people to stop taking antidepressants.
A MINNESOTA TOWN HALL MEETING
A December 13, 2013, article called Newtown One Year Later, The Missing Link on the AbleChild site contained a link to a video. The video is of a town hall meeting that Minnesota Congresswoman Betty McCollum held with some of her constituents in Oakdale, Minnesota eleven months earlier, on January 26, 2013. At about 39 minutes and 30 seconds into the video, a member of the audience made the following comments:
“…I agree with Congresswoman McCollum that we need to have a dialogue with what’s going on with these gun issues. I’m, we’re blindly running into gun control and a violation of the second amendment – but we’re not even sure if we have a gun control problem. I’ve been reading things where a lot of these kids – the Sandy Hook kid and the kid up in Red Lake Minnesota and Aurora – they’re all on Prozac and Ritalin and is this a psychopharmaceutical issue that’s causing these kids to do. – I mean – I think we need to have a, I think we need to bring not only with both sides of the aisle but both sides of the issue together and examine exactly what’s going on here. Is this a gun problem or is it a – you know – it could be anything. But I think before we jump into legislating one portion of this we need to examine the entire issue and find out what’s going on. Thank you very much.”
Here’s Congresswoman McCollum’s verbatim response:
“To that, let me tell you something: that, to quote my grandmother (so I use nice words here), frosted my cookies. We can’t study, federally – we’re prohibited from studying the effects of some of the drugs that you were just talking about as it relates to people who go out and commit violent acts with guns. We’re prohibited from studying that. It’s an NRA scored vote. That’s why I’d never be at 100%. I think we have an obligation to study those kinds of issues. So that’s why we need a dialogue. It is prohibited from the CDC – the Centers of Disease Control – to study this. It’s wrong! And that’s why we need to get the lobbying efforts out of the discussion, just saying here’s your scorecard and they only highlight certain issues. And they don’t give you everything else that they’re involved in. And that’s why I’m here and that’s why I’m glad you’re here. So that we can talk and listen to one another. And so I really am feeling very good that you’re here today.”
In the December 13 article, AbleChild describe their unsuccessful attempts to obtain additional information from Congresswoman McCollum concerning the CDC “rule.”
My interpretation of the Congresswoman’s words in the town hall meeting is that there is some kind of prohibition within the government on researching this topic, and that this prohibition is connected to lobbying – presumably by the pharmaceutical industry.
According to Wikipedia, Congresswoman Betty Louise McCollum is 59 years old, and is the U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 4th congressional district, serving since 2001. She is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). She currently serves on the United States House Appropriations Committee and the following subcommittees: Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, United States House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. She also previously served on the House Committee Education and the Workforce; House Committee on Government Reform; House Committee on Resources; and House Committee on the Budget. So she is mature and not, I imagine, given to flights of fancy. She appears credible; she seems to have some personal knowledge of the “rule”; and there is nothing to suggest that she is making this stuff up.
Why is the media not all over this? The town hall meeting was held almost a year ago. To date the video has had only 307 hits.
WHITE HOUSE PETITION
And let’s not forget that a petition to formally investigate the link between psychopharmaceutical products and violence was removed from the White House petition website in December of 2012 without explanation, even though it was well on the way to obtaining the requisite number of signatures.
Click to enlarge graph
Is the US government, or any branch, or agency, of the US government deliberately suppressing research into the widely-suspected link between psychopharmaceutical products and mass shootings? And if so, is this suppression the result of pharmaceutical lobbying?
If in fact, as many of us suspect, there is a causal link between the mass shootings and psychopharma products, shouldn’t this be a matter of urgent national importance? Whose interests would be served by the suppression of this information? Has the constitutional supremacy of We The People been usurped by They The Drug Companies? By what distorted “logic” can a government collude with the notion of keeping people in the dark concerning a devastating drug effect in order to ensure that individuals keep taking these drugs? I encourage my readers to check out both videos, and perhaps recommend that your friends and contacts do the same. Perhaps there’s an innocent interpretation to all this. If so, I’d be very grateful if someone could explain it to me.
FINALLY
In 2000, Joseph Glenmullen, MD, a psychiatrist, published Prozac Backlash – a critical look at the adverse effects of Prozac and other serotonin boosters. Here’s a quote from the final chapter:
“We do know, from documented clinical experience and research, that these drugs have led to suicidal and violent urges in some patients. We desperately need warnings for patients and doctors, together with information on prevention and coping with suicidal and violent impulses when they occur. Additional research to help us understand the phenomenon is desirable but should not be merely a ploy to delay such warnings and preventive steps.” (p 336)
And that was more than 13 years ago!