Despite a formal request from AbleChild, a Parent’s Rights organization, citing numerous state and federal laws supporting the release of Adam Lanza’s toxicology results and medical records, Connecticut Medical Examiner, H. Wayne Carver, M.D., has arbitrarily denied the request.
National, state and local legislators in the wake of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., are all abuzz over the prospect of stopping such people as Adam Lanza by preventive diagnosis and possible preventive detention.
If my late friend, eminent psychiatric critic Dr. Thomas Szasz, were alive today and read about all of the references to “mental illnesses” and “mental health” as a way to lessen the number of mass killings, he would say, “Am I surprised? No, of course not. This is a way to pretend that evil does not motivate such atrocities and a way for politicians to act as if they have discovered a way to stop them.”
More than a decade after a national scandal regarding the over-prescription of Ritalin and similar drugs to millions of American children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now reports a far higher rate of diagnosis than a decade ago.
An astounding 19 percent of high school-age boys – ages 14 to 17 – in the U.S. have been diagnosed with ADHD and about 10 percent are taking medication for it. Ten percent of high school-age girls have likewise been diagnosed.
Last week, The Post reported that more than 145,000 city children struggle with mental illness or other emotional problems. That estimate, courtesy of New York’s Health Department, equals an amazing 1 in 5 kids. Could that possibly be true?
One of the first people to “draw a potential connection between acts of deadly violence and psychiatric medication” was Neurosurgeon and CNN contributor Sanjay Gupta, MD. He asked, “…what medications, if any, he was on, and specifically I’m talking about antidepressants… If you look at the studies on other shootings like this that have happened, medications like this were a common factor…over a seven-year period, there were 11,000 episodes of violence related to drug side effects.”
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