If lawmakers and authorities are truly concerned about stopping gun violence in schools, they need to take a close look at the prescription of psychotropic drugs for children and young people, says a leading psychiatrist.
The forthcoming edition of an American psychiatric manual will increase the number of people in the general population diagnosed with a mental illness – but what they need is help and understanding, not labels and medication.
The new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) will be out this May and has received a lot of criticism. Published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the manual is the bible of who is not “normal” and has some kind of mental disorder that needs treatment.
Are antidepressants being prescribed too often and too much? Has the definition of clinical depression become too broad? And why are mass shootings now being linked to antidepressant use? The risk that antidepressants will ignite violent or self-destructive behavior has been the subject of renewed controversy.
After evidence that several gunmen involved in mass shootings were taking antidepressants during the time of their outburst, a number of threads have been appearing on the Web regarding this issue, but the media refuses to bring it up.
For the first time ever, and for a brief moment in time, two knowledgeable and highly credentialed public figures have commented on the fact that psychiatric medications cause violence and must be considered suspect in the case of the Newtown shooter. But then, as if it never happened, and as if psychiatric drugs could not possibly be implicated in violence, the issue was dropped by the media.
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