Police have yet to uncover a motive. [Stephen] Kazmierczak was an NIU graduate student in sociology in the spring of 2007, but was not currently enrolled, according to a release on the school’s Web site.
The Chicago Tribune reported that the school honored the gunman two years ago for his research on the U.S. prison system. The research included a study of self-inflicted wounds among prisoners.
“He was an outstanding student. An awarded student,” said NIU Police Chief Donald Grady. “Those he had communication with felt he was a very good student and a fairly normal, unstressed person.”
Grady said that Kazmierczak was a graduate student in social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kazmierczak was taking some kind of medication, Grady said, but declined to name the drug or provide other details.
“He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks,” Grady said.
http://www.cbs46.com/news/15304821/detail.html
When’s the medication going to be named? Who has the police chief chosen to serve and protect, and who to put in danger?
Eat or stop eating yer Prozac, Paxil, or Zoloft, and have uncontrollable urge to commmit suicide and mass murder?
Lilly fights journal article on Prozac
By Barry Meier
Published: TUESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2005Last year was an especially bad one for the pharmaceutical industry, which experienced controversies over how drug studies are disclosed and the implosion of the painkiller Vioxx.
Now, as a result of the recent publication of an article about the antidepressant Prozac, it appears that the staid, usually methodical world of medical journals could suffer its own black eye.
On New Year’s Day, BMJ, a British medical journal, published a news article suggesting that “missing” documents from a decade-old lawsuit indicated that Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, had minimized data about the drug’s risks of causing suicidal or violent behavior.
The article’s appearance came shortly after a controversy erupted over whether drug makers had adequately disclosed the risks that antidepressants posed to pediatric patients. Meanwhile, Christopher Pittman, a teenager from South Carolina, is facing trial for murder as an adult on charges that he killed his grandparents when he was 12. Pittman has acknowledged the crime, but his lawyers contend that he became violent after taking Zoloft, an antidepressant similar to Prozac. . . .
It was in a little-noticed article written by Lenzer in the Dec. 11 issue of BMJ about the Pittman case that she first mentioned that the publication had received “a set of documents that mysteriously went missing from a U.S. mass murder case 10 years ago.”
That article did not go into details. But in her article Jan. 1, Lenzer wrote that the documents in question were connected to a Prozac-related lawsuit that grew out of a shooting rampage in 1989 by a Kentucky man, Joseph Wesbecker, that left nine people dead, including Wesbecker.
Lawyers representing the victims sued Lilly, asserting that Wesbecker’s killing spree had been caused by Prozac, a drug he had been prescribed just before the crimes. During the 1994 trial, Lilly pointed to Wesbecker’s history of psychological problems and said that Prozac was safe. To combat those assertions, plaintiffs’ lawyers introduced hundreds of Lilly documents. They argued that the records showed that Lilly had fully disclosed to the regulator in the late 1980s the potential of Prozac to produce suicidal thinking or acts of violence.
The jury found in favor of Lilly. But the plaintiffs and Lilly had reached an undisclosed deal just before the case went to the jury, effectively settling the case by agreeing not to appeal the verdict.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/17/business/lilly.php
When people try to withdraw from serotonin boosters — especially Zoloft, Paxil, and Luvox — they may experience debilitating withdrawal syndromes. Mistaking withdrawal for a return of their original symptoms, many patients restart the medication, needlessly prolonging their exposure to the drug. Pharmaceutical companies are so concerned about withdrawal syndromes that Eli Lilly recently funded a panel of drug advocates, prominent academic psychiatrists, who wrote a series of professional papers suggesting the euphemism “antidepressant discontinuation syndrome” as an alternative to “withdrawal,” avoiding the latter’s negative connotations.
In the case of suicidality and violence, Eli Lilly has adamantly denied this side effect. But new information has come to light that the pharmaceutical giant has paid millions of dollars to victims and survivors of Prozac-related suicides and murders. The test case was the sensational mass murder-suicide of Joseph Wesbecker. In 1989, one month after starting Prozac, Wesbecker opened fire with an AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifle in Louisville, Kentucky, killing eight people and wounding twelve others before taking his own life in the shooting spree. In 1994, Lilly appeared to win a jury verdict in the Wesbecker trial, which they aggressively publicized as “vindicating” their drug.
But the truth is that the pharmaceutical company secretly paid what Cecil Blye, an attorney for one of the victims, Andrew Pointer, later acknowledged was a “tremendous amount of money. It boggles the mind.”
http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=412061&agid=2
Eric Harris was taking Luvox (a Prozac-like drug) at the time of the Littleton murders
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.
On April 29 the Washington Post confirmed that Eric Harris, the leader in the Littleton tragedy, was taking the psychiatric drug Luvox at the time of the murders. On April 30 the same newspaper published a story quoting expert claims that Luvox is safe and has no association with causing violence. In fact, Luvox and closely related drugs commonly produce manic psychoses, aggression, and other behavioral abnormalities in children and young people. . . .
http://www.breggin.com/luvox.html
Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School Shootings
By MONICA DAVEY and GARDINER HARRISPublished: March 26, 2005
RED LAKE, Minn., March 25 – In their sleepless search for answers, the family of Jeff Weise, the teenager who killed nine people and then himself, says it is left wondering about the drugs he was prescribed for his waves of depression.
On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that Ms. Lussier described as a “cry for help.”
“They kept upping the dose for him,” she said, “and by the end, he was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can’t help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off.” . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/national/26shoot.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1111813290-IFJ7mBNwUjmN
8EWyvysSGQ
David Healey is a respected historian of psychiatry who has written a book that should spark a major debate. He identifies current trends towards the abandonment of independent research into treatments for mental illness, the demand for Randomised Control Trials as the only acceptable measure of whether a treatment works, and the chilling control pharmaceutical companies now exert over psychiatry.
There may be worse to come. US corporate “managed care” is moving into health systems throughout the world. . . .
Psychiatry’s championing of chemical treatments over all else began with the breakthrough drug chlorpromazine. It “completely eliminated the original form of insanity” from the 1940s onwards. The irony is, however, that in 2000 there has been a 15-fold increase in rates of admission to psychiatric wards compared to 1900.
Society’s reliance on psychotropic drugs may have produced further problems that have been mistakenly blamed on the disease rather than treatment. There have been numerous law suits in the US after patients on Prozac committed violent acts. “The rhetoric of modern drug development is powerful enough to blind clinicians to preventable deaths and obscure the fact that the life expectancies of their patients are falling,” writes Healy.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-creation-of-psychopharmacology-by-
david-healy-650506.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article632530.ece
Go to the website for Lexipro withdrawls. My daughter went through this. Dr prescribed it when she really didn’t want it. She stayed on it three months and weaned off slowly as instructed. Rage was the norm for six months following. Antidepressants are great for people that reeally need them but coming off them can be dangerously deadly as we just found out. My daughter told her daughter about the feelings of being out of control and he asked if she felt she would harm herself and she said no. He told her to go back on the Lexipro that her symptoms sounded loke depression.
I stated this was at the heart of all these shootings. I would wager they all had come off of an antidepressent.
The key is to treat these drugs as very dangerous and profoundly addictive substances. Weighing those realities (and amazingly we don’t know how severe the realities are, since the database on adverse reactions and worse reactions to the drugs is purely voluntary), prescribing should be much more rare than it is.
By the way, it’s amazing how many anecdotal stories there are such as yours. And yet the drug company PR machine still manages to keep a lid on the problem.
Sharing these previous thoughts:
Peter R. Breggin, M.D. makes his living off of being Mr. antiPsychiatry, and he has been at it since the mid1970s, when he was then criticizing the use of antipsychotic drugs. Not that psychiatry doesn’t deserve the criticism it receives, like its delay in acknowledging the brain-damaging effects of antipsychotics in certain patients (tardive dyskinesia), or its suppression of the truth about all antidepressant drugs: that they are no more effective than placebos. Unfortunately, Breggin proferred his own treatment solutions which were at least as ineffective as the drugs he was disparaging.However, it seems that every four years some scientist publishes a review of studies of antidepressants and repeats the same thing heard before: not effective. Yet the prescription of these drugs continues. The problem with the antidepressant withdrawal theory of mass murder is that millions of people have taken these medications and have withdrawn from them without consequence. I would be more likely to think that these killers were depressed or at least mentally ill prior to their incidents, hence, the reason for them being on these medications in the first place, and what they were given, antidepressants, failed to help them or prevent or curb the suicidal and homicidal thoughts that preceded these incidents. The notion that depression or the thoughts that accompanies it only began after they stopped the medications is speculative at best. Possible, but speculative.
by shergald
Re: Was it Zoloft, Paxil,or Prozac?
I considered axing Breggin from my little review of the literature but maybe unfortunately did not. I just wanted to give a hint of how pervasive these drugs are in our culture and among young people. He definitely is an inferior and too ‘absolutist’ advocate of the anti-depressant position. David Healey is far superior advocate, and not an absolutist: says he does precribe them, just with great caution and for authentic and severe depression.
by fairleft
Re: Was it Zoloft, Paxil,or Prozac?
More objective to leave Breggin in, since in spite of his extreme views, he has performed a service of alerting people about the dangers of the Psychiatry/Pharmaceutical company complex, yes to get everyone on some kind of psychotropic drug.
I’ve been watching the growth of psychiatric disorders over the years, One, for example, adulthood attention deficit disorder, is growing and for which amphetamines, hidden in some untoward pacific name, is recommended and prescribed. Psychiatry’s problem is survival. They lost anxiety disorders a couple of decades ago, when it was found that the minor tranquilizers (benzodiazepines) were addicting, for that matter, not really pharmacologically different from alcohol. Now they are struggling to retain depression, knowing that there are no effective antidepressants around. If they lose depression in addition to anxiety, well they will lose maybe 90% of outpatient practice.So the hoax of psychiatry continues. Breggin is a thorn in the side, even though he usually ends up blowing his own horn, and gets paid well by lawyers to argue drug induced crimes.
By shergald
Re: Was it Zoloft, Paxil,or Prozac?
Victims’ lawyers should not rely on him. He’s a case loser; too many skeletons in his closet. Healey is far superior.
by fairleft
Re: Was it Zoloft, Paxil,or Prozac?
By the way, on your last paragraph: the indications about the Northern Illinois guy is that he seemed to be a reasonably well-adjusted ‘normal’ person. Had girlfriend, career interest, intelligence and ability to achieve his goals, and had just transferred from NIU to a more prestigious university. The point of critics of anti-depressants is that this mildly/temporarily depressed person probably should not have been given anti-depressants, knowing the possible withdrawal effects.
Of course the ‘mass kill/suicide’ reaction doesn’t occur in a high percentage of people. But even 1% is a lot of people in the U.S., and about which 1% out of the 100% researchers have hardly a clue (it doesn’t appear to be the most severely ‘depressed and angry’ like you speculate).
by fairleft
Re: Was it Zoloft, Paxil,or Prozac?
RE: your first paragraph. If what we hear is true, so why was he taking a medication, necessarily prescribed by a physician?
RE: paragraph two, the withdrawal effects. They have been substantiated in adolescents withdrawing from SSRI antidepressants. More research is needed. Also, 1% is a gross overestimate.
By shergald
I think that’s a little mixed up in order, but thanks. At some point I answered your final why with something like “It’s overprescribed, considering its dangers.”