TRIPLE SHOOTING IN ATHENS: Slaying motive unclear
Police issue nationwide alert for UGA professorBy Marcus K. Garner
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, April 27, 2009
Authorities still don’t know the motive for the shooting, and the search for Zinkhan, 57, continued Monday. Police said they had no leads on his whereabouts.
“I’ve talked to my friends who were there, and they said he was very methodical and went in and just started (shooting),” said Dina Canup, a Town & Gown member since 2001. “It’s just unfathomable.”
It’s very sad, but we see these motiveless mass homicide stories repeatedly (standing out in recent memory was the ‘anti-depressants in his system’ Northern Illinois U. mass murderer). Combine mild to severe depression, drug companies’ & doctors’ profit motives, anti-depressants and American gun laws and what do you get? Guy probly killed himself too, another fairly safe prediction.
Should anti-depressants carry bigger fatter bolder warnings that they ‘have been known to cause severe persecution complex, suicides, and mass homicides’? Yes. That doesn’t mean they should never be prescribed, but amateurish drug-company-advertising-addled doctors need to get it straight in the in-your-face bold: DANGERous. Not that the warnings will do much good, but bigger and clearer is a start.
Should drug companies be allowed to advertise dangerous drugs to encourage people to go to doctors and ask for anti-depressants? Of course not.
Recently and further info on anti-depressants:
Over-prescribed by military docs, responsible for exceptional number of PTSD victim suicides?
The following is from an article on Haaretz that is largely supportive of mass use of anti-depressants. I’ve blocked out the tiny anti-bandwagon bits:
An entire group of anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants has emerged, which treat what is known in the professional jargon as “soft psychiatric conditions.” It is enough to be in a bad mood and not generally happy, for the family doctor – a psychiatrist is not required – to prescribe the right treatment for a more beautiful life.
So people take pills to combat depression, anxiety, suicidal tendencies, agitation, shyness, negative energies, bad thoughts, a broken heart. How can this rising market be explained? The experts say it comes from hard times, pressures at work, a spoiled generation, the constant search for happiness, celebrities talking about it in the media, and especially a decline in side-effects of the medications. . . .
“The idea of happiness is a media fantasy,” says the psychiatrist Haggai Oren, director of the Abarbanel psychiatric hospital. “People don’t come for treatment because they want to be happy, but rather because they want to suffer less. My patients tell me: ‘I am functioning less well; I don’t feel spontaneous; I’m not fulfilling myself; I am stuck in my job,’ and mainly, ‘I deserve more.’ That’s the complaint of the 21st century – we are narcissists. But if there is no decline in functioning or increase in suffering, I don’t write a prescription.
A list of anti-depressant-related homicides and suicides
The links between the pharmaceutical industry and mainstream research, ‘news’ and opinion are massive. See, for instance, pharmalot.com, especially here and here.
The following, by Jay Cohen, offers more on the background of anti-depressants and why they sometimes cause suicidal and homicidal behavior:
The Underlying Cause of Suicides and Homicides with SSRI Antidepressants:
Is It the Drugs, the Doctors, or the Drug Companies?How a dysfunctional medical-pharmaceutical complex causes and perpetuates unnecessary harm
Jay S. Cohen M.D
The following from a doctor’s book review of Cohen’s book:
It’s worth bearing in mind that the number of suicides caused by antidepressants is dwarfed by the number of suicides prevented by them. Including mine.
Should more care be exercised in both prescription and monitoring of their use? Hell yes. That probably applies to all medications, not just the antidepressants or even the psychoactives. In the case of antidepressants, GPs should definitely not be prescribing them; that’s a job for a psychiatrist or a mental health nurse practitioner.
The idea that antidepressants will make you happy is, of course, nonsense. That’s not what they do. They simply relieve chronic depression with varying degrees of success, depending widely upon the individual patient. And in the absence of other effective treatments or, more to the point, effective and affordable treatments, they are the only available option for a great many people.
Whether it’s licit or illicit drugs, there seems to be in our society a certain tendency to exhibit irrational and disproportional panic to their effects. There are vastly more murders and suicides attributable to alcohol, available legally and without prescription on practically every block, in any given week than there are murders and suicides attributable to all prescription psychiatric drugs combined in a quarter century. Moreover, given the extent to which depression was self-medicated with alcohol before the advent of effective antidepressants, it’s quite likely that the number of homicides — to say nothing of suicides — has gone way down as a result.
In short, a distinction between the baby and the bathwater is in order.
Well, except for the final paragraph. Note the headline said “I bet it involved” not “I bet it was attributable to” anti-depressants. I still feel that way after reading further into the professor’s background.
The distinction between baby and bathwater is in the diary. Further on that point, here are three reasonable suggestions I think you’ll probly agree with:
As for preventing or not preventing your suicide, mebbe you’re right but we’ll never really know. Like you wrote, individuals have different reactions to drugs, life events and changes of perspective. Life, decision-making, and ‘the brain’ are complex and individualized. I’m glad you didn’t go through with that ‘decision/inclination’ and stuck around to live and make valuable comments.
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Zinkhan, who speaks fluent Dutch, often traveled to The Netherlands, where he owns a house in Amsterdam and teaches part time at a university, officials said. A colleague of Zinkhan’s told authorities the professor recently had purchased a phone that could be used internationally, according to the Associated Press.
The Vrije Universiteit (Free University) in Amsterdam on Sunday posted on its Web site condolences to victims and their survivors. Zinkhan has taught part time there since April 2007, visiting for about six weeks each year, according to the school.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Its not being on anti depressants folks its going off them. I experienced total rage coming off Lexipro, which I never wanted to be on in the first place but caved in to my doctor. I felt worse on it and did what I was told with weaning off very slowly. It took three months to do that after only three months on it. I felt total lack of contro; and blinding rage. When I told my doctor about it he said, “sounds like depression to me. You should go back on it.”
Thats how big pharma and the docs operate. Once you are on it it is next to impossible to get off it. I feel, imho these rampages are connected with people that are coming off the antidepressants. They can no longer afford them or hate how they feel so they just stop which is the biggest danger of all.
Lexapro is very hard to get off of, a characteristic that too many physicians seem not to know. It requires a much longer “taper down” than other antidepressants – ; without that, getting off can be quite horrible. It may be necessary to go back on the drug and do an even longer taper down to avoid those terrible feelings. I’m dubious that 3 months would be enough to avoid the serious difficulties that you had.
I have two comments to your story.
First, correlation does not equal causation. You are looking at a pattern of two things that go together and are thinking this means there is a causal relationship between the two.
Second, When people are in the depths of depression, they can be unable to act, e.g. be unable to try killing themselves, because they lack the energy to do so. However, as depression begins to lift, they are more activated, yet still quite depressed. They can be at highest risk for killing themselves at this point: activated above the very deepest part of their depression, yet still very depressed, feeling quite hopeless. This can be their point of highest risk for suicide.
What I’m not saying by this is that antidepressants are to be taken lightly or that they are absolutely safe. Furthermore, I would outlaw almost every kind of pharmaceutical advertisement to the public; I think a good deal of what drug companies do in advertising drugs is unethical.
For example, Lexapro was marketed without doing enough to inform physicians of the significant difficulties of getting off Lexapro. Too often there is no patient education by the M.D, and indeed, the MD may not know much about such meds. Psychiatric training isn’t a big part of medical school for all the students. As a result, a lot of meds are prescribed by docs who don’t really know the meds well. Therefore I think that psychiatrists should be prescribing antidepressants, not the vast majority of general practitioners or internists.
However, implying that the meds caused these suicides and murders, is going far beyond the data.