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:
