Gunman’s Contradictions Confound Police
The Associated Press
Sunday, February 17, 2008; 7:16 AM
(San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 2005) Another teenager has shot and murdered schoolchildren, and those who believe that “mental illness” is the cause of all our social problems have offered the standard explanation and usual solution: This child suffered from a mental illness, and if only someone had seen the symptoms and notified mental-health authorities, he would have received an accurate diagnosis and the proper medication, and the tragedy could have been prevented. If only Red Lake High School student Jeff Weise had been placed on antidepressant medications, psychiatrists say, then this murder/suicide would never have happened. The story is usually followed by calls for more mental-health screening and treatment of our nation’s schoolchildren.
In 2003 Britain banned antidepressants for use in children and adolescents, and last year Health Canada issued a stern warning about these drugs, noting “clinical trial and post-marketing reports (of) … severe agitation-type adverse events coupled with self-harm or harm to others.”
(Wikipedia) Beginning in the 1960s, it (Ritalin) was used to treat children with ADHD, known at the time as hyperactivity or minimal brain dysfunction (MBD). Today methylphenidate is the medication most commonly prescribed to treat ADHD around the world. Production and prescription of methylphenidate rose significantly in the 1990s, especially in the United States, as the ADHD diagnosis came to be better understood and more generally accepted within the medical and mental health communities.
Ciba Pharmaceutical, your drug-pusher of choice.
Reported side effects include psychosis (abnormal thinking or hallucinations), difficulty sleeping, stomach aches, diarrhea, headaches, lack of hunger (leading to weight loss) and dry mouth, in some cases also including death.
This is only the description of Ritalin. There are thousands of other psychotropic drugs out there being prescribed for children.
(SF Chronicle, again) According to a study last year in the Lancet, U.S. psychiatrists, pediatricians and family practitioners wrote 11 million prescriptions for antidepressants for children in 2002. All the signs indicate this method of dealing with our children is not working. It is high time for both parents and schools to find a different method of dealing with troubled children. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” the fault is not in our children’s brains or genes, but in ourselves. It is to our own treatment of children that we must look to find an answer to their problems — and ours.