MANIA
The shocking link between psychiatric drugs,
suicide, violence and mass murder

“Andrea Yates, in one of the most heartbreaking crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her kids, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years.

Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor.

In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.” But “rare” is defined by the FDA as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. And since, according to an Associated Press report, about 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S. alone in 2005, that means statistically almost 20,000 Americans could experience “homicidal ideation” – that is, murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one antidepressant drug.

Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking the widely prescribed antidepressant Luvox when he and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 24 others before turning their guns on themselves.

Dr. Peter Breggin, a top expert on the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs, has analyzed in detail “the clinical and scientific reasons for believing that Eric Harris’s violence was caused by prescribed Luvox.”

Beyond showing how meds like Luvox can cause “command auditory hallucinations” and many other scary, suicidal and homicidal “rare adverse events,” Breggin cites Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals as conceding that 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox developed mania during short-term controlled clinical trials.

“Mania,” explains Breggin, “is a psychosis which can produce bizarre, grandiose, highly elaborated destructive plans, including mass murder.”

Authorities investigating Cho Seung-Hui, who murdered 32 at Virginia Tech in April, reportedly found “prescription drugs” for the treatment of psychological problems among his possessions. Joseph Aust, Cho’s roommate, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch Cho’s routine each morning had included taking prescription drugs.

And while the autopsy report says no drugs were found in Cho’s bloodstream on the day of the murders, April 16, Breggin says Cho could well “have been tipped over into violent madness weeks or months earlier by a drug like Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft.”

Cho’s medical records have yet to be released to the public – authorities claiming it’s because a criminal investigation is ongoing, while Breggin suspects “maybe they’re protecting drug companies,” citing the serious problems withdrawal from psychiatric drugs have been known to cause.”

Jenny Hatch