[New-Poetry]http://www.thetrenchcoat.com/archives/1891-Cho-Seung-Huis-creative-writing.html

Wed Apr 18 17:42:52 EDT 2007

Re: PulitzerSent by Frank Jensen:

The Chicago Tribune reports that Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech
shooter who killed 32 fellow students in a shooting rampage, was
taking antidepressant drugs. This is not the first time a school
shooting rampage has been linked to antidepressants. The infamous
Colombine High shootings took place almost exactly eight years ago,
and the shooters in that rampage were also -- you guessed it -- taking
antidepressant drugs.

What is it about antidepressant drugs that provokes young men to pick
up pistols, rifles and shotguns, then violently assault their
classmates? Clearly, there's something wrong with the mind of anyone
who engages in such violent acts. Could the drugs be "imbalancing"
their minds, priming them for violence?

The answer is a very sobering, "Yes, they could be." As we reported in
a previous article on Paxil:

Researchers from Cardiff University in Britain and the Cochrane Centre
examined data on Paxil -- or its generic form, paroxetine -- from
GlaxoSmithKline, legal cases and emails from nearly 1,400 patients who
responded to a British TV program on antidepressants. The researchers
found that 60 out of 9,219 people taking Paxil -- 0.65 percent --
experienced a "hostility event," compared to 20 out of 6,455 patients
taking placebo, or 0.31 percent.

In that same article, published in September, 2006, I stated, "This
finding helps explain why school shootings are almost always conducted
by children who are taking antidepressants. We also know that SSRIs
cause children to disconnect from reality. When you combine that with
a propensity for violence, you create a dangerous recipe for school
shootings and other adolescent violence."

Sadly, that explanation rings true once again with the Virginia Tech
shooting. Wherever we see school violence, antidepressant drugs seem
to found at the scene of the crime. The correlation is not
coincidence. There is a causal link between the two.

The links between antidepressants and violence are well documented
A study published in the Public Library of Science Medicine (an open
source medical journal) explored these same links in detail. (See
Antidepressants and Violence: Problems at the Interface of Medicine
and Law, by David Healy, Andrew Herxheimer, David B. Menkes)
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030372

The authors note that "Some regulators, such as the Canadian
regulators, have also referred to risks of treatment-induced
activation leading to both self-harm and harm to others" and the
"United States labels for all antidepressants as of August 2004 note
that 'anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability,
hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor
restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and
pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major
depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric
and nonpsychiatric'".

In other words, the link between antidepressants and violence has been
known for years by the very people manufacturing, marketing or
prescribing the drugs. As the author of the study mentioned above
concluded, "The new issues highlighted by these cases need urgent
examination jointly by jurists and psychiatrists in all countries
where antidepressants are widely used."

That was last year, well before this latest shooting. The warning
signs were there, and they've been visible for a long time. Medical
authorities can hardly say they are "shocked" by this violent
behavior. After all, the same pattern of violence among antidepressant
takers has been observed, documented and published in numerous
previous cases.

How to stop the violence
Following this recent episode of violence, some Americans are renewing
calls for gun control. But I ask, isn't it time we looked at
antidepressants control? Why do we continue to drug up young people in
this country with psychotropic drugs that we know are closely
associated with violent outbursts?

Giving young men antidepressant drugs is, in my opinion, just like
building silent timebombs and waiting around for one to suddenly go
off. Chemically assaulting these young, troubled brains with powerful
drugs -- while denying them real mental health solutions based on
nutrition -- is the bread and butter of modern psychiatry, an industry
that in my opinion has sold its soul to drug companies and now serves
primarily as a glorified system of legalized drug dealers that preys
upon children and teenagers.

That doesn't mean the doctor or psychiatrist who prescribed the
antidepressants is directly responsible for the violence committed by
Cho Seung Hui, but they may have very well played a key role in
destabilizing the mind of a young man who was on the verge of
insanity. You don't give another shot of whisky to a drunk driver, and
you shouldn't prescribe antidepressants to troubled young men.
Especially when there are weapons lying around.

How many more Americans will be killed by pharmaceuticals?
FDA-approved prescription drugs kill 100,000 Americans each year.
Sadly, these 32 dead students at Virginia Tech now join the list of
those killed by pharmaecutical side effects. And yet nobody in the
mainstream media seems to be reporting about the drugs.

Don't you find it curious that when 100,000+ Americans are killed in
their homes and beds each year, dying from heart attacks and strokes
caused by pharmaceuticals, there's virtually no news coverage, but
when mind-altering drugs cause a student to pick up guns and blow away
32 classmates, it's suddenly front-page news everywhere? The reason is
because there's violence involved, and violence gets ratings for news
organizations.

Another interesting point in all this is that a Korean diplomat
contacted the Bush Administration to offer his condolences. Does this
seem a bit strange to anyone else? The student was an American
citizen, and he had lived in America for many years. In fact, he got
put on antidepressant drugs in America, following the same fraudulent
system of medicine that is uniquely American in the degree of harm it
causes people. If anybody should be picking up the phone and
apologizing, it's the U.S. diplomats who should be apologizing to the
world for exporting death, disease and western medicine. Drug
companies should be apologizing to the families of those who died, as
well as to the family of the shooter. And the doctor or psychiatrist
who prescribed these drugs to Cho Seung should be apologizing to
everybody. Where is the apology from the drug companies who
manufacture these chemicals that kill?

The question I'm asking is: Who's really at fault here? Sure, it's
primarily the person who pulled the trigger. But it's also the
companies and FDA regulators who allowed dangerous, violence-inducing
chemicals to be prescribed to the person who pulled the trigger.
"Chemically-induced violence," I call it. And antidepressant drugs
make it so much easier for the shooter because they make people feel
dissociated from reality. One of the Colombine shooters said it was
all, "like a video game."

Or, as described in shocking detail in the PLoS Medicine study
mentioned above, a 12 year old boy was being drugged with
antidepressants when the following took place. As reported: 

The independent forensic report on the case notes CP as saying that
that night: "something told me to shoot them". He had initially
reported this to be hallucinations and then said he thought it was his
own thoughts. When asked to specifically describe what the experience
was like, he said it was "like echoes in my head saying 'kill, kill',
like someone shouting in a cave". According to the forensic report,
"He reported this began happening after he went to bed.He reported he
had never considered harming his grandparents before and this was
unlike anything he had previously experienced. He reported that the
voices were coming from inside his head and they bothered him so much
that he got up. He reported that the voices continued until he killed
his grandparents. He reported that he couldn't control himself and
reported the echoes stopped after he shot his grandparents. He set
fire to the house but could not explain these actions saying the
thoughts just popped up". He then took a vehicle and began driving but
reported that he had no idea where he was going and that it all felt
like a dream. He recalled asking the police about his grandparents
after he was picked up because he was not sure if it had really
happened or not.

My heart goes out to those who died... ALL of them
Yes, I mourn the dead. Do not mistake my skeptical thinking with a
lack of compassion for those individuals and families traumatized by
this event. But unlike most tabloid reporters, I don't end my story
with the 32 dead at Virginia Tech. I mourn the 100,000 Americans
killed every year by FDA-approved prescription drugs, and the millions
more killed all around the world by pharmaceuticals, regardless of
whether they were killed in a headline-grabbing act of extreme
violence. And unless we restrict the use of antidepressant drugs and
find a way to help young men achieve genuine mental health through
nutrition, sunlight, and avoidance of toxic chemicals, mark my words:
We will see more antidepressant-induced violence in America.

The shootings will not stop until the pills are banned.

You can bank on it. The next attempted shooting is likely only days or
weeks away.

If we want to end this violence, we must end the chemical warfare
being waged against the minds of our young men and children by the
drug companies.

Study summary:
Here's the summary of the study, mentioned above, published in PLoS
Medicine:

Recent regulatory warnings about adverse behavioural effects of
antidepressants in susceptible individuals have raised the profile of
these issues with clinicians, patients, and the public. We review
available clinical trial data on paroxetine and sertraline and
pharmacovigilance studies of paroxetine and fluoxetine, and outline a
series of medico-legal cases involving antidepressants and violence.

Both clinical trial and pharmacovigilance data point to possible links
between these drugs and violent behaviours. The legal cases outlined
returned a variety of verdicts that may in part have stemmed from
different judicial processes. Many jurisdictions appear not to have
considered the possibility that a prescription drug may induce violence.

The association of antidepressant treatment with aggression and
violence reported here calls for more clinical trial and
epidemiological data to be made available and for good clinical
descriptions of the adverse outcomes of treatment. Legal systems are
likely to continue to be faced with cases of violence associated with
the use of psychotropic drugs, and it may fall to the courts to demand
access to currently unavailable data. The problem is international and
calls for an international response.

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Skip Fox 
    To: 'NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views' 
    Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 9:07 PM
    Subject: [New-Poetry] http://www.thetrenchcoat.com/archives/1891-Cho-Seung-Huis-creative-writing.html

    A student told me that Cho Seung-Hui's creative writing is on the net (link below).  I'm not trying to be morbid by looking at this, but just trying to see if I could have seen signs of the level of his disturbance. I don't think I could have. Here's a short and twisted little play he wrote. The actions are at times inexplicable (when not exaggerated), the actions are violent, the relationships are twisted, and the name (McBeef) is disturbing, but I cannot honestly say I would have notified the authorities if I would have seen this in an early creative writing class (1st or 2nd undergraduate level).

    http://www.thetrenchcoat.com/archives/1891-Cho-Seung-Huis-creative-writing.html

    Perhaps an inappropriate topic. Perhaps an important one, or one that is important in terms of a larger issue (trying to pick out this type of disturbance or not being able to).

    If Nikki Giovanni felt he was significantly disturbed on the basis of this, I applaud her human intelligence as well as on her poetry.

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