The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    The Killer Profile Part Two: Mothers and Soldiers

    By Orion on Thu, 02/07/2013 - 9:56am |

    The last article I wrote here - The Killer Profile - attempted to profile the sort of individuals who have perpetrated massacres like Virginia Tech, that Aurora, CO movie theater and Sandy Hook Elementary. There's a fairly obvious profile for those individuals and they seem to model themselves after one another to some degree.

    Those cases are so extreme and out of ordinary behavior, however, that it's easy to just not worry about such things occurring. Cases like this, on the other hand, are where the worry really starts:

    Photos of 23-year-old Globeville resident Mayra Nunez and her kids -- daughters Nivek, six, and Isabella, three, and son Eric, two -- depict a happy young family. But from this point forward, they'll likely trigger more sadness than joy in friends and loved ones. That's because Denver police believe Nunez shot and killed all three of her offspring before turning the gun on herself. She's dead, as are Nivek and Eric, and Isabella is clinging to life at this writing.

    More:

    The emotions this discovery unleashed are conveyed in police recordings obtained by the station.

    "A father is hysterical, crying, but he says the 2-year-old is still breathing," a dispatcher is quoted as saying. "[It] sounds like it's a mom that shot a couple of her kids and possibly herself. Police are pulling up on scene now."

    Nivek and Eric were reportedly already dead by the time help arrived. But, the dispatcher later noted, "One child is crying and breathing. Possibly shot in the head."

    Look at this picture of Mayra Nunez, in the center, before all that happened:

    That doesn't look like the profile of a serial killer, does it? That adorable, beautiful young mother shot a toddler in the head with a gun. That is fundamentally disturbing, isn't it? Guns certainly made what could have been just a case of family abuse in to a brutal murder but still, gun or no gun, this woman felt compelled to suddenly murder her own children.

    That doesn't fit with alot of what you guys said could be a primary cause of this tragedies in the comment thread of my last post. We don't see a "natural born killer" type or someone who didn't appear to have any lasting relationships, both things suggested in that thread.

    This world has always been imperfect but there was a time when shootings were pretty limited in scope. I personally grew up in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle - there were shootings regularly and I knew a few victims from having worked for a rap magazine in the area. They were predictable as hell, however. The violence always involved drug deals of some kind. You didn't really have whole families killing each other or girls getting shot at school. You certainly didn't have young mothers inflicting the violence with handguns.

    With psychotropic medication actually a commercial item in the marketplace (as opposed to something you only took when you were seriously in need), I do think that nearly all these insane cases are at least worth looking at possibly involving psych meds. The effects are so questionable and uncertain that people taking them on the scale they are amounts to a large scale social experiment. In Nunez's case, what you may have is a woman who got treated with antidepressants for post partum depression - potentially leading to a psychotic episode.

    What you have in addition, however, is "stressors." One comment I got here said that the obvious change, for the worse, of America's role in the world is "making us all a bit freaky." People who are already freaky will get freakier, as is the case with a guy like James Holmes. However, people who may have been living normal, peaceful lives like the woman above may suddenly lose their bearings completely. and do the irreversible on people they love very much.

    This capitalist society is so cannibalistic that there really is no social security. People are behaving exactly like you would expect them to when love for one another is out the window and replaced with a mindless race for currency accumulation. With elements like psychoactive drugs and an economy that doesn't seem to work for anyone, guns may well be too dangerous to be in such a volatile social environment.

    There is a discernable profile for the worst mass killings. Unfortunately, the smaller ones, which occur more frequently, are far less predictable and could involve any of us if the right incentives occurred.

    The proliferation of the small cases, often involving people who know one another, in times this uncertain is what may really be upsetting people.

    Additional: After I wrote this article, this happened. God help this country....

    Here's a really choice part of Chris Dorner's "manifesto:"

    “If possible, I want my brain preserved for science/research to study the effects of severe depression on an individual’s brain. Since 6/26/08 when I was relieved of duty and 1/2/09 when I was terminated I have been afflicted with severe depression. I’ve had two CT scans during my lifetime that are in my medical record at Kaiser Pemanente. Both are from concussions resulting from playing football. The first was in high school, 10/96. The second was in college and occurred in 10/99. Both were conducted at Kaiser Permanente hospitals in LA/Orange County. These two CT scans should give a good baseline for my brain activity before severe depression began in late 2008.”

    It's pretty much guaranteed that Dorner was taking SSRIs given that paragraph. PTSD, etc. are misnomers. Previous generations saw alot worse up close than Dorner ever did and never flipped out like this.

    Comments

    Please, now you're going to argue that they shouldn't try to treat post-partum psychosis because it might not always go right?

    It's a real thing, Andrea Yates' 5 kids could tell you if they were still alive!

    Everyone's "natural" level of hormones is not always healthy, I am sorry to inform you, Orion. Every human body and mind is not a perfectly made mistake-free copy of God, there are flaws and mistakes, things called non-infectious disease.

    I know some guys in India supposedly can walk barefoot over hot coals without being burnt, but mind over matter, counseling, bio-feedback is not there yet to be able to fix all these things. Can't fix post-partum hormonal dysfunction yet with bio-feedback, can't fix insulin dysfunction with it yet, can't fix menopausal night sweats with it either, when hormones are spiking up and down. Excess hormones are dangerous mind-altering drugs occurring "naturally" if you want to call it that, via dysfunction. When too low or too high, hormones make you sick, physically and or mentally, and it just happens sometimes without taking a single drug.

    I myself would like to see more research into the male hormonal disease that causes wife beating, road rage, bar fights and war. There was a 60 Minutes episode eons ago that stuck in my mind and wouldn't let go. It was about a bunch of men in a trial of a new tranquilizer (don't know if it was an SSRI) and they were sitting with their spouses, holding their hands, both were crying and saying stuff like hallelujah, this drug saved my marriage, this drug saved my life, I ruined my whole life up until now being an angry violent hothead, I have been reborn like an average guy, I never knew life could be like this.... (And yes, do see Andrew Sullivan on the topic of testosterone surges.)

    Oh and back to post partum psychosis. We could just do like in the old days when it happened. Take the mother to a loony bin, and the father breaks the kids up and sends them individually across the country to relatives, some of whom resent having to support another kid and make them work, and some of whom who have a husband who molests the kid, and....


    by artappraiser on Thu, 02/07/2013 - 5:18pm

    I myself would like to see more research into the male hormonal disease that causes wife beating, road rage, bar fights and war.

    A friend of mine was in India last year - he had hoped to meet someone there but didn't meet a single woman. All the women hid themselves out - as they were all in serious danger of being raped if they went outdoors. No drugs around - that was just unleashed male behavior.

    Cigarettes didn't cause all cancer but their contribution to cancer was enough to be taken seriously. I had a woman who adores her children call me up on the phone asking for help as she kept having intrusive thoughts of murdering her kids while detoxing from Effexor. If I seem obsessed, well my brain does work like that unfortunately. As for Andrea Yates, well....


    by Orion on Thu, 02/07/2013 - 5:22pm

    Orion, it's real and it's not new, from wikipedia

    Puerperal mania was first clearly described by the German obstetrician Friedrich Benjamin Osiander in 1797,[5] and a literature of over 2,000 works has accumulated since then.

    and their laundry list of record symptoms

    Some patients have typical manic symptoms, such as euphoria, overactivity, decreased sleep requirement, loquaciousness, flight of ideas, increased sociability, disinhibition, irritability, violence and delusions, which are usually grandiose or religious in content; on the whole these symptoms are more severe than in mania occurring at other times, with highly disorganized speech and extreme excitement. Others have severe depression with delusions, auditory hallucinations, mutism, stupor or transient swings into hypomania. Some switch from mania to depression (or vice versa) within the same episode. Atypical features include perplexity, confusion, emotions like extreme fear and ecstasy, catatonia or rapid changes of mental state with transient delusional ideas; these are so striking that some authors have regarded them as a distinct, specific disease, but they are the defining features of acute polymorphic (cycloid) psychoses, and are seen in other contexts (for example, menstrual psychosis) and in men.

    On India, this is getting into a topic that has long interested me. Young men are doing that, not old men.

    Adolescent men get surges of hormones. I've gotten into this before, I'll just generalize badly here. Suffice it to say, people have long known this is a problem, since civilization began, they've tried to figure out ways to harness the problem, and it always has been a major societal problem, of adolescent male hormonal surges. Matter of fact, I just ran across this interesting related piece on that problem:

    http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/stories/8303117/school-of-hard-knocks

    while I was searching for that old Sixty Minutes piece on that I was yammering about above (which was probably way too long ago to be on the internet....)


    by artappraiser on Thu, 02/07/2013 - 5:37pm

    Yeah, my friend is the one you'd have to ask about that. I kind of brought it up to defend myself. I'm not just pulling all of this out of my butt because I have an axe to grind, I really think the commercialization of psychiatry and the application of it to children is a horrible, awful and bizarre thing and think the evidence backs that up. cheeky

    I know where the hostility towards alot of my posts comes from and, from the numbers I can tell alot of people aren't hostile but don't really know what to say. What I'm trying to is go deeper than most people are - a gun doesn't fire itself. A person fires a gun. We need to isolate the reasons why people are doing this.

    Alot of the comments you've left have mentioned the homeless, Natural Born Killer types, etc. - the people you would expect to break from normal behavior and do stuff like this - except stuff like this is now happening every single day and it's not those type of people at all doing it. It is obvious that there is something far darker going on in our society than many care to recognize and, if we don't do everything we can to stop it, it's only going to grow to the point that we have to recognize it.

    As a friend, who is in the LA area right now, put it: "Since The Tragedy in Newtown we have been flooded with the debate on gun control in the States. Everybody has their opinion on that issue but personally I think the debate on improving mental health in the States should be getting as much or even more attention than the gun control issue."

     


    by Orion on Fri, 02/08/2013 - 8:32am

    Orion, the problem here is that when you write in this tone and without specificity, you don't isolate anything--you obfuscate with conclusion-jumping. When you allow the overall message of your piece to be "It didn't used to be this way, and now it is, and it's because of prescription drugs," you lose your non-gullible readers.

    If you want to be taken seriously, you MUST allow your approach to accommodate the information that mental illness is not a new thing, that quite a few people take antidepressant medications with acceptable results and few side effects, and that availability of guns makes it possible to create more mayhem with less effort than in the past. If your writing indicates that you don't understand these facts, it undermines an intelligent reader's trust in everything else you say.

    You are correct that in a growing set of very upsetting cases, mood-altering drugs did not resolve mental health issues and may have made a person's problem worse. We need better understanding of how body chemistry affects thinking and mood. We need better monitoring of patients taking antidepressants, and at some point in the future, we may need to scrap antidepressants entirely in favor of something that works better. We need to do something about the fact that mentally ill people have access to guns. But you need to focus, and talk about these issues in a way that is specific, reasonable and points to solutions if you want to make a difference. 

    You have a unique voice to add to this chorus. And I understand that we all write on a spectrum--sometimes we write emotionally, sometimes we write academically. But please do allow yourself to be guided in the technical details of structuring your writing (and perhaps your method of looking at a problem) so that the largest number of people possible will listen and not tune you out.


    by erica20 on Fri, 02/08/2013 - 12:53pm

    If you want to be taken seriously, you MUST allow your approach to accommodate the information that mental illness is not a new thing, that quite a few people take antidepressant medications with acceptable results and few side effects, and that availability of guns makes it possible to create more mayhem with less effort than in the past. If your writing indicates that you don't understand these facts, it undermines an intelligent reader's trust in everything else you say.

    I think I have been saying this.

    The proposals I've said in most of the writing is that psychiatry should be an adult, consensual affair - you shouldn't bring children in to it unless there's really extreme reasons to do so. I've also been saying that there is a line between mental illnesses that are almost promoted to sell drugs - ADHD, Asperger's, bipolar disorder - and disorders like schizophrenia that are real and haunting. Mental illness treatment should be a public service of sorts - it shouldn't be a commercial enterprise.

    You are correct that in a growing set of very upsetting cases, mood-altering drugs did not resolve mental health issues and may have made a person's problem worse. We need better understanding of how body chemistry affects thinking and mood. We need better monitoring of patients taking antidepressants, and at some point in the future, we may need to scrap antidepressants entirely in favor of something that works better. We need to do something about the fact that mentally ill people have access to guns. But you need to focus, and talk about these issues in a way that is specific, reasonable and points to solutions if you want to make a difference.

    Yeah. I agree with all that.

    You have a unique voice to add to this chorus. And I understand that we all write on a spectrum--sometimes we write emotionally, sometimes we write academically. But please do allow yourself to be guided in the technical details of structuring your writing (and perhaps your method of lHow does Tim Geithner change his mind?ooking at a problem) so that the largest number of people possible will listen and not tune you out.

    I'm trying to figure all that out. I broke a damn record with an article at 1300 reads - I've taken down alot of stuff that obviously doesn't interest anyone. What I write angers enough people to get what you have said about people "tuning me out" or not being receptive more than once - but seriously, 1300 views. Respectively, Erica, I'm not really being "tuned out" with numbers like 1300 plus!

    This article itself got over 150 in only a couple hours, it's pushing 200. My support group is closed and has gotten enough requests to reach over 100 members and each post gets at least a half dozen views and some by some of our best folks have gotten over 50 views. I would not post my nonsense if I wasn't getting an audience. These shootings are profoundly disturbing and most of us know, in our heart, that something is going on beyond just firearms.

    As I said before, the interest I'm taking with this is figuring out why people are shooting people like they are. I'm not doing that because I don't think guns are an issue - they obviously are. It's rather trying to figure out what is pushing so many over the edge. I actually tried to avoid mentioning SSRIs in this article and talking about the "stressor" factor more but ended up mentioning it when Nunez's case reminded me of alot of mothers who went psychotic that I've met through the support group.


    by Orion on Mon, 02/11/2013 - 5:11pm

    Please, now you're going to argue that they shouldn't try to treat post-partum psychosis because it might not always go right?

    Artappraiser, if you have the time, please visit my SSRI group. Almost all the serious members of the group there besides me are women - they got put on SSRIs to treat depression after having several babies. They don't think depression should not be treated. Most the material posted this is about alternative treatments.


    by Orion on Fri, 02/08/2013 - 8:28pm

    Everyone's "natural" level of hormones is not always healthy, I am sorry to inform you, Orion. Every human body and mind is not a perfectly made mistake-free copy of God, there are flaws and mistakes, things called non-infectious disease.

    I know this thread is a bit old but I wanted to add a bit more...I don't feel as if I gave you a suitable reply.

    I of course know that and perhaps I have been too broad, as one commentor here said, and not really going in to the topic the way it should be.

    Every human body/mind has flaws. I have had migraines and later on seizures for most my life. They started when I was literally a small child. Medication to fight off diabetes, AIDS, seizures, etc. makes perfect sense. Natural treatments for post-partum depression makes sense.

    However, all human beings have moods that go up and down. The body responds when life is not being lived as it should be. Antidepressants are very dangerous because they are not alleviating symptoms - for many of those who take them, they are actually messing around with the human body's very emotional reasoning. It puts them in weird moods of euphoria and agitation that are unnatural and bizarre. It's not medicine - these drugs act just like street drugs because they act exactly like street drugs and fulfill the same need.

    That is what makes medicine and drugs different from one another. Medicine alleviates symptoms of illness. Drugs mess with the human body's normal functions. The drugs that all these individuals in these stories are taking do the latter, even if the doctors told them it was medicine.


    by Orion on Wed, 03/06/2013 - 2:14pm

    I don't think you will be taken seriously on this issue until you stop lumping all kinds of drugs together. Here you veered way of course to intimate that hormonal therapy is the same as anti-depressants. (And all anti-depressants are not SSRI's, and some have been used since way before you claim things changed.) I think you need to get much more specific about exactly what kind of drugs you think are being prescribed that cause people to be criminal, which ones having which exact actions on the brain and body.

    I don't know the numbers of mentally disturbed or mentally ill who are grateful for some of the newer psychiatric medicines. I do know there are some, most notably many parents of severely mentally ill teens whose stories I have read who know the hell of their kids going off their meds. So once pared down, I would like to see numbers, on your "bad drugs" list too; I would trust your arguments more if you objectively looked into how many think they have improved their lives and how many have adverse effects.

    But most of all, to be taken seriously by someone like me, you have to be very specific about what drugs and what effects you are talking about, and have some data to back up the idea they are doing more harm than good.

    A lot of your arguments come off as if., in the end, you would agree with the twinkie defense or the PMS defense in cases of homicide. That any alteration of the unaided natural biochemistry of a person is turning everyone criminal. Where the truth is, a very few people do get very bad mental effects from something like poorly calilbrated medication for blood sugar levels, that does not mean we should stop the use of all drugs treating diabetes.

    ALL drugs have bad side effects in some individuals! There is no way around this, because we are not identical machines. I do not buy that means "let nature take its course." And I know that alternative medicine and environmental medicine, which I have been actively interested in since the late 80's do not argue "let nature take its course."

    As long as we are giving personal history, I know I would be very angry at you if your feelings about altering the body meant I could no longer have hormone replacement therapy for menopause. It works quite well for me and my suffering before being on it was pretty intense, I could not manage basic normal life, would be shaking and sweating on a couch with extreme brain fog most of the day.

    I am already angry that my access to pseudoephedrine in allergy medication has been restricted because some people could possibly use it to make meth. The constriction of blood vessels that it causes helps me, a person with abnornally low blood pressure, when I have blinding allergy-induced headaches.

    I think that the state of medicine today means that people MUST have the ultimate power to work with a physician to try to alter their own body chemistry when it goes awry.  That that empowerment is the crucial thing to making medicine work. And I believe that it does go awry, very often. In the "natural" evolutionary world, we were not all meant to live, some of us were meant to be weak and suffer and die. So when you get into your "all drugs are bad" mode, it does rile me a bit, I am afraid you aren't being careful enough about what you wish for.

    Your small recent foray into the world of abortion and birth control, makes me suspect you are falling into the general mindset that informs ultra conservative Catholicism. Where using the mind to invent medicine that regulates conception and birth is "unnatural." Well, what's "natural" is for all women to be prolific breeders and to have the weak ones who can't take that die from childbirth, thereby the prolific breeders pass on their genes. It also used to be "natural" to die from bacterial infections before there were antibiotics.....


    by artappraiser on Wed, 03/06/2013 - 6:26pm

    I don't think you will be taken seriously on this issue until you stop lumping all kinds of drugs together. Here you veered way of course to intimate that hormonal therapy is the same as anti-depressants. (And all anti-depressants are not SSRI's, and some have been used since way before you claim things changed.) I think you need to get much more specific about exactly what kind of drugs you think are being prescribed that cause people to be criminal, which ones having which exact actions on the brain and body.

    I got this criticism from a friend, alot of this is too broad.

    Most of this writing is about the implications of serotonin altering drugs. Most serotonin altering drugs are street drugs - LSD and cocaine do this to infamous effects.

    I'm sorry if it seems like this is a general attack on medicine as a whole. I take Tegretol twice a day to deal with seizures - I will not go off of it ever. All of this writing is dedicated to the SSRI class of antidepressants specifically - as that provides the best avenue of explanation as to why people are flipping out and murdering each other like this.

    As for the Catholic conservatism, that is accidental. There is a religious component to all of this but not in a hardcore way and certainly not in a particular denominational path.


    by Orion on Sun, 03/10/2013 - 3:51am

    If I were you, I would look into which drugs have so many lawsuits going against them that they are being considered for class action

    Like Chantix:

    http://www.topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/prescription/2220-ano...

    Because while relying on a small number of ancecdotals from internet groups can be very valuable for self-diagnosis when you suffer from side effects and/or iatrogenic illness (that's how I myself have solved a lot of health-related problems for myself and relatives,) it's not a true indication of a major societal problem. For the latter, which is really a totally different thing, you have to have evidence of larger numbers, and class action suits are one thing that could give you that.

    It's good to keep in mind that all medicines (both natural and corporate) have side effects and will affect a small number of people to their detriment.

    Now, the large number of lousy doctors in our system who aren't good diagnosticians and overuse and misuse tests and medications and cause iatrogenic illness, now that's again a different thing....don't get me started.wink So far "knowledge is power" is all I got on that....but I'll just say that that's where I think "the common good" problem lies here. Not in the drugs themselves, but in the practitioners who prescribe them.

    Normally I am on the side of not limiting access to drugs by professionals, no matter how dangerous they might be to some patients, and am not a big fan of class action against drugs nor of nanny statism  in general on health issues. I prefer to be on the side of getting better professionals (doctors) who not influenced by profit or other factors like poor training, using information with an agenda, quota systems of practice, general zeitgeist of bad "conventional wisdom"--i.e., let's yank out all kids' tonsils--or let's give all kids ritalin, laziness, etc. And of empowering the patient with knowledge and transparency, of course.


    by artappraiser on Mon, 03/11/2013 - 8:55pm

    This is all more complex than I may make it sound at times. I realize that. There is a reason I decided to continue contributing here, artappraiser, instead of Info Wars or a similar website that would be more on my side.

    Nevertheless, what's important to remember in all of this is we are talking about controlled substances. All controlled substances are the same. The over last year of my life has been pretty much that of all recovering drug addicts - making up for bad behavior, relapse (despite my writing, more than a few times I found myself bringing out the pill bottles after getting angry about something or other), depression, recreating a shattered identity. I avoided drugs for the most part most of my life - a little bit here and there with my hippie friends - but I got to know what it felt like to be one thanks to an addiction my mother/educational establishment gave me to these drugs. (I was also taking high doseages of Klonopin as well.)

    All I want and what I hope this writing makes the bold case for is that these drugs are dangerous just like any other drugs. The fact that they are still given out to children shows that people are in weird denial about all of this still.

    We don't give heroin or alcohol out at elementary schools but are doing the equivalent with these drugs.


    by Orion on Sat, 03/16/2013 - 9:52am

    Incidentally, Carbamezepine (Tegretol) has some antidepressant effects. I don't know what the required dose would be--i.e. maybe a person would have to take so much to get the effect that other side effects would make it impractical for clinical purposes, but I remember reading it.

    :^)


    by erica20 on Mon, 03/11/2013 - 8:43pm

    Yeah, well I need Tegretol. I didn't need antidepressants and alot of people who are being given antidepressants don't actually need them.

    The work I'm doing - which will be crossing over in to local newspapers very soon - isn't about limiting medication people need. It's about the over prescription of medication well beyond what people actually need.

    Perhaps I have been too broad - alot of these atrocities, I think, are the product of a thought process in our society in which we don't really tackle our personal problems personally or take the effort to work things out with one another and instead act like pills can do it for us.

    The way drugs like Zoloft are marketed on TV, complete with warnings of suicidal/homicidal ideation, is exactly as if popping one will magically solve your personal problems. Honestly, we should all know better than that because it's not the first product marketed at us with that promise.

    Normally I am on the side of not limiting access to drugs by professionals, no matter how dangerous they might be to some patients, and am not a big fan of class action against drugs nor of nanny statism  in general on health issues. I prefer to be on the side of getting better professionals (doctors) who not influenced by profit or other factors like poor training, using information with an agenda, quota systems of practice, general zeitgeist of bad "conventional wisdom"--i.e., let's yank out all kids' tonsils--or let's give all kids ritalin, laziness, etc. And of empowering the patient with knowledge and transparency, of course.

    It's one thing to bring up "nanny statism" when talking about regulating diet soda or how many people you can marry or who you can marry. When you are talking about drugs that may literally make someone want to kill themselves and those around them, however, I think we're in a whole new territory.

    The point of this writing is not an all out ban. If it were, I would be contributing for Scientologists or Christian Scientists instead of places like this, local newspapers, etc. What I am really hoping for is much deeper regulation - of this and many dangerous things in our society, including guns.


    by Orion on Tue, 03/12/2013 - 2:47am