This is a very different response than when I blogged about this ten years ago. Thank you. 

When I came off of SSRIs, I was told very bluntly that doctors "don't know how they work" and that "it's all guesswork." 

I can swear on my life that the proliferation of mind altering pharmaceuticals has a lot to do with seemingly inexplicable phenomenon in our modern society. There is a general stability that is no longer there. 

Jordan Peterson had a very similar experience to Ross Douthat. Despite monumental success, he was suddenly sick and incapacitated with little expression as to why. We came to trestrict alcohol as we learned that it could incapacitate people, make them aggressive and dysfunctional. However, only alcoholics would ever drink every day - we have people on possibly far more powerful pharmaceutical drugs every day of their lives.

There was a really famous case during the early 2000s of a student in Washington state, Corey Badsgaard, who held students he had known his whole life hostage in an incident he couldn't recall. He spent 14 months in detention for the act.

When I came off of these medications, I was actually told about incidents in which I had seizure episodes where I physically assaulted medics who were trying to help me. Multiple people attested to it. The seizures stopped after I stopped taking those medications! I was on these medications for well on 10 years - who all knows what occurred during that time? As Badsgaard's father said, these drugs are hell!

ADHD is now marketed largely towards women instead of men - and I have met a good deal of young women on these medications. The effects are equally devastating and perhaps even more so. Women are more likely to internally destroy themselves as opposed to lashing out at the larger world. It's easier to intervene in the latter.

There are now mass media stories about this phenomena - you hear less about random violent acts by young men and more about stuff like this: women who have completely lost any sexual feeling. These drugs are hell for everybody. They need to be taken off the market.

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Also, when I first blogged about this a decade ago, it was largely conservatives who were trying to deny the need for gun control, as guns are most often used in these cases. However, I would say that our experimenting around like this demonstrates the need to restrict weapons. If someone on drugs came to school with a baseball bat, they could easily be stopped and talked down. It's not zero sum - when you start messing around with the unknown, you need to take look at the tools at your disposal.