dagblog - Comments for "The Killer Profile Part Two: Mothers and Soldiers"

This is all more complex than

Orion — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:52:34 +0000

In reply to If I were you, I would look

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.

Yeah, well I need Tegretol. I

Orion — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 06:47:53 +0000

In reply to Incidentally, Carbamezepine

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.

If I were you, I would look

artappraiser — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:55:46 +0000

In reply to I don't think you will be

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. 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.

Incidentally, Carbamezepine

erica20 — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:43:39 +0000

In reply to I don't think you will be

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.

:^)

I don't think you will be

Orion — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 07:51:44 +0000

In reply to I don't think you will be

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.

I don't think you will be

artappraiser — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 23:26:01 +0000

In reply to Everyone's "natural" level of

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.....

Everyone's "natural" level of

Orion — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:14:10 +0000

In reply to Please, now you're going to

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.

If you want to be taken

Orion — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 22:11:26 +0000

In reply to Orion, the problem here is

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.

Please, now you're going to

Orion — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 01:28:45 +0000

In reply to Orion, it's real and it's not

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.

Orion, the problem here is

erica20 — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:53:50 +0000

In reply to Yeah, my friend is the one

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.