Drugs and murder - but we don't want to talk about that

From Psychology Today, "Psychiatric Drugs and Violence: A Review of FDA Data Finds A Link."

There has been an enduring controversy over whether psychiatric medications can trigger violent actions toward others. A review of the FDA's Adverse Event Reporting System  by Thomas Moore, Joseph Glenmullen and Curt Furberg, which was published by PLoS One on December 15, found that such "adverse events" are indeed associated with antidepressants and several other types of psychotropic medications.

To do their study, Moore and his collaborators extracted all serious events reports from the FDA's database from 2004 through September 2009, and then identified 484 drugs that had triggered at least 200 case reports of serious adverse events (of any type) during that 69-month period. They then investigated to see if any of these 484 drugs had a "disproportionate" association with violence. They identified 31 such drugs, out of the 484, that met this criteria.

The 31 "suspect" drugs accounted for 1527 of the 1937 case reports of violence toward others in the FDA database for that 69-month period. The drugs in that list of 31 included varenicline (an aid to smoking cessation), 11 antidepressants, 6 hypnotic/sedatives, and 3 drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Antidepressants were responsible for 572 case reports of violence toward others; the three ADHD drugs for 108; and the hypnotic/sedatives for 97.

This is a mental health and gun-violence angle *no one* in the oldline media, Congress or the administration is discussing. Of the school shooters since Columbine, how many of them were taking prescribed psychotropic drugs, and which ones?

Total silence from the media of the political figures - Big Pharma's campaign donations and ad buys carry a lot of weight, I guess.

The professional literature is clear that mental illness is not in itself an indicator of propensity to violence, but we need to look at the data about mentally ill or disordered persons who are taking certain drugs or categories of drugs. These drugs often state that "homicidal ideations" are "rare adverse events," which the FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 persons. But there are tens of millions of persons taking these drugs regularly. You do the math.

Nikolas Cruz's aunt, Barbara Kumbatovich, told the Miami Herald that she believed Cruz was on medication to deal with his emotional fragility.