Meaningful public debate after the Newtown, Conn., multiple shootings vanished when NRA’s unstable president got media attention and plugged armed school guards, which didn’t work at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999.
Instances of mass violence and mass shootings occur undoubtedly too often. When shootings such as those in Sandy Hook, Columbine, Aurora, and Virginia Tech happen, the blame often falls on gun ownership, violent media, or violent video games. I believe, as a whole, people are overlooking a variable that could very well be at the root of this problem — psychotropic drugs.
On April 4, 2013, AbleChild.org filed an appeal with the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) seeking release of Adam Lanza’s medical records held by the Connecticut Medical Examiner’s Office. That appeal, prepared by Emord & Associates and filed by the Heitke Law Office (Rhode Island), contests the Connecticut Medical Examiner’s refusal to disclose the shooter’s records.
One of the first people to “draw a potential connection between acts of deadly violence and psychiatric medication” was Neurosurgeon and CNN contributor Sanjay Gupta, MD. He asked, “…what medications, if any, he was on, and specifically I’m talking about antidepressants… If you look at the studies on other shootings like this that have happened, medications like this were a common factor…over a seven-year period, there were 11,000 episodes of violence related to drug side effects.”
There have been recent calls for a national Mental Health Registry, and then additional calls to link such a registry to gun licensing. In the dreadful wake of Newtown, both the left and the right and the current US federal administration are demanding that we tighten mental health statutes to make it easier and even mandatory for health care providers including psychiatrists and psychotherapists to incarcerate people on suspicion of perpetrating violence.
In a recent blog, I evaluated all the ways psychiatry and individual psychiatrists already have too much authority to lock up American citizens. I’ve pointed out how ineffective that power has proven in preventing violence.