By Kelly Patricia O’Meara April 9, 2014 Another mass attack by a knife-wielding teenager, leaving 20 people injured with four suffering serious, life-threatening, wounds. While…
Before his father deployed to Iraq, Daniel Radenz was a well-adjusted fifth-grader earning straight A’s and B’s in school near Fort Hood, Texas.
But shortly after Army Lt. Col. Blaine Radenz left home in June 2008, his 11-year-old son became withdrawn and anxious. His grades at school slipped and his mother noticed mood swings. The child’s longtime pediatrician referred him for counseling.
A psychiatrist at Fort Hood’s Darnall Army Medical Center prescribed the antidepressant Celexa. Daniel also saw a psychologist there. Doctors added to and changed Daniel’s drug regimen, but his problems grew worse, said his mother, Tricia Radenz. Daniel started cutting himself and once used his own blood to write “the end” on a bathroom wall at school. One day in band class, he began hallucinating and ran into the hall, where teachers found him crouched and hitting and scratching his face.
On June 9, 2009, Daniel hanged himself from a bunk bed in his home.
The military-pharmaceutical complex is making a killing or, more specifically, making a fortune off the folks we’ve asked to do the killing — and off the rest of us. They dope our unruly kids, they dope the young men and women fighting in and returning home from the war, and they dope the rest of us right here at home for being sick of wars overseas and fearful of war on the middle and lower classes and dreading the reckonings to come and being ashamed of our own sad national shadow.
The Army has told some of the psychiatrists who supervised Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Hasan that it’s investigating them — and they could face punishments from letters of reprimand to court martial. The Army said it’s going to decide if the doctors at Walter Reed “failed to take appropriate action” against Hasan and were “derelict” in their duties.
The huge missing “elephant in the room” is the high likelihood that Dr. Nidal Malik Hasan was medicated with potent brain-altering psychiatric drugs. These would be drugs that Dr. Hasan had easy access to and which he was probably prescribing widely to his psychologically traumatized soldier-patients, unaware of the serious dangers to them or to himself. These popular, aggressively marketed, highly profitable drugs are known to cause a number of serious adverse effects including hostility, suicidality, sleep alteration, depression, mania and psychotic episodes.