In the most recent case in a row of notorious accidents, Ivan Lopez, the soldier accused of Wednesday's deadly shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas, was undergoing treatment for depression, anxiety and insomnia all at a time, but no evidence has emerged linking his mental condition to his deployments overseas, military officials said Thursday.
Despite his recent stint as a truck driver in Iraq, no combat trauma served the reason for the soldier’s violent outburst in which he killed three and injured 16 others, before pulling a trigger at his temple. What more likely him was his both parents’ death in October and November, nearly all at a time.
It’s now formally registered that he was taking medications, including the sedative Ambien, for mental-health conditions "ranging from depression to anxiety to some sleep disturbance," still he could boast a military record free of major disciplinary blemishes, Army Secretary John McHugh told a Senate hearing Thursday.
The fatal link between psychiatric drugs and violent outbursts seems to be common place whatever a new accident of that kind makes media headlines.
Aaron Alexis, aka Navy Yard shooter also "had been treated…. by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems." A bit later, after a number of enquiries it was discovered the only medication for depressions at the Veterans Administration disposal was SSRI drugs.
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was also taking anti-depressant drugs as he massacred 16 Afghan civilians in 2012. SSRI medication, which is known to cause violent outbursts, is routinely used to treat PTSD, which goes some way to explain why there are so many stories about both active duty and returning troops carrying out acts of inexplicable violence.
Despite it being reported that prescription drugs were found in the apartment of 'Batman' shooter James Holmes days after the Aurora massacre, it took a staggering nine months to officially report what those drugs were. Like Columbine killer Eric Harris, Holmes had been taking Zoloft, another SSRI drug linked with violent outbursts.
The research is still inconsistent and weak, and yields no effect on the matter. The thing is, pharmaceutical giants who produce drugs like Zoloft, Prozac and Paxil spend around $2.4 billion dollars a year on direct-to-consumer television advertising every year. Thus, it would mean a tremendous downturn in media’s revenues if they started running negative stories about the strong anti-depressant medication and its direct link to violent acts.
In the tragic Sandy Hook accident, the perpetrator Adam Lanza was proved to have indeed been on brain-altering psychiatric drugs a while before the shooting. Still the coroners unveiled nothing about what particular drugs he was on, perhaps fearing some would stop taking psych drugs. Like Kelly Patricia O’Meara, the author of "Psyched Out: How Psychiatry Sells Mental Illness and Pushes Pills that Kill" writes, the whole policy of US authorities' withholding the evidence of crimes, as well as altering it at crime scenes proves to be a huge underbelly of Big Medicine, and Big Psychiatry. The government thus wants to be an “accessory to a crime, ” says Dr. Gary Kohls, researcher at Centre for Research and Globalization.
As the website SSRI Stories documents, there are literally hundreds of examples of mass shootings, murders and other violent episodes that have been perpetrated by individuals on psychiatric drugs over the past three decades. Still, the media is failing to generate a national conversation about the issue, it instead chooses to exploit mass shootings to demonize the US second amendment on keeping and bearing arms.
This comes in line with a number of conspiracy theories now infrequently voiced. The latest conspiracy movement seems to be specially set up to underscore the need for a national debate on mental illness, and to push further the one on the gun issue. There have appeared so-called 9/11 truthers, Sandy-Hook & Navy Yard truthers and the like. On various websites and blogs, some Sandy Hook truthers, for instance, crow about the "smoking gun" they say proves the shooting was a hoax — a photo of President Barack Obama, backstage at a Newtown vigil two days after the shooting, and a young blonde girl sitting on his lap – the one who was declared dead in the violent act.
Source: The Voice of Russia
