Bad American

So now we know. Apparently it was Prozac:

UPDATE:

Apparently it was a lot more:

(CNN) — Steven Kazmierczak had been taking three drugs prescribed for him by his psychiatrist, the Northern Illinois University gunman’s girlfriend told CNN.

Jessica Baty said Tuesday that her boyfriend of two years had been taking Xanax, used to treat anxiety, and Ambien, a sleep agent, as well as the antidepressant Prozac.

Baty said the psychiatrist prescribed the medications, a fact that made her so “nervous” that she tried to persuade Kazmierczak to stop taking one of the drugs.

She said he had stopped taking the antidepressant three weeks before the Valentine’s Day rampage on the NIU campus in DeKalb, Illinois, which left five students dead and 16 wounded. He then killed himself.

In an exclusive interview with CNN Sunday, Baty said Kazmierczak had been taking the anti-depressant for obsessive-compulsive tendencies and anxiety caused by school pressures.

She told CNN that, during their two-year courtship, she had never seen him display violent tendencies and she expressed bewilderment over the cause of the rampage. Watch where Kazmierczak turned for gun advice »

“He was anything but a monster,” Baty said. “He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.”

Kazmierczak told her he had stopped taking the anti-depressant “because it made him feel like a zombie,” she said during the interview Sunday at her parents’ house in Wonder Lake, Illinois. “He wasn’t acting erratic. He was just a little quicker to get annoyed.” Watch girlfriend remember NIU shooter »

She said he had also had problems sleeping.

In her second conversation with CNN, on Tuesday, Baty said Kazmierczak began seeing the psychiatrist shortly after they transferred from NIU to the University of Illinois in Champaign in June 2007.

Wearing an orange University of Illinois sweat shirt, (Steve Kazmierczak’s girlfriend Jessica) Baty briefly stepped out from her mother’s home in Wonder Lake, Ill., about 70 miles northwest of Chicago, to address reporters there.

“You’re presenting him like a monster, and he wasn’t,” said Baty, before retreating indoors.

Her family put a sign in the yard saying, “Our thoughts, prayers go out to all the victims of the NIU incident. Please respect our privacy as we need to grieve and mourn this tragic loss of so many lives.”

In an emotional interview on CNN, in which Baty wiped tears from her eyes — a peace ring visible on one of her fingers — she said she was baffled about Kazmierczak’s actions.“He was anything but a monster. He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.”

She went on to say “he was a worrier” and that Kazmierczak told her he had “obsessive-compulsive tendencies” and that his parents committed him as a teen to a group home because he was “unruly” and used to cut himself.

Baty said he saw a psychiatrist monthly but stopped taking Prozac a few weeks ago. She said the medicine “made him feel like a zombie.”

But Baty said that recently he was “a little quicker to get annoyed.”

“He wasn’t erratic,” she said. “He wasn’t delusional.”

Of course the Prozac made him feel like a zombie. That’s what it does for many if not most people, especially those who have sensitive personalities. Of course he wasn’t delusional. Of course he was “a little quicker to get annoyed.”

Of course.

Here’s what happens when you just quit taking SSRIs, based on reliable first-hand information:

First, you cry. A lot. Your emotions come right to the surface and stay there. Anything and everything can bring you to tears.

Now for the differences:

Zoloft - As Billy Joel once sang “it’s either sadness or euphoria.” You get them in equal doses when going off Zoloft. The other thing you get are those nifty little electrical impulses that zip across your brain and are accompanied by a “zzzzt!” sound you actually hear, most notable when you turn your head or shift your eyes from left to right or vice versa. Initially, it’s kind of cool, then it becomes annoying, then it becomes ‘mother make it stop!’

It does stop, usually after 10 days or so.

Paxil - same as above but worse emotional swings. After 5-6 days off Paxil you want to strangle a kitten. Hopefully no one gets hurt.

The same kind of problems are inherent with going off most SSRIs.

Some good background on SSRIs here:

The mainstream media, of course, is trying to spin the story by claiming Stephen snapped because he stopped taking his medications. MSM headlines proclaim, “Illinois Shooter Stopped Taking His Medications.” What these headlines fail to communicate is the fact that psychiatric drugs cause long-term disruptions in the brain which lead to a strong dissociation with reality. These young, male shooters hardly even know they’re in the real world anymore. They no longer see their fellow classmates as human beings, but rather as lifeless objects to be used for target practice. For those people taking psychiatric medications, there’s even a strong dissociation with one’s own life, as evidenced by the repeated willingness of these shooters to ultimately turn their guns on themselves.

These are precisely the kinds of things acted out by people who take psych medications: Disconnection with reality, disconnection with self, and disconnection with others. Modern psychiatric medicine is in the business of taking people who feel depressed and chemically lobotomizing their brains so they feel nothing. Once they feel nothing, there’s nothing stopping them from unloading on fellow human beings with firearms. They no longer feel empathy or compassion. Nothing matters anymore. This is strongly characteristic of the well-documented side effects of psychiatric medications.

You see, what most people fail to realize is that there are a lot of decent, warm, sensitive human beings out there who go through our insane American society completely misunderstood. They may not be ‘into’ making money, gaining fame, talking about celebrities, into watching sports, television, supporting imperialism, etc. etc. In short they are society’s otherwise decent misfits. Think of flower children, for instance. Or those quaint folks who sit a the mall food court playing D&D. Or the person standing on the street corner collecting money for Greenpeace.

They feel lost in this world of hyper-competitive kill or be killed you are what you own.

So many of them, so overwhelmed the message society sends them: you are a misfit!

So they wander into the local shrink’s office or mental health clinic. Its not so much they want to be told they’re sane (that’s part of it) but they want to know how to cope with living in a society that is as hostile to their temperament as a noise chamber would be for an autistic. They may be diagnosed with something like oppositional defiance disorder.

And, usually, they are pumped full of SSRIs to help them ‘adjust’ to the world as it is, not as they wish it would be.

And the one thing so many of these folks begin to notice, whether its Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac or whatever, is that they get what might be called a flat affect. That is, they no longer experience the sharp range of emotions and feelings that they used to have.

And this is refreshing. At first.

But after awhile, they miss little things they used to do. Like cry with something is sad. Now they’ll just feel a bit of a remorse. Or they won’t laugh a great belly laugh at things they used to find hilarious. Now they’ll just chuckle a bit and find it wry.

The thing about these meds is that while they flatten the range of your emotional response, your brain, the reasoning part, generally keeps working. If you tend to carry on enlightening conversations with yourself in your head or out loud, generally these will continue.

And your rational brain will start to notice and remember the way you used to laugh and cry and remind you of it.

And a little bell goes off in your head which says - something is wrong; you’ve changed.

And for many people, perhaps, like Steve Kazmierczak, you want to know what it’s like to feel again. For better or worse, you want to know what its like to be fully human again.

But unfortunately, by that time it’s too late: the SSRIs have unalterably changed your brain’s chemistry. Now you must take them, possibly, for the rest of your life.

You, however, may not know this or believe it. After all, drug companies lie like thieves.

And you’re willing to take the chance.

And you can do it - you can break free of a particular SSRI, but only if you step down your dosage very gradually over a period of months under a doctor’s supervision.

That’s right, I said months, not days, not even weeks but months. It will still be hell and may leave you eventually feeling more drained and hopeless than before you started.

If you decide to just stop you are playing with fire. You can’t just stop.

What happens to many people when they just stop?

I would think the vast majority of them don’t land up shooting up schools but quite possibly land up in jail or in psychiatric wards where the people monitoring those facilities may not completely understand what just happened.

The reason I’m spending so much time with this today is that so many people just want to instantly demonize the mentally ill who kill, thinking them intrinsically evil. I referenced such people in a previous post.

And the ‘lawnorder, string ‘em up’ types find comments like Jessica Baty’s to be inconceivable. HOW could a person like Steven Kaczmierczak be characterized as “the nicest, most caring person ever?”

Sounds like that line from The Manchurian Candidate (1962), doesn’t it? “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

There’s a reason it’s so eerily familiar.

I am becoming convinced that what we as a society are doing, through the pushing of these anti-psychotic meds, are creating a new biochemical class of humans. These are people whose brains will be chemically altered for the rest of their lives.

And for the most part, those of you who aren’t on some form of anti-depressant, won’t even know who those people are unless they get up the courage to tell you.

And if you want a clue, check this out:

Thursday, December 2, 2004

"Adult use of antidepressants almost tripled between 1988-1994 and
1999-2000. Ten percent of women 18 and older and 4 percent of men now
take antidepressants."

And those were 2004 statistics which didn’t count all the kids put on various mind altering drugs. If we extrapolate the data at current trends, at least 15,000,000 Americans out of a population of 300 million are permanently on some form of anti-depressant. And the actual numbers could be far, far higher.

More here:

According to a government study, antidepressants have become the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. They’re prescribed more than drugs to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, asthma, or headaches. CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen discusses the CDC study on antidepressants »

In its study, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in visits to doctors and hospitals in 2005. Of those, 118 million were for antidepressants.

And if there’s another great argument for Canadian single payer national health this is it: these people had better be provided with their meds at all times, no questions asked, or incidents like what happened at NIU and Virginia Tech will be happening every week.

These drugs, which the above-references CNN story talked about, are not benign mood enhancers. Let me stress again: THEY PERMANENTLY ALTER THE CHEMISTRY OF YOUR BRAIN.

When I read stories like this (from the link above):

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — Dr. Ronald Dworkin tells the story of a woman who didn’t like the way her husband was handling the family finances. She wanted to start keeping the books herself but didn’t want to insult her husband.

The doctor suggested she try an antidepressant to make herself feel better.

She got the antidepressant, and she did feel better, said Dr. Dworkin, a Maryland anesthesiologist and senior fellow at Washington’s Hudson Institute, who told the story in his book “Artificial Unhappiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class.” But in the meantime, Dworkin says, the woman’s husband led the family into financial ruin.

a cold chill runs up my spine.

Folks, without trying to sound like the plot of some sci-fi movie, I really don’t quite think we understand what we’re doing here.

Financial ruin is one thing, shooting up public places quite another.

One day, I suppose, history will look back upon this age of The Altered Brain Humanoid and remark about this trend as leading human society to a period of ruin not unlike the Black Death of the 14th century.

I believe, for the sake of massive drug company profits and the sincere desperate desire of many Americans to feel good about themselves in an increasingly insane society, that we are playing games with the one organ of the human body that we understand the least - the human brain.

And the time has come for someone to say ’stop.’

Before its too late.